Shortcut icons on Unity desktop

Noteworthy as Unity's turn away from the desktop towards the launcher might be, I'm an old dog and like my screen crowded. The (manual) way to create a new desktop shortcut icon to an application is to create a shortcut file in the Desktop directory, i.e: /home/george/Desktop/Firefox8.desktop And the contents: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Name=Firefox … Continue reading Shortcut icons on Unity desktop →

Updating the Galaxy Mini to Android 2.3.3 under Linux

The Samsung Galaxy Mini S5570 comes with Android 2.2 and can easily be updated to Android 2.3 if you are running Windows on your computer and if you get Samsung's fragile Kies application to run. If you have been following this blog you know that any Windows installations reside safely banned inside Virtualboxes so my … Continue reading Updating the Galaxy Mini to Android 2.3.3 under Linux →

Varnish, session_linger and dropped connections

Recently I conducted a load test on my beloved low end Ubuntu 8.04 VPS. The setup consists of a mysql 5.1 DB, a Tomcat 6 webapp, openjdk 6 and Varnish 2.1.2. The load generator was issuing HTTP GET requests through a DSL connection which were supposed to create a decent load on Tomcat. To my … Continue reading Varnish, session_linger and dropped connections →

Running a java webapp in a VPS

The market is swarming with cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) offers [1] these days, and the specs don't look bad: you can get as much as 2GB RAM, 50GB storage space and a double core 2GHz CPU for less than 10$ / 8€ and nearly unlimited traffic. That's ideal for … Continue reading Running a java webapp in a VPS →