Auto-login

Found an interesting post in the Arch Forums on how to auto-login and start X on boot. I wouldn't suggest using this by default (I've only used it to time my preload tests). Depending on where you keep your computer and whether it's a laptop (like mine) that you take out in public, it can be quite a security risk, allowing anyone who can push your power button access to all your files.

Tag Cloud

Found a really easy tutorial on how to implement a Tag Cloud widget in Blogger.

Clouds display, in a very intuitive way, which subjects the writer is most passionate about. In my case: How tos, Linux and Performance. No need for a long list of bracketed numbers. Its all much cleaner and clearer with a cloud.

Bash aliases and functions

Aliases are a great thing to put into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file to speed up your use of the command line and functions are even better. So I'm going to share a few that I've collected and created.

HPET problems

I have a Compaq Presario F700 laptop. I love it. The only issue I've run into with it, that's hard ware related, is a weird tendency for the boot process to stutter while under battery power. When not plugged in and booting there are several points where it freezes and I have to press a key to get it to continue booting. This happened both while running Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 and Arch, each with the latest kernel at the time. So I'm pretty sure it isn't software related.

Opera with some Firefox extensions

Opera is an amazing web browser that's long been overshadowed by Firefox. I've been switching back and forth between the two for ages now and can never seem to make up my mind. Its mostly been a contest between Firefox's extensions and Opera's speed. I've always felt that Opera was slightly faster but Firefox's extensions made up for it with increased functionality. Today's post is about mimicking the functionality of some of Firefox's extensions in Opera.

Lightweight Login

I have a fascination with lightweight software. To me they just make sense. Why use a flashier application if all the needed functionality exists in a less resource intensive program?

Tutorials

I love writing tutorials. But lately I've been thinking. Sure, its great how a tutorial shows another person how to do some cool trick you've just figured out, but its not really teaching them how to do tricks of their own.

Preload

Preload is an daemon that monitors which programs you use most often. And when the system is idle it loads them into memory, speeding up their startup times when you do run them.

atime, relatime and noatime

Most filesystems take note of the last time a file was accessed, this is known as atime. The downside of always knowing when the file was last accessed is that even if you don't change any of the data within the file, the disk still has to write the new atime information. Atime updates are a terrible waste of time. It turns read-only operations into writes just to keep atime up to date. So with the release of the 2.6.20 Linux kernel relatime was introduced. relatime only updates whenever the file data is changed. Atime was still default until the recent release of the 2.6.30 kernel where relatime became the default.

Transformers 2 and Merging

I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on opening night. It was pretty not bad. CG was amazing as expected, plenty of explosions and action and Megan Fox was hotter than ever. A few things I didn't like about the movie though (Warning: spoilers):

Kernel Hooks

Arch Linux is really great for easily changing system settings, even more so than most Linux distros. One thing I've been playing around with recently is trimming the size of my initramfs to speed up my boot process. Its not that its slow (~20secs to desktop) just that its there and I love to tweak things =P

New Blog!

This is my 2nd blog. The first was fun but based on too restrictive a subject matter. There are sooo many blogs already devoted to Linux tutorials out there. So I've created: We Are All Robots, a blog about anything I damned well please! Well almost anything, I'm a computer geek learning more and more about computers every day. A large part of my posts will obviously be about technology and my personal experiences with it. And I'll probably still write tutorials, because its fun to teach people something cool you've just discovered. And I'll probably write mostly about Linux, because its so freaking cool! So pretty much this is the same blog as the first but with a better name =P