Archive for January 2007
Ubuntu's unexpected inconsistency
UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
The first time this happened which is months ago I just rebooted the machine and that cleared the error.
This time around rebooting didn't work and so I had to type the command fsck and then
answered yes to a series of y/n fix questions that followed and thankfully the problem was
fixed.
delicious
digg
Getting around graphics
In the Ubuntu space, I found that the combination of GIMP Image editor and gThumb image viewer works very well for me and I can achieve all I need with those two pieces of software. I use GIMP for most stuff including layering and filtering but gThumb is good for light weight changes as it also has functions like desaturation and colour reduction. Its also good, as its name suggests, for image viewing.
I think its a question of drawing the strength of software applications but it takes some time to get a real good grip especially if graphics is a minor component of your work like it is to me.
With this idea of using more than one software application from Ubuntu, I have now realised that in Windows I can also use a combination of IrfanView and Paint.Net.
Whilst IrfanView has been around for some time now, Paint.Net is still in beta form. Despite still being beta I think its a very good light weight piece of graphics software that most people doing casual graphics will find handy. One word of caution though is that when you install it choose custom installation and then select not to get automatic updates because last time there was a newer version and I could not open the version that I had and I could not update as well from the site and so in the end I had to uninstall it and then manually download the latest version.
Monitoring site uptime
Its a good idea not to use an e-mail from your site otherwise you won't receive it when the host goes down and so you have to use a webmail account like yahoo or gmail or something like that or an e-mail with another host.
The SiteProbe statistics are basic but you get a weekly report which suits me well because my host is reasonably reliable and so for most weeks I get 100% uptime.
For a more comprehensive but free monitoring I think SiteUptime offers a reasonable service in their free plan. Unlike the SiteProbe service which just monitors the http server only, the SiteUptime service monitors ftp, pop3 and smtp servers as well plus you get monthly reports and some fancy statistics.
I am sure there must be other website monitoring services available but I have found these
two to be quite easy to use and accurate.
