Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

diskcheck

Fedora Linux ships, among many, a very useful utility – diskcheck. This RPM installs only two files:

  • /etc/diskcheck.conf – small and asimple configuration file for the script
  • /etc/cron.hourly/diskcheck – the script itself

diskchek periodically (hourly, by default) checks free space on all partitions and sends a notification email to the administrator (root) reporting any partitions with less than 10% of free disk space. If all paritions have enough disk space it will just keep silent. Which partitions to check/skip, how much free disk space to consider as a warning point, and where to send the email – all of these can be easily tuned via the configuration file.

This tool, while being extremely small, provides a great service – proactive notification. Thing like this can solve lots and lots of headaches while troubleshooting strange behaviours.

Distributed authentication

Today I realized that I am still not registered at Spread Firefox. That is a shock and shame. I immideately went there and got myself an account and a sweet looking button on the bottom of the right panel. I am now an official promoter of Mozilla Firefox. Although I had probably converted a billion times more people by just talking to them than by placing a button on this site, but anyway…

While creating an account, I read about distributed authentication. The “billion sites – billion accounts” problem is old with the web and there were several alternatives to solve it. Microsoft Passport was the most famous, but I think its as dead as Elvis these days. I’ve never heard of Drupel way of solving the problem, so I thought maybe I just post a link so you guys get the idea about it too.

In short: Drupel is an open source CMS, which among other things, supports communications between installed instances for username/password verification. So, basically, one person can get a single account at any Drupel-based website and than use this account to login to any other Druperl-based website. Sweet!

Luckily or unluckily (which is a total other question) not all sites are Drupel-based. That doesn’t mean that everyone else is out of the game. Since the system is open sourced, other sites can be made to suppor the protocol. The protocol is, by the way, XML-RPC, HTTP POST, or SOAP based as mentioned on one of the sites above.

Overall, I find it to be an excellent idea. Hopefully it will gain some weight in the near future, so that I could use a single account on most of the websites out there.

Promoting Mozilla Firefox

This site has a whole lot of original promotional graphics for Mozilla Firefox. You can find anything there – wallpapers, avatars, comics, banners, animated GIFs, buttons, etc. Pay attention to those little digits on the bottom of the listing pages – these are page switchers. Yes, many categories have several pages filled with images. These all are absolutely and totally amazing!

rss2mail

Previously I have wrote lj2mail – a script which gets fresh posts from LiveJournal and emails them to the list of recepients. I have tried to avoid sending same items over and over again, but failed. The script was implemented with the help of LiveJournal API (LJ::Simple Perl module).

I got annoyed by that script repeating some items (mess with publishing date), so I wrote a different one. rss2mail simply gets the RSS feed, parses it and emails items as individual messages to the list of recepients. I guess that caching RSS item link is much better than LiveJournal’s publishing date. Also, rss2mail is much more flexible. It can be used with any RSS feed, not only LiveJournal’s. I have tried to make it as generic as possible. If it doesn’t work with other feeds, just check the fields of the RSS feed it uses.

rss2mail.pl