Daniel Sokolowski's Blog

Using Aptitude to list and install backported or unstable packages Early into my linux Debian web server administration, out of necessity and after a lot of trail and error and reading I worked out the right preferences that keeps my systems very stable and yet with the ability to install the occasional backported or unstable package. My package management utility of choice is `aptitude` but these settings will also effectively work for `apt-get` and before I begin do +1 this if you find it useful. The above shows the available version of Django with their respective APT pinning numbers: 990 being the stable version and selected by default when installing, 400 being the backported version, 50 being an unstable version, and 100 pinning for our already installed version. During normal installation the stable default is always selected, however now I also have an option to easily see other available versions by viewing the information provided at bottom of the package detail...

DIY - Do it yourself fireplace child guard Our wonderful 8.5 month old Sofia has become a crawling race car with an untamed thirst for exploration. And so with the cold nights approaching we needed to child proof the fireplace. This however proved to be more difficult than would reasonably expect, I've checked the local Toys "R" Us, Walmart, and even a Canadian Tire with no success for a ready to use product. Internet search was more fruitful and returned a few online stores one could order from, however in all honestly they didn't look too sturdy to me. So I build my own relatively quickly and inexpensively. Materials needed is a privacy plastic lattice - the smallest hole pattern - a few screws and anchors; tools needed are a drill, and a handsaw if you don't have the lattice cut at the store - that’s it. The construction consits of screwing the lattice into the wall and the final product is easiest explained through following pictures. ...

How to manage/remove people that added you from your "have you in circles". One could call it spam, and so I am - people/profiles following you that clearly have no reason to do so, even if you don't follow them back still show up in your "have you in circles" section. There is a way to completely hide that section, block the person or ignore them. The first two are drastic, the ignore option is the best and recently. Here is how to Ignore somone on Google+ : Click on your "Notifications" box Find and click "Added you on Google+" In the list that follows find the person and click 'Ignore' Log Out and view your profile to verify it worked. To see full list click More circle notifications » See the not very helpful Google Help Page for more information. Also do +1 this post as that helps me immensely.

One home owners experience with microFit ***a posting and project in progress*** microFit is an Ontario program under which the government will pay you a premium for any electricity you generate back to the grid through renewable sources. It started in 2009 and offered an amazing 80.2¢/kWh for electricity generated by rooftop photovoltaic panels. The demand was so high that to keep the program balanced in 2012 the rate was lowered to 54.9¢/kWh - 31.5% lower and I would bet the rate will continue to declined as the program is now under yearly review. Assuming an average 13¢/kWh electricity cost in Ontario the rate is still appealing and makes the investment worthwhile financially and of course environmentally. It must be said that if you yourself are considering microFit then do not wait - apply yourself or have it done by a company on your behalf - once you get a approved your rate is locked in for 20 years and you have 6 months to complete the project. Furthermore, because th...

A Tip for squeezing a little more free space from a VPS Our web design VPS with Linode has been rock a solid solution over the last 4 years. It currently hosts multiple client sites, freeswitch, mail agent, wireless security camera feeds, and in the past even a Minecraft server and FreeNet; all these services eat up precious hard drive space and with only 20GB the wall can be hit early. However this measly 20GB does comes with a kick ass IO rate that beats even some dedicated servers Stop blabering and get to it Linux logs everything, these logs grow overtime, systems run 'logrotate' to archive and delete old logs - the settings are very liberal and tweaking them could save gigabytes of space, 1.1GB in my instance. Modify your /etc/logrotate.conf as needed but the important bit is compressing by default and using bzip2 instead of gzip to do so. # see "man logrotate" for details # rotate log files weekly weekly # keep x weeks worth of backlogs - defaul...

Locating the administrator of a Google Analytics account For whatever reasons a client might have not been granted access to their Google Analytics information by their former developer. This normally is not an issue as developer are mostly a friendly bunch and when asked will grant proper access, but what if the former developer's identity is unknown or lost? - yes rather unlikely scenario but this has happened to us and it can happend to you. Google Analytics tracking ID reverse lookup by ewhois On the surface ewhois is your typical look up service with the one and important exception is that it allows tracking down the administrator of analytics tracking code. This can be accomplished due to the fact that site tracking codes contain a common id representing the parent account. Danols Web Engineering Google Analytics tracking codes are UA-12420089-X where X is the unique id of a tracked site. Based on this fact ewhois is able to return other related sites from i...

MANIFEST.in not honoured during install phase The python package setup procedure appears to be a mess, you have setuptools, distutils, and distribute (distutils2?). All I set out to do was to fix the installation setup.py in django-simplemenu package which was omitting the non-python module plain locale directory but instead got myself involved a 3 hour roller coaster; I am sharing my findings in hopes of helping you, so if you are reading this do +1 this. Including sub directories and non python files as part of package There are two ways: MANIFEST.in file and package_data setup.py option. The latter is Pythonic but doesn’t do recursive includes - so you would have to list every sub directory - and can not include files in the root top most folder; sure once could write a python function to do this but why the complexity? MANIFEST.in with its file/directory pattern matching and with the setup.py's ``include_package_data`` option fits the bill: ``include_package_data...