Linux Administration, PHP, Web Development, Hardware

I started with the very nice ping script from the consttype blog, but I didn't like that the graph was so hard to read with multiple ping hosts that had similar latencies, and it would time out with more than three IP addresses, and that it took the best ping rather than the average.   So I have changed it to use a faster ping, report a ping of 1000 when it fails to connect (so you get a spike rather than a gap) and be linkable with ping_ipaddress format.

Copying a Logical Volume or Partition over SSH

This should only be attempted on either a snapshot lvm volume, or an unmounted hard drive partition!

Using ssh and dd you can copy any LVM or (unmounted) hard drive partition over the internet to a new machine easily.  You can do a "push" or "pull" copy.  Here's a "push" copy:

dd if=/dev/vg0/partition-snapshot bs=1k \
   | ssh remotehost dd of=/dev/vg0/partition-destination bs=1k

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking.  I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day!  Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important.  This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

Using jQuery's .get .post or .ajax features to parse xml results, you may find that only Internet Explorer 6 fails to parse your xml result in the callback function.  You can always count on your friend IE6 to crush productivity!

** Note ** I've sold this card since, but I'll repost this in case it is useful to anyone:
Just a reference in case anyone else is trying to figure out how to get dual head working (with screen stretch) on Ubuntu in particular since Ubuntu doesn’t figure it out by itself. Took me awhile to get this figured out.
The magic lines (in “Device") are this

If you have a server computer with a printer attached and a client computer across the network there’s a super simple way to configure cups, create a “/etc/cups/client.conf” file and stick a line like this, with the server's IP address in it:
       ServerName 12.34.56.78

It seems that the many people who have been looking for a php beautifier now have a very nicely done perltidy work-alike in Magnus Rosenbaum’s new phptidy program.