Peter's Blog 22.7.2004

Keyboard Shortcuts

Furl recommendations always seems to yield something interesting. This time it's Microsofts list of keyboard shortcuts. New ones to me that will be useful IF I can remember to use them are:

• Windows Logo+BREAK (Display the System Properties dialog box)

• Windows Logo+D (Display the desktop)

• Windows Logo+M (Minimize all of the windows)

• Windows Logo+SHIFT+M (Restore the minimized windows)

• Windows Logo+E (Open My Computer)

• Windows Logo+R (Open the Run dialog box)

I always wondered what the windows key was for. I thought it was like scroll lock. Hope they work on Win2k. UPDATE: They do.

WBloggar

Jul 22 16:53:54 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: awakened at Thu Jul 22 16:53:54 2004
Jul 22 16:54:00 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: sleeping at Thu Jul 22 16:54:00 2004
Jul 22 16:54:30 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: awakened at Thu Jul 22 16:54:30 2004
Jul 22 16:54:36 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: sleeping at Thu Jul 22 16:54:36 2004
Jul 22 16:55:06 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: awakened at Thu Jul 22 16:55:06 2004
Jul 22 16:55:13 ad-pc fetchmail[1492]: sleeping at Thu Jul 22 16:55:13 2004

#
# Convert unicode to good old ascii
#
def DeUnicode( strString, bStripLF = 0):
    strOut = strString.encode( "iso8859_15", "backslashreplace")
    strOut = strOut.replace( '\\u2022', '*')
    strOut = strOut.replace( '\r', '')

    return strOut

Google Rankings

My name (Peter Wilkinson) is quite common and does not appear in the first 5 google pages. However, my wife's name is less common and by subtly mentioning her at the bottom of this page I have managed to get her name (Bisi Wilkinson) to bring my blog up at number 10. Petty or what?

Life with Gentoo

Two Gentoo servers, one at work, one at home. The one at home seems fine, perfectly stable. The one at work has a problem where once every few days a few deamons will drop dead: syslog-ng, cupsd, apache, atd, cron etc. It is not always the same pattern of daemons and I'm having trouble working out the problem.

More often than not the first sign is that syslog-ng stops logging to /var/logs/messages. It may be tied up with cron running logrotate and the htdig indexer. Logrotate is set up with the standard config script for syslog-ng and I've checked the Gentoo CVS to make sure that it is up to date and I've run it from the command line with no ill effects.

My suspicion is that it is tied up with htdig indexer for a few reasons:

• I'm not running it at home and home pc is ok.

• When it runs it can tie the pc up heavily for a few seconds, long enough for IMAP clients to complain about loss of connection.

• CRON keeps sending me error messages like this:

  /usr/bin/rundig: line 53: 11495 Aborted                 $BINDIR/htnotify $opts
  

Because it happens so infrequently I am waiting for the next occurence to do another post mortem.

I'd say Gentoo was hard work.

I think I did an emerge -u world last night but the at daemon hasn't sent me any mail. It seems to have happened because emerge --pretend -u world gives a different list compared to before.

The list of updated files includes vixie-cron and syslog-ng so it is worth doing.