And there is Redis, the new kid on the block. Redis is a high speed storage or cache system, much like Memcache on steroids. Redis writes data into memory, which makes it really fast. And in contrast to Memcache, it writes data periodically to disk depending on the amount of data that has changed. Redis is been said to be able to handle in excess of 10’000 reads/writes per second!

In contrast to Memcache, Redis has its own client language. The basic “set” and “get” are pretty much standard, but we can increment values, set lists and sets and easily handle key replacements and checks for existing values.

As of this writing, version 2 is in Release Candidate 4. For production environments, you’re highly encouraged to use the stable version 1.2.6. To install Redis, download the desired version, untar and switch to the Redis directory. There is no configure script, we just call make, then copy “redis_server” and “redis-cli” to your desired location (eg. /usr/local/bin) and copy redis.conf to /etc/. Let’s start it up! Although I downloaded version 2 RC 4, the server shows version 1.3.17:

redis-server
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 * Server started, Redis version 1.3.17
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 * The server is now ready to accept connections on port 6379
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 – 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 1074272 bytes in use
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 * Server started, Redis version 1.3.17
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 * The server is now ready to accept connections on port 6379
[3926] 11 Aug 10:42:33 – 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 1074272 bytes in use

We can now use Telnet to connect on port 6379 or use the Command Line Interface that comes with Redis (redis-cli) and issue some commands:

redis> get firstName
(nil)
redis> set firstName Peter
OK
redis> get firstName
“Peter”
redis> setnx firstName Peters
(integer) 0
redis> get firstName
“Peter”
redis> setnx firstNames Peters
(integer) 1
redis> get firstNames
“Peters”
redis>

Complete command reference can be found here and it’s highly encouraged that you play around with them and get familiar with the CLI commands. It is really amazing what Redis provides in terms of powerful memory storage solution coupled with such an easy setup and usage. One thing is for sure, we’re hooked.

MS Office 2010 marks a milestone in the company’s efforts to stay abreast with an shift within the software industry that moves away from programs running locally on computers to free services that can be accessed from any browser over the Internet. Microsoft must walk a fine line and be careful not to make the free applications too appealing as to impact its lucrative software business negatively.
Software accounted for 29 percent of Microsoft’s revenue and 51 percent of its operating income in the most recent quarter.

In contrast to it’s competitor, 4 percent of companies use Google Apps today, according to Forrester Research.

In addition, the Outlook e-mail program will be able to pull in information from users’ outside social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. It also adds new features to tame the ever-growing number of messages in the inbox, including a way to group all replies to a single thread under one line.

You will need an appropriately sized external drive or USB Flash Drive, as the Snow Leopard install DVD’s size is about 6.2 gigabytes. An 8GB USB stick like the SanDisk Cruzer 8GB is the perfect choice.

Now let’s plug in that USB stick and get started.

1. Start up Disk Utility and select your Flash Drive from the left side pane.

2. Select the Erase tab and set Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It should be the first choice in the list. Set Name to Snow Leopard or OS X Install so you can easily keep track of it. Before you the Erase button, be sure that you copied any files or folders from the Flash Drive that you want to keep, as everything will get erased. You’ve been warned! Hit Erase.

3. After the Erase action has finished, we’re ready to move the installation files onto the stick. If you don’t already have the installation DVD inserted, do so. It should appear in the left side pane. Drag it’s image (Mac OS X Install DVD onto the source input field. Select your USB Flash Drive and drag it onto the Destination input field. Then hit Restore and wait for the process to finish. Be patient as it can take more than 20 minutes.

4. In case you try to install the OS now by clicking on the USB image, a warning may appear saying that you cannot install OS X from this volume. Ignore the message. Remove the installation DVD from the drive and restart your Mac with the USB plugged in. When your Mac boots up, press and hold the option/alt key until a menu with available drives appears. Select it and follow the prompts. At this point everything should proceed the same way as the regular DVD install.

In case you didn’t know, there is a helpful MySQL utility called mysqlcheck, available as of version 3.23.38. It does exactly what we need.

To check all tables in all databases for corruption and errors and also fix them in one go, this is your command:

mysqlcheck -u username -p password  –check –optimize –auto-repair –all-databases

mysqlcheck executes statements like CHECK TABLE, REPAIR TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and OPTIMIZE TABLE and chooses the best statements for any given operation and storage engine.

Note that the operations complete a lot faster if you can afford to to disable any external services, especially if your database is large.

