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A collection of 53 posts

Monitoring

SuperShaper-SOHO, a Wondershaper alternative, is now using the HFSC scheduler

A lot of people still use DSL to connect to the Internet, and most of these connections have a lower upstream bandwidth than their downstream. This can often cause latency for interactive low-bandwidth applications, like SSH and VoIP (SIP, Skype and Lync), when uploading large amounts of data because of

Monitoring

How to add Slack notifications to an existing Monit setup

So you've got a fine Monit setup that has a lot of checks for this and that and you're getting emails whenever something fails. Life is good and you're happy. And then your company wants to try out this hip new chat thing called Slack and you think that it

Hardware

Solution for MediaScannerService on Android draining your battery

Have you ever experienced that the system service Media climbing to the top of your application list on the Battery tab on your Android device? I had this particular problem, and it took me a very long time to actually figure out what caused the problem. I had read on

Software

iPXE hackathon in Tønsberg, Norway

So, a while ago I decided that I wanted to invite the core developers of the iPXE project to my home for an extended weekend of hacking on the project. The agenda was to try and merge as many outstanding patches and pull requests that we knew about. The work

Software

This is why I participate in an Open Source community

The other day I received this email from a user of one of my CPAN modules. This is what makes participating in an Open Source community really worth it! The tool he's talking about is XML::Rabbit. Thanks a lot, Jack! Just a note to say thank you.  I had

Software

GSoC 2012 roundup for iPXE

During the summer season of 2012 (northern hemisphere) I've had the pleasure of being the coordinator of the iPXE network boot loader's participation in the Google Summer of Code program. This is a summary of what happened during the summer. What is iPXE? iPXE is a network boot loader. What

Software

Hiking and hacking at Preikestolen

Recently, I was participating in the Moving to Moose hackathon at Preikestolen near Stavanger, Norway together with a lot of other Perl hackers. I was one of the few people that actually drove to the venue, and it took quite some time to get there. During the trip I stopped

perl

New project: ZNC IRC bouncer log viewer

I've just published a new project on GitHub, named znc-log-viewer, that might be useful for IRC junkies. If you use the ZNC IRC bouncer to keep you logged on to IRC all the time, you might've enabled the log module to avoid missing messages when you're not connected to the

Hardware

Solved: ASUS P8Z68-V PRO GEN3 mainboard resetting instead of booting first device

I recently upgraded my main computer to a new shiny Intel Z68-based motherboard with a 2nd generation Core i7. A really nice piece of hardware, I'd say. But while I was setting it up I had some very odd problem. When I plugged everything in and wanted to boot it,

Hardware

How to fix "No access" error when changing Windows file permissions

Yesterday I helped my father to install his new computer with Windows 7. For several reasons I shall not mention, it was in the best interest to take the hard drive of the old (broken) computer and copy all the data from it to the new. What he (and me)

perl

Config::Role - Object constructor parameters from file made easy

After I wrote that big 5-part article on WWW::LastFM / XML::Rabbit I noticed several things that could be improved. One of them was the fact that loading configuration information from a file in the home directory was a pretty generic thing to do. I decided to factor that code

Software

How to automatically block IPs that do a dictionary attack on your SSH server

Have you ever noticed that the sshd on your publicly facing machines gets bombarded with dictionary attacks several times per day? This problem is mostly an annoyance, as it fills up the logs with lots of User authentication failed, wrong password for messages. There are of course several ways to

perl

Implementing WWW::LastFM with XML::Rabbit - Part 5

* Part 1 of 5 * Part 2 of 5 * Part 3 of 5 * Part 4 of 5 * Part 5 of 5 In the previous article we started implementing the geo.getEvents Last.FM API call. In this article we will complete the implementation of the Event class and create a small

perl

Implementing WWW::LastFM with XML::Rabbit - Part 4

* Part 1 of 5 * Part 2 of 5 * Part 3 of 5 * Part 4 of 5 * Part 5 of 5 In the previous article we finished implementing the geo.getMetros Last.FM API call with XML::Rabbit. That particular API call doesn't include a lot of interesting information, but it

perl

Implementing WWW::LastFM with XML::Rabbit - Part 3

* Part 1 of 5 * Part 2 of 5 * Part 3 of 5 * Part 4 of 5 * Part 5 of 5 In the previous article we looked at how XML::Rabbit does its magic to give us a very compact syntax for creating Moose attributes that mirror simple XML document values.

perl

Implementing WWW::LastFM with XML::Rabbit - Part 2

* Part 1 of 5 * Part 2 of 5 * Part 3 of 5 * Part 4 of 5 * Part 5 of 5 In the previous article we created a simple framework for making HTTP requests to the Last.FM API. In this article we'll go into detail on how XML::Rabbit can

perl

Implementing WWW::LastFM, a client library to the Last.FM API, with XML::Rabbit

* Part 1 of 5 * Part 2 of 5 * Part 3 of 5 * Part 4 of 5 * Part 5 of 5 In this series of articles I'm going to implement a client to the Last.FM web services API which allows us to find concerts and other events in your local

advocacy

JW Player uses term "Open Source", but violates Open Source Definition rule #6

I recently came across the software JW Player. It is a Flash/HTML5-based video player to use on your website. Oh, this looks great, I thought. Why haven't we used this at work, I asked myself? It is, after all, open source. Then I clicked on to the download page

perl

Unicode::Collate is really, really slow

I noticed a while back that there was something fishy with perl's built-in sort when dealing with Unicode text. Doing some research made me eventually notice the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) and the perl implementation in Unicode::Collate and the very useful Unicode::Collate::Locale. Thanks a lot to the

perl

Using perl instead of awk in my one-liner

I was filtering some output in the shell today, and I reached for my trusty awk '{ print $1 }' to get the first part of a line separated by whitespace. Then I started to think; why am I using awk for this when I know so much perl, and

Software

Slow text consoles in Ubuntu 10.04-based VM in VirtualBox?

The default text console on Ubuntu 10.04 uses a graphical mode that uses a planar memory layout. Apparently this graphics mode is extremely hard to virtualize efficiently. Setting another (graphical) text mode that is fast, even on virtualized machines, is actually not that hard. You need to edit the

Literature

The new Catalyst book from Packt Publishing

Some weeks ago I got a copy of the new Catalyst book from Packt Publishing on the popular MVC web framework for Perl. The new book covers the 5.8 release of Catalyst, which is based on Moose. The book also includes some chapters on Modern Perl topics, namely Moose

perl

Having problems to install CPAN modules that use Module::Install on Windows?

I have been discussing this problem with Adam Kennedy and some other people at #win32@irc.perl.org today: Line 388 of Module/Install/Makefile.pm is a blank line, but the line after it is a simple two-arg open(). open MAKEFILE, "> $makefile_name" or die "fix_up_makefile: Couldn't

perl

Apple, the devil in our midst

So Matt Trout has lost the Iron Man Challenge. As part of the competition rules it is time to make a vote for a hair color for him and a talk title that he will present at an upcoming Perl conference. My vote goes to a light blue color as

java

Are you unable to run the JavaME SDK 3.0 emulator on Windows 7? Workaround found!

If you get this error message when trying to run midlets through the built-in emulator of the JavaME SDK 3.0, try disabling DEP for runMidlet.exe. Error message given by Netbeans and/or Eclipse: *** Error *** Failed to connect to device 0! Reason: Emulator 0 terminated while waiting for it