Archive for December, 2007

Yugo Fan Club

Monday, December 31st, 2007

It’s almost new year and this is a great time to draw some conclusions.

I act as an administrator for this website, Yugo Fan Club. I do the technical things and I don’t want to get into the personal stuff. I am interested in Yugo cars since I own one :)

So, I started making friends on the internet via this Yugo forum website and I got promoted to an administrator.
We started with some lousy hosting in Serbia but then we got a good hosting in USA (well apart from that accident that I talked about some time ago).

We also started as friends, helping each other out with various things, learning about cars and stuff. But about a year ago, some administrators had personal problems about running the forum. So two of them left and made their own website that I helped them make. Now, at the end of 2007 lets see some stats about Yugo Fan Club website (also featured on Wiki).

Recently, I’ve put PHPBB 3 and the users thought both good and bad about it. The ones that had problems didn’t like the new theme and after they found out they can have the old theme back everything was ok in the house ;)

In December, the number of unique visits is 24126 (today is the last day and it’s not over ;) ) which amounts to 778 unique visits daily (per ip).

Daily, people open 2715 pages (4 per visitor) which is 84192 for this month.

Our traffic for December is 12 GigaBytes and our forum compression is turned on.

Most visitors came from .com, .net, .org, then Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina etc.

There are 62367 posts, 4149 subjects and 1254 members

:)

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Tata Group’s Low Cost Car

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Indian car manufacturer Tata Group is about to launch the cheapest mass car around. The car, named “People’s Car” (this reminds me of VolksWagen a bit ;) ) is going to cost about 2500 USD.

The motive for this car is driver safety. The traffic in India is 10 times more dangerous than that in the USA. You can see a family on a motorbike, a father, a child in front and a wife behind him driving in the streets. By using cars, the thought is, there will be fewer fatalities.

The car uses a 32 Horse Power Engine, weights about 600 kilograms and has it’s engine located in the rear. It is Euro 3 compliant, with manual and automatic transmission.

Here are the links and a look at how an Indian crosssection looks like:

Business Line Google News

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Zabbix

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Zabbix is a network monitoring solution. I used to play with Nagios but I find Zabbix a better product. Simpler to install, easier to use, better web interface.

Zabbix works in a client/server mode. Client is called an agent ;) so on each box you want monitored you install the agent. The server gets installed either with mysql or with postgresql database support. I opted for mysql. The install was done on my laptop Ubuntu. I had some problems early on since my server didn’t see my client.
This was because of the server or client settings that I changed. Since installing both products I noticed a lot of forks/threads in the process list and I wanted to cut down the number of those by editing a config file.
Don’t do that, Zabbix doesn’t like that ;)

Now I got 25 Zabbix instances in my process list

root@warlock:/tmp# ps aux|grep zabbix|grep -v grep|wc -l
25

Anyway, Zabbix looks nice. I can monitor everything related to how my box functions. I had to clone 2 eth0 rules (incoming and outgoing) and make it work for my wireless network. I just changed eth0 to ath0 both times after cloning.

I have to figure out how to send daily reports to my email :)

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Take 4 by Netenberg

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Today, I got to install a package of programs called Take4 by Netenberg.

You get Fantastico De Luxe (what a fine name ;)), Universina (you’ll never guess what is this for), Click Be! (another fine name) and AccountLab Plus.

*sarcasm start* Wow, it felt great to have these De Luxe, Universal, Plus programs! *sarcasm end*

Universina is actually a template for Cpanel and I don’t like it. Neither does my client

Fantastico is actually the reason we got this bundle, it’s ok but I didn’t see some of the scripts I expected… Maybe I had to install the unstable version to get them…

Click Be! is a tool that won’t work with my php suexec. We’ll see what happens with this one.

And AccountLab plus is already included with Fantastico De Luxe.

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eGroupWare

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

I’ve setup egroupware before and it works ok, you got various applicaitions, FeLaMiMail (what a strange name) for email. a calendar, address book, document management, project manager, resources, tracker, file manager, and even wiki. That’s a lot of applications. I saw a gallery php script integration module not bundled here, there are probably more applications.