Ready? Here we go!

First, find and download your desired fonts into ~/Downloads/fonts. You may have to create that directory first. Then extract them and copy to the system fonts directory as follows:

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
sudo mkdir customFonts
cd customFonts
sudo cp ~/Downloads/fonts/*.ttf .
sudo chown root.root *.ttf
sudo mkfontdir
cd ..
fc-cache

And that’s it. If you had your favourite graphics program open during this process, you’ll likely need to restart it to see the added fonts.
Have fun!

Start off by rebooting your system. At the GRUB boot loader screen, move the highlighted entry with the arrow keys to interrupt the boot process. While the current boot entry is highlighted, press E and you can edit the kernel line.

Grub boot loader screen

Use the arrow key to highlight the line that starts with kernel, and press E to edit the kernel parameters. When you get to the screen below, append the number 1 at the end of the line. This will enable you to boot into single-user mode.

Edit GRUB boot loader entry

Next press Enter, then B, and the kernel will boot up into single-user mode. Once there you can run the passwd command, changing the password for user root:

prod-093# passwd
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

Next time you boot up, use your newly created password to login.

If you don’t have it on your system yet, here is the imagemagick download location. You might also have it in your repository, check your package manager as it might be as simple as calling “sudo apt-get install imagemagick” (on Ubuntu) or “sudo yum install imagemagick” (on Red Hat/CentOs).

Here is a small compilation of command-line tools (by no means a complete list). The list of available commands is actually sheer endless, you’ll be amazed by how powerful this application is.

imagemagick resize

convert image.gif -resize 128×128 resized_image.gif

imagemagick crop

convert  image.gif  -crop 240×360  cropped-image.gif      (add’l params for crop location: 240×360+10+10)

imagemagick rotate

convert image.gif -rotate 90 rotated-image.gif

imagemagick mirror

convert image.gif  -flop mirrored-image.gif

There are many more, actually way too many to list them all here. Have a look at the official ImageMagick usage page for a complete list of image manipulation actions.

• Acrobat Reader
• Firmware for the ALSA sound system
• Google Earth
• DVD decryption
• MPlayer / MEncoder
• Non-free codecs and
• Skype

and the list goes on. Two simple commands get you up and running:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

This adds the Medibuntu as a repository and updates the sources list. You can now install software like additional codecs, utilities and more like this:

sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs libdvdcss2

And you can always use Synaptic to install new software, of course. For a complete list, go here.

Start script called “startup_script” on startup (note the dot at the end of the line) :

# update-rc.d -f startup_script start 99 2 3 4 5 .

- start is the argument given to the command (start, stop).
- 99 is the start priority of the script (1 = first one, 99= last one)
- 2 3 4 5 are the runlevels at which to run the script

The dot at the end of the line has significance, read more here: /etc/rcS.d/README

Start startup_script on shutdown and reboot :
# update-rc.d -f startup_script start 90 0 6 .

Stop startup_script on halt and reboot :
# update-rc.d -f startup_script reboot 90 0 6 .

To run the script as a daemon, use the skeleton file located at “/etc/init.d/skeleton”

To know which runlevel you are running, type:
$ runlevel

Read more about runlevels here.

But if we look under the hood of the actual Memcache application, and I’m not talking about the PHP or ASP extension, but rather the executable that’s running as a daemon under linux, for example, it is a rather simple database like application running in memory. Now there are two basic actions that need to be performed to use it, one is writing info into memcache, the other is reading it. In a typical scenario, there are many reads for one write, that’s the whole point, isn’t it. But what if we can isolate the reading from the server side scripts, and let a small high speed module do that for us.

That’s where Nginx and it’s Memcache Module comes in. We use PHP to fill up the cache and then let Nginx serve that content to the requesting client. According to lead architect Peter Gilg, this configuration is used at Mademan.com, a lifestyle site serving up to 1 million pageviews/day.

To be more specific, we’ll have nginx listen on port 80. If a request comes in, it checks memcache if the requested page is in memory and serves it directly to the client, or sends it to Apache (on port 88 for example) to produce the page. At the same time apache inserts the page into memcache, so it’s available to nginx for the next request. A sample configuration nginx script would look something like this:

server {
  location / {
    set $memcached_key $uri;
    memcached_pass     name:11211;
    default_type       text/html;
    error_page         404 = /fallback;
  }

  location = /fallback {
    proxy_pass backend;
  }
}

Additional Resources: Nginx Memcache Apache