RBucky

Open source social networking startup Diaspora releases screenshots

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:01:20 +0000

Now that Facebook is on top of the world in the social networking game, several new promising networks have emerged. One that has really grabbed my attention is Diaspora. Diaspora promises to be an open-source social network, presumingly a server-side application running on an AMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP) platform. Their initial funding round was requesting only $10,000, but they ended up capturing over $200,000.

Diaspora Message Propagation (pre-alpha!) from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

The first release is due in approximately September 2010. Below are the goal sets per month.

June

Real Time Message passing between seeds
Building the core of the application

July

OStatus/Standards compliance
Encryption Layer
Implement awesome user interface

August

Plugins
Services(including FB) integration
API Refator

September

Prep for source code freedom!

Screenshots

DuckDuckGo search engine

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:14:10 +0000

DuckDuckGo is a great new search engine that you really do need to try. It provides excellent results and comes ready to go with a variety of custom settings and simple “Add to Chrome” feature. Hey, they even sent me some free stickers. Give them a shot at http://duckduckgo.com/.

DuckDuckGo home page

DuckDuckGo sticker

Custom made Ubuntu mug

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:42:05 +0000

I had a custom Ubuntu mud made for my morning coffee. It was created by http://www.mtchildmudworks.com/

Wireshark command line video

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:24:54 +0000

Simple script to list and display images in a gallery

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:26:50 +0000

A couple of days ago I was wandering around the net looking for a simple PHP image gallery to display directory contents. I wanted something that would stand alone and have a simple user interface without much overhead. I came across a package called Qdig Administration Script. Qdig is drop dead simple. All you need to do is add images to a folder or in the main directory and it will do the work for you. See an example of the script at http://markimoore.com/bp-media/.

Qdig user interface

Qdig also comes with an administration interface where you can crate captions for the images and delete them if necessary.

As an alternative, you could always enable directory listing in Apache, but Qdig provides an excellent alternative and a nice simple UI to get the job done.

Matt Cutts speaks at Google I/O about SEO

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:24:28 +0000

I was browsing through my RSS feeds today and noticed a new video from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. If you have an hour to watch this and you are the least bit concerned about Search Engine Optimization, then you need to sit down and take it all in. And yes, take notes.

How to convert .ogv to .avi

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:05:58 +0000

If you have a .ogv file and you want to convert it to an .avi, you have come to the right spot. Using yum or apt-get, install mencoder. Using Terminal, insert the following command

mencoder -idx input.ogv -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o output.avi

What is the fastest browser for Linux?

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 11:36:13 +0000

Benchmarks using SunSpider, a Javascript rendering agent, performance benchmarks were initiated on the major browsers. The goal was to determine the quickest loading browser in Linux. Each test was performed 3 times with clean caches and no extensions.

The Results

source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/05/what-is-fastest-browser-on-linux-opera.html

Browse Google using a Terminal interface

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 11:20:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to browse Google in a Terminal-like interface? Well, here is your chance. Goosh is an open-source product that emulates a Unix shell to traverse Google searches.

This shell uses the same Terminal commands that you would be happy using in Linux, but restricted to Google searches. View a list of help terms by typing “h” on the terminal interface or simply to check out your options. Visit my shell implementation by clicking the image above or visiting the link at

http://rbucky.com/shell

Understanding server load averages

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:00:16 +0000

As I add more domains to my server, I wonder about server load and how much is too much. Generally, I use htop as a system load monitor and Munin for everything else. My current server load averages 0.4 over the course of 5 minutes. The server is hardly at idle (i.e. 0.0%). When you look at load, there are usually three numbers in sequence depending on the tool you use. The first number represents a 1-minute average, second number a 5 minute average, and the third a 15 minute average. Below is a great explanation and real-world example of server load averages.

Explanation

Server Example: Xeon 3200 Series with 4GB RAM

Xeon 3200 series is quad core cpu.

1.0 on a single core cpu represents 100% utilization. Note that loads can exceed 1.0 this just means that processes have to wait longer for cpu a slice.

4.0 on quad core represents 100% utilization.

Anything under a 4.0 load average for a quad-core xeon is ok as the load is distributed over 4 cores.

Ideally, I would say that a sustained load average of 3.0 or under on your machine would be very good as I have had quad cores servers running at over 3.0 every day during peak usage — that had no perceptible slowdown.

Tools

htop – non-GUI based system monitor

Munin – comprehensive GUI charts for your system include I/O, MySQL, Apache, and other processes

mpstat – included in the sysstat apt-get package

top – non-GUI based system monitor (not as pretty as htop)

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