I played with my new toy – HP Mini 5103 WT211ES. eCryptfs is not as enterprise as they say. It started to fail on Ubuntu 10.10. And also it is terribly slow especially for seeking. So I was looking for a better solution. I didn’t want the full disk encryption which the alternative CD offers during the installation because the disk is very fast and the CPU is not so fast 
I decided to make a separate partition to host my home directory and other private data. (more…)
Ubuntu encrypted home
Firefox cache and history cleanup
Firefox gets slower by the time. Lots of data is stored in sqlite databases. First step is cleaning cache – Menu>Tools>Clear Private Data – check Cache and Cookies. Other slowing stuff is the browsing history. Cleaning the whole history is not very effective way so why not remove only the oldest items? (more…)
MSPGCC4, debugging
I recently found a forked project MSPGCC4. It is built against newer GCC and GDB. It supports multiple versions. I tried GCC 4.4.3 and GDB 7.0.1. The compilation and installation is very easy. Just run the buildgcc.sh, choose wanted versions and watch the progress.
MSP430, GCC, mspdebug
This article describes brief steps to setup a Linux development tools for MSP430 MCU – compiler and programmer. MSP430 is not as well linux-supported as AVR or 8051 but fortunately there are ways to make it working.
Internet Explorer fixators – PNG, box model, …
The old and painful problem with Internet Explorer is the PNG transparency. IE6 is still so wide-spread, damn. Few clever people created a JavaScript fixes for that. The best I know is iepngfix. It has a little limitation and works for IMG, background-image, …
Besides the PNG transparency Internet Explorer has many other holes. Missing CSS selectors, wrong box model, … I found IE7 script which patches most of those holes. So great! Now I can use selectors like DIV > DIV or DIV + DIV everywhere. It also fixes the box model (total width = margin + border + padding + width) and min-height/min-width. It tries to fix the PNG transparency too but it is not as well tuned as the iepngfix. You should remove this path of the script.
Transition to FastCGI
Apache’s prefork MPM is a very heavy memory eater. Thirty instances together with PostgreSQL can consume more then 1.5GB of memory. I have already managed the PostgreSQL to become modest. Now the Apache is the target.
Filtering duplicities in XSLT
I had a problem: I needed to find some tags in a subtree without duplicities. The duplicity was determined by a tag’s attribute value. (more…)
MagicDraw – UML tool
Good (meaning many features and userfriendly) and cheap UML modeling tool is a hard candy to find. I need at least following stuff:
- use case, class, activity and sequence diagrams
- not just dummy diagrams but also some semantics
- ability to run under Linux
Memoization
I presume that you know what the memoization is. And if not then you can read about it on wikipedia. I’d like to write about problems that I ran into while implementing memoization in Python.
Function in a function, scope, decorators
When I started using decorators I was confused how it works. I was using decorators like @staticmethod and @classmethod and I didn’t care how it is done. It works. But what about custom decorators? (more…)