I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem. Here’s my few recipes for using this: Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 –use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/ Uncompress:�pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x Enjoy!

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition. After remembering to rename my virtual host files with …

Here’s my diary from the “epic” experience of simply trying to upgrade Alfresco installations from 4.2.c to 4.2.f. I found the community documentation to be dated and had minimal confidence in its current validity. Still, it helped. These are my final notes on the process and in actuality there were a lot of wrong …

I’ve been working on migrating a Moodle 2.4+ installation from a rickety old Ubuntu 10.04 server on Amazon EC2 to a fresh machine as I can’t seem to update the original server to 12.04, which has newer PHP packages I require to run Moodle 2.6+, which I want specifically due to a user stats plugin I want installed.. So …

I’ve been setting up a number of apt-cacher instances on different networks I run Ubuntu boxes on. This is a well documented process. I’m posting the key steps if only for my own reference later. apt-get install apt-cacher Edit /etc/default/apt-cacher add AUTOSTART=1. Edit /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf and make sure …

Howdy all, geek-mode enabled. So I’ve been fighting somewhat to get my AirPlay enabled device (Apple TV) to function perfectly. I use pfsense to run my router and in so doing I’ve got a Wireless and Wired network that are bridged together. I found with the AppleTV that only devices on the same physical media could …

Hey just a fast post here.. I’ve been using sshfs on Ubuntu (meh, linux in general) for awhile as a means of securely remotely accessing my files. I’ve taken some steps to add a line to my /etc/fstab file to make this run smoothly… Though today I ran in to a really weird situation. I found that despite having a …

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here. What it does This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a …

Ubuntu Logo Hello World! While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was …

Here’s a little video I whipped up on account that some people STILL haven’t heard of Synergy.. Check this video out if you too are a bit unclear about what the dealio with Synergy is.