While adding more capacity to my Ubuntu 12.04 based server I decided to use two disks in RAID 1 – although the whole topic is well discussed and described, it still took me some time to put all pieces together, so here I’d like to share my experiences. Plus there are couple of decision point on the way, so I’d like to explained my decisions, based on informations I read. Continue reading Software RAID 1 And LVM
Yearly Archives: 2013
Diskless PC (booting from USB stick) with Ubuntu
Recently I decided to revamp my linux HTPC and this time to do it properly – there is no disk and all media are on separate server (or NAS – I prefer server, because I’d like to run some other things there, which might be problematic to run on pure NAS box). New PC should boot from from common USB stick – 8GB – value around 5 EUR (I thought it would be more convenient to build system and I did not have any server yet to boot from network only – actually old HTPC would become server, but first new HTPC has to be created). To overcome two major issues of common USB stick – limit on number of write operations (too much writes decrease lifetime of the stick) and slow write operations speed I decided to use overlays file system (or sometimes called union file system), where (once all system is set up) all writes go to memory – this is similar to linux live CDs or USB sticks. In order to be able to do some user customizations after installation and that user can save various data his home directory, the home directory is hosted on server/NAS and shared via NFS. The recipe described below is for xubuntu 12.10. Continue reading Diskless PC (booting from USB stick) with Ubuntu
Timezones and DST in Oracle APEX
Almost all APEX applications I’ve been working with recently are used across multiple timezones, where many timezones uses DST (Daylight Saving Time) – that is basically almost all Europe and North America. The natural requirement is that users can see date+time information in their timezone time, reflecting if DST is active or not. Timezones and time conversions are always bit of mess and APEX is not supporting this completely out of box, but with small effort we can make our applications really global. Continue reading Timezones and DST in Oracle APEX
Good Book About Javascript
I’ve have been working with Javascript here and there – always small pieces – as I know Java, C, Python I though that I do not need to learn anything special about Javascript, that I should be able to manage right away – In fact I somehow did, but I’ve been always bit struggling with some strange behaviours. Having to write couple of Firefox add-ons recently I decided to read some book about Javascript to shed a light on those anomalies – I found this book very good – Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.
It relatively small book – I’ve read it in a few hours, but it gives you very good overview of all features of the language and show you how to write good and maintainable code in JS. Now I know that Javascript is very expressive language, where I can use some powerful features like functional programming, prototypes etc.