Sunday, October 28, 2007

Gimp Release Candidate Adds The Best Feature Ever


For the longest time, my main gripe with the gimp has been with the inflexibility of the select box. Before, you had to slowly drag the mouse, watching the width/height coordinates and let go at just the right time to get a box of a particular size. I'm sure there's a plugin script out there somewhere that could readjust the box, but I tried to find one, and write one, without luck.

Today, I got rid of the the gimpshop package on my ubuntu laptop (kept crashing on select) and low and behold, I see a Gimp Release Candidate with a beautiful gimp-balloon logo. And check out the flexibility of the box select now. I am so happy! Gimp users of the world rejoice at this awesomeness!

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Fonts in gutsy, boldness in Firefox, etc.. redux

http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/227-KDE-and-Xorg,-Fonts-and-DPI.html

Reading this article, which corresponded nicely to my Thinkpad T60p's screen, and adding that one line to my xorg.conf, basically fixed the suckiness of fonts I've since experienced after upgrading to gutsy.

Yay for obscurity!

Monday, October 8, 2007

Running a site on a Virtual Private Server with LAMP

Thought I'd jot a few notes on my experience running a site (www.dishola.com) on a VPS.

My single biggest problem has been monitoring memory usage. VPSen throttle you on a) bandwidth, b) disk space, c) CPU, and d) memory. The first three are usually quite easy to monitor on graphs and also, I've found, hard to over-consume. Disk space is probably the easiest one of the bunch to off-site, via S3 and others. But memory. Man. Every so often I'll get pegged with a burst of traffic and apache sucks up that last bit of memory, and then wham - the VPS kernel starts trying to kill things - apache, mysql, etc.. but it doesn't work. Even when the traffic looks like it's come down again, the memory situation is still "stuck". Fortunately, because of Xen and GPLHost's awesome technology, it's real easy - and seems safe - to recycle the machine and then all is normal again. Granted, I'm running a memory-needy webapp on 256MB of RAM. I wish one of these folks (GPLHost, slicehost, etc.. ) would offer VPS where I could buy the pieces of the puzzle I need in increments. I think I could easily buy up more RAM and give back disk and CPU. Oh well.