Yann "Bug" Dubois

Here is a short memo that I use for quickly reinstalling an operational configuration under Debian / Apache2 / PHP5 / Mysql for hosting web sites on a dedicated GNU/Linux hosted server. This configuration also includes eAccelerator and basic supervision and administration tools (Munin, phpsysinfo, mtop, PhpmyAdmin, AWStats). It is directly operational and sufficiently secured for a standard install (as long as packages are regularly updated). Anyways it works for me©®™.

Any serious hobbyist-grade two-channel digital oscilloscope is worth a few hundred bucks, with professional lab models reaching into the few thousands. One way to avoid spending too much on such a versatile equipment is to use a personal desktop or laptop computer as a digital oscilloscope. Commercially available plug-and-play probing interfaces and compatible software and drivers are still quite an expensive option. Alternatively, here is a way to turn any GNU/Linux computer with an integrated sound board into a free digital oscilloscope using free software and custom-built probes. Just follow this step-by-step visual guide.

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Here are a few books about computing science, the web industry, programming and key programming figures that I have been (re-)reading lately. I strongly recommend each of those.

I recently took a apart my Verbatim external USB 2 hard drive unit to find out what kind of hard drive and components where hosted inside. I found out a Hitachi Travelstar mini-SATA 2.5″ HDD and a nifty little mini-USB – to – SATA converter board inside a basic external drive enclosure. Here are the pictures.

Following a recent hard drive crash on my Sony VAIO VGN-NR10E laptop, I had to take it apart to change the internal HDD. I took some photographs of the tear-down process, and here is a visual step-by-step break-down guide on how to perform this hardware upgrade.

Tired of waiting forever for this single-coma change on a WordPress hierarchical page to finish saving? – Relief is coming your way. In the form of a simple plugin. Just download it, enable it, and now you can rediscover how it is like managing the content of hundred-pages CMS blogs with pretty permalinks in a few seconds instead of minutes.

Hey, did you know you could post your blog in a Facebook page and benefit from all of Facebook’s social bells and whistles without even installing a single plugin?

All you need to do is to get a free Facebook Application ID, create a Facebook “Fan page”, configure the Facebook app to grab a page from your blog, smack it onto a custom tab in the Fan page and bingo!

Let’s review in detail how this works step-by-step…