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Isso is an online comments system, similar to Disqus. The difference is that it's self-hosted, so there's no fee to pay, and nobody is data-mining your personal information.

My web-server hosts a number of different blogs, so Isso needs to handle comments for multiple virtual-hosts. The deployment instructions do mention …

I use rsync for backups, and it has a very nice feature, where it uses hard-links to a reference directory tree, in order to reduce space. That works well, but sometimes the chain of links is broken, and disk space gets used up unnecessarily. The most common cause is when …

I'm dipping my toe into the world of IPv6. My home network now supports it (Thanks to AAISP), and now I've started to slowly shift my server addresses over. Inspiration from ipv6friday.

Here's a Python script to remove Textile mark-up from a Wordpress blog.

Download the script here: untextile.py

I've recently upgraded The Raven to the latest version of Wordpress. When I first set it up (back when Wordpress was at version 1.2!!) I installed the Textile plug-in. Most of …

proc is a program that 'compiles' Pro*C into C or C++. It's shocking that a big company like Oracle could produce something so shoddy.

Each time the program runs, it generates three temporary files in the current directory and leaves them there! After a few builds I've got thousands …

I've just spent a rather dry afternoon working out how to create a service on AIX. In brief, AIX doesn't provide any real support for SysV style Unix services, instead it has its own scheme, which does not use the familiar start/stop wrapper scripts.

Late last year I went to the Ordnance Survey to see a demonstration of their new OpenSpace mapping service. It was there that I met Artem Pavlenko, who wrote Mapnik. We talked briefly about a few things, one of which was the Boost C++ libraries. I suggested that using such …

I have one of these mice and I love it. Instead of a scrollwheel, it has a little "joystick" just behind the middle button. And what's more, it lights up blue!

Anyway, I keep having to set up my xorg.conf file for it, and I always have to puzzle …

My sound disappeared after upgrading from Firefox to Iceweasel. Irritating, but the problem is easily solved:

Ensure that alsa-oss is installed. Then, edit /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc and set:

ICEWEASEL_DSP="aoss"

(Thanks tomacewan.)

I've stupidly bought a VIA EPIA motherboard. It's a tiny, low power server board, with two built-in VIA-Rhine ethernet controllers. I've added a Prism based wireless PCI card. I use it as a firewall and WiFi base-station.

Apparently VIA's BIOS is really stupid. I have real trouble running a stock …