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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week, Monday 21st February, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. This month will hopefully see the return of Mr. Jamieson who's been out of action for several months, so be on the look-out for the loud guy who's clearly out on the town for the first time in a while. I'll also let ppl know about a new regular coding discussion meet-up (Java/Groovy/Ruby/anything etc.) which is due to be starting in Ipswich on the fourth Monday of the month (not fixed yet), if anyone's interested. Other than that, I might start another religious debate on vi versus emacs as I'm trying to make a sincere effort to pick one up again this year. Hope to see some of there! Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Sort dd/mm/yyyy
by Richard Parsons 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Hi everyone I have some data like this: something:01/01/1980:something something-else:12/05/1993:foobar another-something:32/01/2012:barfoo etc In other words, it's a colon delimited file in which the second field is a date in the form dd/mm/yyyy. How do I sort the whole file in date order by the second field? I can see that 'sort -k' allows me to pick the positional part of the fields and -t allows me to pick the delimiter. But I can't work out how to combine them so that the whole file is sorted. Thanks Richard

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EeePC
by Simon Royal 17 Feb '11

17 Feb '11

Hi First can I start by apologising for mutliple threads. I have started this one, but will keep all future questions within this thread. I am having sleep/suspend issues on my EeePC. It is odd as it works 50% of the time fine. I close the lid, it goes to sleep, I open the lid and press Esc and it wakes fine - sometimes. It is a 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. I cant replicate it or work out what is causing it not to work other times. Any ideas? Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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question about logging user activity
by Peter Alcibiades 17 Feb '11

17 Feb '11

Hi, We have got a grant from a charity to install a system which gives public access to a few hundred graphical exhibits, basically stuff we would like to have on display, but either they are too fragile, they are too big, or there is no space to hang them. To make the thing accessible we really need to have a reasonable amount of the information associated with the graphic, a few hundred words of prose, and probably a thumbnail. The grant was enough to buy is a nice big screen, we will reuse an older computer to drive it, and we'll mount it on a suitable stand for the public, and it also covered scanning these often very large graphics. We have pretty much decided to use tellico as the interface for this purpose. This is partly because all the information is in tellico already, its what we use for the main catalogue, so it saves work, and it means that keeping everything in sync is real easy. I feel OK about all this part, its just background and not the thing I'm asking about. A condition of the grant (as is apparently usual nowadays) is that we do tracking and evaluation on how much and if possible how the system is being used. This is the question. In the above circumstances, what would you use to log user interactions? If we only logged numbers of uses of the app, that would be a start, and a lot easier than getting questionnaires filled out, which people probably will not do anyway. If we could log which graphcs are being looked at, and how often, that would be very nice as we could think about other ways of making them more accessible. Any suggestions? I am sure it must be possible, but a quick pointer to what people have used successfully for this kind of thing could save an awful lot of flailing around. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] EeePC
by Alex Scotton 17 Feb '11

17 Feb '11

I was purely commenting on the irony behind apologising for multiple threads, within a new thread... I have no issue with the multiple threads, I use gmail which groups emails of similar subject anyway so pfft On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Alex > > Like I said I will not be starting any more threads. > > I don't really understand what the problem is anyway. > > I have a sleep issue - I write a post about it. Someone will reply if > they want to. I have a different problem on the same machine - I write > a post about it. Someone will reply if they want to. > > If all problems are in one thread it makes it hard to follow and check > if things have been resolved. > > I am on a number of groups and they all use separate emails for > separate issues, hence the reason I do it here. > > Simon > > On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Alex Scotton <alex.scotton(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> You've started another thread, to apologise for creating so many >> threads?.... interesting >> >> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> Hi >>> >>> First can I start by apologising for mutliple threads. I have started >>> this one, but will keep all future questions within this thread. >>> >>> I am having sleep/suspend issues on my EeePC. It is odd as it works >>> 50% of the time fine. I close the lid, it goes to sleep, I open the >>> lid and press Esc and it wakes fine - sometimes. >>> >>> It is a 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. >>> >>> I cant replicate it or work out what is causing it not to work other >>> times. Any ideas? >>> >>> Simon >>> >>> -- >>> --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: >>> http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. >>> --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' >>> running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1 >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> main(a)lists.alug.org.uk >>> http://www.alug.org.uk/ >>> http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main >>> Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >> >> >> >> -- >> Alex Scotton >> mob: 07950 524744 >> home: 01603 768361 >> Web Design | Graphic Design | MySQL Design and Optimization | SEO, >> advertising and Marketing Services | Computer Repairs | Network, >> Active Directory and Streaming Services | NLB and Bandwidth Shaping >> http://goo.gl/FIbia >> > > > > -- > --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: > http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. > --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' > running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1 > -- Alex Scotton mob: 07950 524744 home: 01603 768361 Web Design | Graphic Design | MySQL Design and Optimization | SEO, advertising and Marketing Services | Computer Repairs | Network, Active Directory and Streaming Services | NLB and Bandwidth Shaping http://goo.gl/FIbia

