Walkero

I like to work and experiment on totally different projects all the time. Every month I intend to put my hands on something new and interesting, discovering exciting technologies and solutions. This means that I usually find myself working on totally different things, from Electron applications to Drupal websites to python scripts or pure C code, and the list goes on and on.

The last thing that I need is to have a development environment a complete mess. But, how can you keep everything organized and clean, and most of all, flexible to change?

The GOG.com is a great website that distribute a lot of computer games, old and new. GOG Galaxy is their desktop application that connects the players with each other and the gaming community. GOG Galaxy is an alternative to Steam and currently is available only for Windows as a beta version. But it runs under Linux just fine, with the help of Wine of ‘course. Read more to see how you can install and use it under your Linux system!

Yesterday I created a new Conky script for my laptop I use for everyday work, running Ubuntu 12.10 with Mate. The image at the left shows how it looks like.

The weather script is based on Yahoo weather API, which is totally free. The script I use is based on the Google Now-Inspired Conky Theme found at OMGUbuntu website. The script retrieves the Weather information and shows them at the Conky. Although I like the default theme weather icons of the above theme, I wanted to make it look like StormCloud.

If you are a Linux user then you surely use terminal. Whenever I do a clean install to the latest version of any Linux distribution, one of the first things I do is to set the F10 key to not be captured by the system and pass directly to the terminal. This is necessary for various old programs running through terminal, like midnight commander.

These days I am working on a very nice project which has to do with simple music compositing inside a web browser. I thought to use the fine SoX which can do many things with the processing of sounds. I am using it to combine sound series and then mix a few of them. I need to export the sounds as OGG and MP3 files. The OGG files will be used by most of the HTML5 ready browser and there is a fallback with flash that will use the MP3 files. Even if a browser doesn't support the OGG file it will automatically use the MP3 file.

My personal webserver has 255 days uptime. High availability for my hosted websites, with no downtime all these days. Of course, the webserver is fully updated at the latest stable software available.

Yesterday I got a new hard disk for my trustful laptop. My HP laptop runs for more than three years, every day, for more than ten hours. As you can see it's a fully working computer. If you ask why I had to change the hard disk, the reasons are safety and speed. Safety, because you never know what might happen after all that time of daily work. Speed, because the new hard disk (Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD 500GB) is almost twice as fast as the previous one (Toshiba MK3252GSX 320GB). I connected the new hard disk using SATA to USB converter.

On my webservers I always use an installation of munin, to track events on my servers that happened while I was sleeping. Today, I saw that around 6 in the morning there where a huge increase of mysql requests, around 6.5 times more than the average count of requests. Also the cpu usage increased that time around 7.8 times over the average. That problem last for about 10 minutes. So I had to investigate it a little bit.