The thing with egroupware is that installation can be quite complicated. I installed from source on CentOS 5 and after fixing numerous things it complained about I got almost lost in the installation process. Once I finished the installation I noticed you can not change the language. The only language available was English and my client wanted German. So I drilled Google for answers and drilled some more and found out I had to install it in German to have German language available later on. WTF! So I did that, and it was not easy since I don’t know German that well and I got it working. Now I can choose only German and English languages…

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Jazz

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

I like jazz. It’s not my favorite kind of music, it could be. What I like about the jazz is female vocals, they rule.

Today I was listening to a satellite jazz radio station and I heard this song that I never heard before. The problem with this radio station is that it doesn’t spit out anything about the song, so I had only the lyrics I heard to go on.

I thought I heard the words “Waiting the water” so I Googled them and I got no good results. Then I added the word jazz at the end and got somewhere a link to Eva Cassidy lyrics. Now, I knew I was on to something. The song is actually called “Wade in the Water”, lol. And it’s great, you can see it here.

I listen mostly to nujaz, new, electronic jazz, usually mixed with some chill sounds. But jazz gems like these are really special :)

The thing I really liked about this song is it’s background, just read “About This Video” section on YouTube. It says that this gospel was sung to the slaves to warn them to keep in the water when running for freedom since the dogs couldn’t sniff their scent in the water… Amazing!

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Goodbye Old Lightbulbs

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

For some time now, I’ve been buying compact fluorescent lights for my house. I gave one to my dad.

The reason I’m doing this is that they use so little power (max is like 20 or 23 Watts), give out the same or more light and last several times longer than conventional bulbs. Sure, they cost more but in the long run it pays off.

I’ve bought one branded fluoro bulb (Phillips or something), 20 Watts and it runs great in my dad’s living room and I bought one labeled 36 Watts from a local store. Well it seems that the 36Watt bulb is actually weaker then the 20 Watt branded bulb and it’s made in China… I probably should have known better…

Anyway, those bulbs are cheaper now as are many other things because of the New Year. I’m going to buy some more.

Now, I don’t use that much light… Really.

When I work I just have one lamp turned on so that I don’t go blind looking at my laptop. And the conventional incandescent light bulb in my lamp broke today… maybe that’s a sign… or maybe not ;)

Anyway, go out and buy one compact fluorescent light bulb for your house, you will be doing good for your budget and your environment.

And by the way, the US made a law by which in 2012 you wouldn’t be able to buy old style light bulbs any more, only the fluorescents will be available. Read about it in The New York Times article.

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China is corrupted

Monday, December 24th, 2007

But so are many other countries, hehe.

The reason this post is about china is that the Chinese authorities set up a website about corruption where ordinary people could come and complain. But the website crashed on it’s first day due to a huge number of visits.

Now you can interpret that in various ways.

You can say, China is a lot corrupted so that’s why the website crashed.
Or you can say, there’s a LOT of Chinese people and that’s why it crashed, etc. Take your pick.

My thoughts are that the corruption is a thing of the morals. If you have ethics, morals, you won’t do it no matter how rich or poor you are. But some people just can’t resist and they make us, law obeying citizens, look like fools. Can we fight them back?

Read more about what China did here.

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Energy from space

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Ooooook, I’ve heard about many silly things in my life but this is really strange (at least for now). It seems a small island of Palau will get its energy from space. Yeah, you’ve read that right, from space.

The idea is to put low orbit satellite(s) that use solar panels in space to gather energy and to transport it back to earth using microwaves, like the ones in a microwave oven, and transform that to DC (direct current) on earth. The project will cost some 800 million USD and the island will get about 1 megawatt of power, enough to power 1000 homes.

Read more about it here.

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Linux-based MPX Multi-touch Table

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

It looks nice :)

Would fit great on my desktop but since I always browse the net while eating I’d probably destroy it ;)

Anyway, the gadget is really fancy these days but I guess in the future it might be widely available…

Read more about it here

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