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EeePC Suspend Linux
by Simon Royal 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

Hi Well everything is working under Ubuntu on my EeePC 701SD, almost everything. Sound, wifi, webcam and screen worked out of the box, but I am having suspend problems. I have searched the net and cant find any references to new versions of Ubuntu, they all relate to version 7 and 8. When I shut the lid, the EeePC goes to sleep. All the lights go off and the power light flashes which is it sleeping/suspending. When I open the lid it doesnt wake. I got a brief glimpse of the desktop for a spit second but then the screen stays blank. The lights change back to what they were before but no screen. Any ideas. EeePC 701SD and Ubuntu 10.10. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Eee Experience
by Simon Royal 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

Hi For anyone interested, my EeePC arrived today and I thought I would share my experience. I played with the built in Xandros system and agreed it was rubbish. It lasted about 2 mins before I was installing Ubuntu. I installed it via USB stick and it went on, no problems with the install. It took about 20 mins. So far everything is working out of the box, sound and wifi at least. Screen size seems fine. I have not tried out the built in webcam or mic yet but even if these do not work out of the box I can sort these out later. Mine is a 701SD with 8GB SSD. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Sysadmin work, anyone?
by Jenny Hopkins 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

Sorry to post to main with this, but if anyone would like a spot of work this guy is looking urgently for someone. I've taken on more work than is comfortable already, so have no time. Let me know if interested and I'll pass on his email etc. Thanks, Jenny Hi Jenny, About 4 months ago my mum passed me your email address about a bit of freelance sys admin work for a site I’ve been building with a friend for the last couple of years. In the next couple of weeks we are finally starting a proper advertising campaign, hence I’m panicking about having absolutely no concept of when/why/if our site will get overloaded/crash/go down. We are currently on a 1GB slice with slicehost.com, running a Django 1.1 site, with a PostGreSQL database and Apache 2/memcached (the memcached thing I am taking on faith from a previous developer who said he’d set it up, but he wasn’t the most trustworthy guy!). the website is www.gayhop.com, and at present have never had more than maybe 10-20 people online at one time (at that was just for a few days when we told friends about it, generally it’s just 2 or 3 of us connected simultaneously). I know from various reading around and asking slicehost support that our options are either to simply throw more servers into the equation (which I guess gets expensive pretty quickly) or go for a setup similar to this: http://rackerhacker.com/redundant-cloud-hosting-configuration-guide/ with a DB server, a static media server, a load balancing server, and an actual app server (or several of each). As you may guess, I know very little about sys admin stuff. I’m a frontend developer mostly, although I’m fairly competent with Django now, having had to write a lot of code to get things working the way we want after our Django developer left in September. But I know nothing of Apache/linux/server setup. I guess what would be great is to know: a) What you think we should do regarding our setup to minimise the chance of going down b) How much you’d charge to advise us and do the work, OR if you’re way too busy – whether you can recommend anybody else? {I asked him for a few more details....} Hi Jenny, thanks for your response. The idea for now would be hiring somebody to do a one-off job of advising us on the best steps to take to cope with higher numbers, and then implementing those. so for now no support contract, although if we find somebody good that would obviously be something we will need in the future. Our slice was setup by our last developer, I did none of it and really do know nothing! It’s running Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) according to SliceHost. In terms of user numbers – really no idea! I’d want a setup that can at the very least cope with 100 online users at one time (maybe our current one can – I’ve no clue), though if advertising goes well this would hopefully quite soon get up towards the thousand mark. At that point though I’m sure we would need to re-evaluate our server setup anyway, and get a sys admin to do serious upgrading for us. Thanks again for your help already. Kyle Duncan

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Truths In SSD Writes
by Simon Royal 14 Feb '11

14 Feb '11

Hi I am awaiting the arrival of an Asus EeePC, which is SSD based. Ive been reading about the limited writes on SSD, with conflicting info. Does anyone have a clear info on this. Do they have limited write capabilities? Is this within a normal users/machines lifespan? What happens when it reaches it write limit. There are tricks to reduce write such as use a non-journalised file system like ext2 instead of ext3/4 and do not use a swap partition. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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USB Booting
by Simon Royal 14 Feb '11

14 Feb '11

Hi I am awaiting the arrival of my EeePC, which should be here tomorrow. It is still running Xandros - the lightweight Linux distro it comes with - and I would like to run Ubuntu on it. Is there anyway of testing if a USB stick will boot or is bootable if you have no machines that will boot to USB. I made a USB stick of Ubuntu 10.10 using Unetbootin. However, I have a 1.5Ghz PC tower that does not boot to USB, a Toshiba SP A10 that does not boot to USB, a IBM ThinkPad R31 that does not boot to USB and an Apple PowerBook G3 which is not x86 nor does it boot to USB. So, I have no way of testing whether this stick will actually work, although I see no reason for it not to. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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