“Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users.”

I’ve just finished enabling gravatars on my blog, and this was as simple as adding the gravatar code in my theme. Starting with Wordpress 2.5 gravatars are enabled by default without any additional plugin needed, and you only need a compatible theme to start using gravatars. This was not the case with my theme so I had to add a simple code to enable this:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '32' ); ?>
There are other parameters you can use, and they can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Gravatar

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If you want to run fsck on a loopback filesystem (normally a virtual machine disk image like xen for ex.) you just have to tell its proper filesystem type when you run fsck:
fsck.ext3 /path/to/loopbackfile.ext3for ext3 or:

fsck.reiserfs /path/to/loopbackfile.reiserfsfor reiserfs, etc.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a quick tip that will show how you can tell your Linux system to perform a fsck on its partitions on the next reboot. Normally this will happen by default, after some time as configured in the filesystem at creation time (or changed later): after a number of days or a number of filesystem mounts. If you are using ext3 filesystems you can check these intervals configured with:
tune2fs -l <device>
...
Mount count:              5
Maximum mount count:      37
...
Last checked:             Sat May 17 16:39:18 2008
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Thu Nov 13 15:39:18 2008
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The latest Akismet version 2.2.1 brings a cool new feature: stats! In the wordpress dashboard we have now some nice stats on Akismet activity (you can find it under the “Akismet Stats” tab in your admin dashboard). What’s cool is that they present the information from the past also. I can see all my data from the time I have started this blog - actually from the time I activated akismet). Nice… I can see now graphically and in text that my blog is averaging about 10,000 spam comments per month.

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Rackspace announced today that it has agreed to buy Slicehost and Jungle Disk for a total of $18 million. This move is supposed to improve its Mosso cloud offerings to better compete with Amazon Web Services.

Slicehost is a leader in Xen-based virtual machine hosting with more than 15,000 “slices” online today. Jungle Disk offers reliable cloud storage solutions that allow users to easily share an unlimited amount of cloud storage between multiple users through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup.

http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1215812&highlight=

The Debian Art team is seeking a slogan for the next stable release, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny”.
The poll, can be found at: http://www.debianart.org/contest/lenny-slogan.html so go there and vote for your favorite one.

The choices are:

• The Spiral Strikes Back!
• The Universal Operating System <- my favorite one
• When code matters more than commercials
• Free never looked so good
• The universal operating system never looked so good!
• We build it the right way
• Wanna see new horizons?
• See Freedom Work
• One operating system. Infinite Freedom

For the first time in the history of debian stable releases, a new kernel was included in the stable branch in what was called “Etch and a half” project. This happened from the desire to support hardware that requires updated drivers. This allows an ‘official’ way to upgrade your 2.6.18 debian etch kernel to a more recent one 2.6.24 without doing a manual compile or some use some backported packages. Still if you are not very careful this upgrade can cause problems and this post will show how you can loose your network connectivity if your system is using a bnx2 based driver.
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