I try my best to stay away from Windows. I wish my clients did the same. The usual difficulty of troubleshooting elusive network performance problems is amplified many-fold when there is a Windows computer at the end of the line. With Unix it’s relatively simple: run tests “a”, “b”, “c”, etc and follow the familiar process of elimination. With Windows in the picture the number of steps uses up all of the English alphabet and spills over well into the Russian one. And when you finally reach step “я”, you have to pull out your Chinese dictionary.

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

You just replaced a failed network card, rebooted your server and now network wouldn’t start and your screen is filled with cryptic error messages about some kernel module doing something it’s not supposed to do. …

Below is the SQL script that will attempt to identify and remove duplicate posts in your WordPress database. This script can be useful for autoblogging. If you use plugins like WP-o-Matic to pull full-text RSS …

Whenever a new WordPress version comes out, I get an itch to upgrade as quickly as possible. Generally, this is not a good idea, unless you enjoy working out new software bugs and dealing with …

This is the second part of my review of iPhone apps unworthy of your ninety nine cents. You can read the first part here.
Certain applications are well-written and might have been quite useful, if …

Sometimes, in the course of writing shell script, a need arises for some random input. Using the built-in $RANDOM shell variable will give you a random number from 0 to 32767 . Let’s take a …

Many long-time iPhone users are familiar with the mystery of disappearing keyboard clicking sounds (among other sound effects). Here are a few things you can try before you take your fruity phone back to the …

As you may already know, Wget is a popular (particularly in the Unix world) command-line downloader and Web crawler application. You can read more about Wget in one of my earlier posts on the subject. …

Heavy traffic, hungry SQL queries, leaky applications will eventually leave your server low on memory. Apache will go on a hunt for swap space and MySQL will start freezing in thoughtful contemplation. Your hard drives …

Running MySQL commands from a shell script is a relatively simple task that has a lot of people baffled. Some say its too complicated and suggest using PHP or Perl, others claim doing so is …