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Where has my disk space gone?

Lee Schlesinger

December 17, 2008 2:00:00 PM

If Parkinson's Law for computers holds true, then no matter how much disk space you have, it will get used up. If you're already feeling a pinch, consider using a disk space analyzer tool to see what's eating your space.

Tracking build status with Pulse

Lee Schlesinger

December 16, 2008 2:00:00 PM

Pulse is a build server that can monitor your source repository and trigger a build and test cycle every time somebody does a commit. With Pulse you will always know if the most recent sources in your revision control system compile and if they pass your unit and system tests. Better yet, Pulse allows you to build and test your current working copy of checked-out source, during a so-called Personal Build, so you can see if your code breaks things before you commit your changes to the central repository.

Condensing with Open Text Summarizer

Lee Schlesinger

December 15, 2008 7:00:00 PM

Properly speaking, Nadav Rotem's Open Text Summarizer (OTS) is not a summarizer at all. True summaries generally involve rewording contents at a higher level of generality while preserving the meaning, not just producing a condensed version of the original the way that OTS does. However, within its limits, OTS is an efficient tool for automatically producing abstracts of non-fiction, that, in the last 15 months, has received favorable mention from at least four academic publications, including one in which it outperformed similar utilities, including commercial ones such as Copernic and Subject Search Summarizer.

Manage your mbox file with Archmbox

Lee Schlesinger

December 08, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you can also grab or delete messages by matching regular expressions against message headers.

Keeping an eye on your Web proxy usage with Squid Graph

Lee Schlesinger

December 05, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Squid Graph is a Perl script that takes your Squid proxy server access.log file and generates a Web page showing you statistics about your proxy accesses and transfers, including the number of cache hits and the percentage of requests that were served by the cache alone. With Squid Graph you can see how well tweaks to your Squid configuration are working.

Quickly share your screenshots with JShot

Lee Schlesinger

December 04, 2008 9:00:00 AM

With the JShot screen capture and uploader utility, you can quickly put all or part of your screen on the Web and send a URL to it to a friend. JShot is free for noncommercial use, and is great when you want to show people a screen capture and don't want to have to deal with file names and upload permissions.

Bidirectional filesystem syncing - DirSync Pro vs. Unison

Lee Schlesinger

December 03, 2008 9:00:00 AM

Everyone knows and loves rsync, the command that lets you clone a directory tree to another disk or system with the ability to keep the clone fresh in an incremental and bandwidth-efficient manner. Sometimes, however, you want to sync in the reverse direction. With bidirectional filesystem syncing tools, there is no primary filesystem -- you just tell the tool to make sure both target directories, or clones, are identical. Here's a hands-on look at two tools designed to accomplish that task: DirSync Pro and Unison.

Browse all your source code revisions with ViewVC

Lee Schlesinger

December 02, 2008 8:00:00 PM

For programmers on big projects, a version control system for managing source code is vital, but working on files in a large project from one of these programs' command-line interfaces is cumbersome. Worse, the results of the commands lack highlighting to show the differences between files and revisions. ViewVC is a handy browser-based code viewer that allows users to browse a source code tree managed by either CVS or Subversion, look at changes, compare revisions at the file or line level, and perform other operations -- just about anything except allow users to check out or commit files.

Three graphical mount managers

Lee Schlesinger

December 02, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Mounting and unmounting filesystems used to be straightforward in GNU/Linux. A basic knowledge of the mount command or some editing of /etc/fstab in a text editor and you were done. However, with the addition of udev in the 2.6 kernel for autoplugging, and the demand for hotswapping USB devices, along with the increased use of logical volume managers and other complications, the process is now more complicated -- perhaps too complicated for many among the growing number of desktop users. That is where graphical mount managers such as Forelex Mount Manager, PySDM, and MountManager find their niche.

Gmail notifiers let you know "you've got mail"

Lee Schlesinger

November 26, 2008 8:00:00 PM

If you are into email like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were in the movie You've Got Mail, you probably want to be warned as soon as any message enters your mailbox. If you use Gmail, you can try one of several Gmail-specific applications that let you know when new messages arrive.

Debug your shell scripts with bashdb

Lee Schlesinger

November 24, 2008 6:00:00 PM

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script.

A graphical way to MySQL mastery

Lee Schlesinger

November 21, 2008 9:00:00 AM

MySQL GUI Tools is a suite of graphical desktop applications for working with and administering MySQL servers. The suite consists of three tools: MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Migration Assistant (available only on Windows). We'll look at the first two to see how well they let us manage MySQL without using the command line.

Doing a diff without touching the command line

Lee Schlesinger

November 19, 2008 9:00:00 AM

With diff-ext, GNOME users can compare and merge files from within Nautilus. If, instead, you use KDE 3, try out kdiff-ext from the same site, which works with Konqueror. Each utility handles paths to files and directories and invokes an external diff tool to perform the grunt work. With diff-ext you can easily compare two files with different names, from different directories, or whole directory trees.

Set Mantis to track your bugs

Lee Schlesinger

November 14, 2008 4:00:00 PM

Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.

Tidy up your mailboxes with Archivemail

Lee Schlesinger

November 13, 2008 9:00:00 AM

Over time, people tend to accumulate a large number of messages in various email accounts, most of which they never bother with again. The problem is particularly acute for administrator accounts that receive routine notifications of events that are viewed, if at all, no more than once. The archivemail tool lets you easily archive these old messages and thereby free up some disk space and improve your mail client's performance.

Does cb2bib remove drudgery from bibliography creation?

Lee Schlesinger

November 11, 2008 4:11:11 PM

Many academics and students share a dirty secret: They hate the drudgery of assembling bibliographies. The cb2bib utility attempts to remove some of the drudgery, at least so far as online references go. Designed primarily for use with BibTeX, cb2bib can also be used with other formats once you export the results. However, whether the application actually makes bibliographical tasks easier seems questionable.

Automated processing tools for better digital pictures

Lee Schlesinger

November 10, 2008 4:00:00 PM

When you return from a trip and copy your digital pictures over to your file server, you might like to rename the image files or (losslessly) rotate them to their correct orientation to make finding and viewing them simpler. You might even want to embed comments right into the image files in such a way that all image viewing tools should be able to harvest and share this metadata. In this article we'll take a look at some command-line tools to help you with these tasks.

Slow startup? Bootchart reveals all

Lee Schlesinger

November 03, 2008 9:00:00 AM

Ever wondered what takes your Linux box so long to boot up? You can see for certain with the Bootchart package. Bootchart logs the entire startup process and produces a clean, graphical representation of its results suitable for everything from troubleshooting to good old-fashioned bragging rights.

Transparent compression of files on optical media

Lee Schlesinger

October 31, 2008 3:00:00 PM

Support for transparent decompression of files on optical media has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.4.14. Here's how you can take advantage of this support when you burn your own optical media by using the mkzftree tool and the -z option to genisoimage. These commands compress files using zlib, which uses the same algorithm as gzip. Using the transparent compression Rock Ridge extension can allow you to fit much more data onto a DVD.

Parallel SSH execution and a single shell to control them all

Lee Schlesinger

October 30, 2008 8:00:00 AM

Many people use SSH to log in to remote machines, copy files around, and perform general system administration. If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time. Parallel ssh, Cluster SSH, and ClusterIt let you specify commands in a single terminal window and send them to a collection of remote machines where they can be executed.

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