Using XMPP to Find Out When a Long-Running Process is Done

Do you often find yourself running a process that you know is going to take a while? Do you also find yourself checking the shell it's running in every five minutes to see if it's done? I do this fairly often, so what I used to do is something like this:

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Posted on 2011-10-27

Why OwnCloud

In the latest Linux Outlaws episode (episode 234), Dan and Fab go over the latest OwnCloud release. Fab states his opinion that there's no point to running your own cloud service, since cloud services are all about delegating infrastructure control to a third party. In my opinion, cloud services are about three things:

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Posted on 2011-10-25

SSH Shortcuts

Let's say that you have a server you SSH into very often. Let's also say that sshd on that server is running on a non-standard port to avoid annoying scanners (we'll using 53718 in this example). To SSH into this server, you run the following:

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Posted on 2011-10-19

Asynchronous MySQL Queries in Perl Using DBD::mysql and AnyEvent

A lot of people use MySQL, and these days, asynchronous-style programming has really taken off. If you're involved in both of these camps, you may be wondering how to send a query to MySQL and have it inform your event loop when it's ready with the results of that query. A common solution is to use a thread or child process for each connection, and exchange data using IPC. However, if you're using Perl and DBD-mysql 4.019 or better, you have an alternative: the new asynchronous interface.

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Posted on 2011-10-19

Repository-Specific Ignored Files in Git

Have you ever been working in a Git repository and wanted Git commands like git status to ignore certain files, but you didn't want to contaminate the project's .gitignore file with your specific ignore rules? Well, with .git/info/exclude, you can!

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Posted on 2011-10-19