Maildir is a huge improvement over mbox for storing local mails of users. Why? I will not go into a long explanation about this, because it is not the scope of this post, but just consider that saving each mail in its own file on the disk (Maildir) opposed to saving all mails in a single file (mbox) is much faster. Not only faster, but it is also much easier to manipulate the files (that are individual mails) on the system. For more details on maildir vs. mbox you can see http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

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While still hoping to release Etch as expected in December, the Debian team has revealed the name of the next Debian version: Lenny. This is from debian-news.net and the actual announce is very funny:

“If you managed to read so far: Congratulations! That means you get to be one of the lucky first 10 people to know the codename for the next Debian release: it will be called Lenny.”

Haha… I’m one of the lucky ones

In Part1 of this post I have explained the problem I had faced, when trying to renew one domain registered with RegisterFly. This is the second part of the post and shows a step by step procedure describing the solution that worked for me and allowed me to move away from registerfly and not loose my domain. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently Software Engineering is the number one job in America based on its growth, stress level, and pay.

Check out the top50…

RegisterFly.com, inc. is an ICANN Accredited registrar with over 2 million names registered by customers in all 50 states and 120 countries (from their own sayings).
They are a cheap domain registrar solution, and from my own findings at the time I have chosen to work with them (about 3 years ago), they had the best prices on the domain registration marked. Being a cheap provider I would not expect some stellar technical support, but not even like this…

Peoples that know me at least a little, know that I am normally a very calm person and I will normally not start a post that denigrates others services… I am just to busy to think that it is worth to waste my time with such discussions, and better use my available time to write about something positive that might be useful to others also. But during the last days that I had some terrible problems with RegisterFly while trying to renew one of my friends domain, that just made me so upset and nervous on these incompetent peoples and made me decide to write about this. I assume other peoples are in the same situation and might benefit from my experience because in the end I was able to save the domain and move it elsewhere.

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The release of the next stable Debian version, 4.0 (code Etch) is getting closer. Peoples following the debian testing branch have noticed probably already that the latest base-files update has changed their system banner and instead of the old:

/etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux testing/unstable \\n \\l

after this update it now shows:

/etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 \\n \\l

and

cat /etc/debian_version
4.0

Here is the update output:
base-files/etch upgradeable from 3.1.16 to 4:

Preparing to replace base-files 3.1.16 (using .../base-files_4_powerpc.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement base-files ...
Setting up base-files (4) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/debian_version ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/issue ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/issue.net ...

Lighttpd is a small and fast webserver developed with security in mind and a lot of features. Until recently Debian packages were available only in the unstable release, but now they have been included in Debian Etch (testing) and will most certainly make it to the next stable Debian release (etch is scheduled to be released in December).

Myself I have been using Lighty for a while, either compiled from sources or using the unstable debian package that worked very well for me without any special problems. Though I am using it only to serve static content (images mainly) and not use any other special features. In this case lighttpd outperforms apache in my experiences by far in performance (requests / second) and also resources utilizations (CPU and memory).

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One of the most important steps in optimizing and tuning mysql is to identify the queries that are causing problems. How can we find out what queries are taking a long time to complete? How can we see what queries are slowing down the mysql server? Mysql has the answer for us and we only need to know where to look for it…
Normally from my experience if we take the most ‘expensive’ 10 queries and we optimize them properly (maybe running them more efficiently, or maybe they are just missing a simple index to perform properly), then we will immediately see the result on the overall mysql performance. Then we can iterate this process and optimize the new top 10 queries. This article shows how to identify those ‘slow’ queries that need special attention and proper optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

After the announcement from 26 September 2006:
“As Debian experiments with funding, the editor and main author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.”

I was not expecting to see a new DWN release soon. And after reading the reason why Joey decided this, you can’t blame him for doing that.

But surprise!… Yesterday I have seen a new release from DWN going live: October 31st, 2006.
With the help of other peoples and Joey’s weekly summaries this was possible, and brought back one of my weekly reads.

Anyone with the proper experience, knowledge and time can help keeping DWN alive… For more details see the DWN contributing page to find out how to help.