As you might have noticed, WordPress 2.5 is out, so I’ve just upgraded this blog.

Till now all I can tell is that the admin interface has changed a bit. Oh and there is a system to upgrade plugins with one click, which is way cool. Otherwise pretty much the same good old WordPress.

The upgrade went smoothly, just as for any other previous release and everything seems to be running just fine. However, at the first glance, the blog seems a bit slower than before the upgrade … (maybe this is not related to the upgrade … I’ll have to check this out).

Edit : The slow feeling is away, so I guess it was something totally unrelated to the upgrade.

A cool feature of WordPress I’ve just discovered : delayed posts.

read this entry »

I ran into this into the following article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“. This article is mainly common sense, but there are interesting points, such as :

• avoid piping when you can, in order to save performance (the classical construct grep | wc to count the lines is useless as most versions of grep can count with grep -c)
• use awk to “grep” on a specific field of a line with “… | awk ‘$1 == “XXX”‘ which is cool and I never use
• the find | xargs construct (I’d add “find -print0 | xargs -0″, useful if your find brings back filenames with a space inside …)

All in all it is worth a reading, if only to refresh your memory.

I currently manage all my X10 home automation with MisterHouse which is a fantastic tool but is a bit on the heavyweight side. Plus you need to know a bit of Perl to take full advantage of it.

If you are looking for something simpler to use, you might want to consider HEYU. read this entry »

If you got this virus (or know someone who did), and it is spreading to all of your MSN contacts with something like the following message :

hey How are you???? this is ur pic rite?!
http://www.msn- gallery.com/gallery.php?user=some_nickname.jpg

or in French something like :

http://msn-friends. iquebec.com/?photo=some_nickname
ta tof fais koi sur ce site

Then you can use the following article (there is a removal tool) to get rid of it : How to Remove MSN Virus Project 1/ Generic2.EXO / Backdoor.Generic3.SAT

Thanks to v-nessa.net for having shared this !

Happy Easter to everyone ! Enjoy the chocolate

A common problem when you deal with a pool of servers (clusters or server farms, you name it) is to execute the same command line on each server. It is usual to solve this with a “for” construct such as :

for i in server1 server2 ; do ssh $i "uname -a"; done

But this is basically re-inventing the wheel everytime. Here comes Distributed Shell (DSH).
read this entry »

I’m back from a 3-day-training about clusters with Linux which was pretty exciting, and here are the main points which were covered :

• Vitualization with Xen
• Sharing data with GFS / GNBD
• Clusters with RedHat Cluster Suite
• Load Balancing with Linux Virtual Server (LVS)

read this entry »

This little Perl one-liner can get handy when you need to translate “time in seconds since the Epoch” (for example in logs) to local time :
% perl -e 'print scalar(localtime(1202484725)), "\n";'
Fri Feb 8 16:32:05 2008
%

This was pretty useful today when browsing through Nagios event logs, where times are given in seconds from the Epoch.

By the way, the Epoch is defined as 00:00 UTC on January, 1st, 1970.