Karim Vaes

For the most frequent visitors:

Flemish – Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuwjaar
English – Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
German – Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr!
Finnish – Hyvää Joulua or Hauskaa Joulua – 0nnellista uutta vuotta
French – Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!
Italian – Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo
Japanese – Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto
Spanish – Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo

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I stumbled upon a tool with high potential when tracing/profiling under linux. I’ll immediately take you to an excerpt from the Valgrind Quickstart:

The Valgrind tool suite provides a number of debugging and profiling tools. The most popular is Memcheck, a memory checking tool which can detect many common memory errors such as:

• Touching memory you shouldn’t (eg. overrunning heap block boundaries, or reading/writing freed memory).
• Using values before they have been initialized.
• Incorrect freeing of memory, such as double-freeing heap blocks.
• Memory leaks.

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Issue
If you’re using an icon theme other than the default for Ubuntu causes OpenOffice to have no icons in the menus or on the toolbars, causing the toolbars actually have the tooltip text as the button’s text (example: Export to PDF, Print File Directly, Spellcheck, etc).

Workaround
Install the “openoffice.org-style-default” package, which installs the “openoffice.org-style-andromeda” package.
OR: Use the default Human theme for Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-style-default

References
Ubuntu forums
Launchpad

This post is meant to share a small trick that I often use when installing linux on unknown systems. In my opinion, one of the biggest downsides in linux is setting up your monitor. Imagine starting out with linux, cause you hear it was great, installed it… and got an ugly looking desktop because the Xorg.conf is has the default properties.

Then you have a lot of evangelists saying you can perfectly calculate these values, but the thing that pops into my mind at this point is “user friendliness”.

A lot of things said to come down to the trick:

• Download knoppix
• Burn/mount it, so you can boot from it
• Boot your desktop/laptop with the knoppix live-cd.
• Backup the Xorg.conf file
• Boot your main linux distro (cfr. Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, RedHat, Debian, … whatever)
• Backup your original Xorg.conf file
• Restore the Xorg.conf file from the Knoppix generated one
• Tweak it to your preferences

A additional & simple step that might ease up things for you…

Jeff Alexander blogged about the setup behind microsoft.com. It got the slashdot effect, and his blog is apparently (temporarily?) suspended. You can find the blog post below, as I dug it from out of the google caches.

Microsoft.com: What’s the story?
If you’ve ever wondered how microsoft.com uses our technology then read on. I recently came across some good information from the folks over at the Operations team at Microsoft.com. The thread basically talks about how we use IIS, Firewalls and Windows Server 2008. I think as we come up to launch next year it’s a really good and quick insight into what they do and how they do it. So enjoy the reading and let me know what you think..Pretend I’ve asked about how they protect our sites…

At this point we still don’t use firewalls for MS.COM sites and don’t have any plans on the books to put them in place. Here is the short answer as to why:

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