CONNECT 9600

I’m used to navigating through tabs in Firefox with my keyboard so i tend to close them with Control-W too. Now you’ll notice, Control-W is really close to Control-Q…

Control-Q is the “Oh, hi Honey!”-button. It instantly quits (all of) your firefox windows. Nice feature when you’re surfing for porn, but during non-porn-related surfing (… wait … what?) it’s very annoying to accidentally hit Control-Q when you meant Control-W and suddenly all your tabs are gone.

Since i have eight desktops to switch to and no Honey walking around the house, i have no use for such a function. As it seems there is no way to disable this ‘feature’ from within the standard Firefox UI, an addon had to be found.

Enter ‘keyconfig.xpi‘ (mirror).
At the time of writing, this addon was not available through the ‘Get Add-ons’-feature in Firefox.

Install the addon, restart Firefox, and you’ll find a new menu entry in the Tools menu called Keyconfig…. Click it, pops a window, you’ll be able to rebind and disable a lot of keys.

One of which is ‘Quit [File]‘.

So much win.

Recently i felt the sudden urge to allocate four 50 gigabyte large files on my disk. Without thinking about it too much, i fired up dd and sipped my coke while my server nearly died under the added IO-load…

I searched the web for clues with keywords like ‘quickly allocate space for large file’ and such, but this did not bring me to the widely know concept of ‘sparse files‘. Ofcourse i knew about sparse files, my favorite torrent client uses sparse-files to pre-allocate space for downloads! Why didn’t i think of that immediately…

For the sake of findability, i’m posting how to quickly create huge files on disk when you dont care about the contents:

[root@comma:~] # dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile1 bs=1M count=0 seek=50K

[root@comma:~] # ls -la bigfile1
-rw-------  1 root    root    53687091200 2010-07-27 21:01 bigfile1

[root@comma:~] # du -h bigfile1
0       bigfile1

While ‘ls‘ sees a 50G large file, the actual on-disk size of the file is 0 bytes. It’s a sparse file.

Perhaps this helps someone in the future.

I installed FreeBSD 8.x in a VM today. Word has it, ZFS-support in FreeBSD works really well, so i thought i’d give that a try. The VM was installed as a ‘minimal install’ and i haven’t touched it since i rebooted after installation.

This is my VMs ‘Domain CPU utilization’-graph since:

Quite a ‘busy’ OS for doing nothing at all…

I am still processing what just happened to me. It still feels somewhat surreal even though i hold the cold reality in my hands. This does show the power of social media; Twitter in this case. It also shows there are, still, very friendly people on this planet.

What just happened? Let me tell you the story:

It’s friday afternoon and i am at home with a broken metatarsal bone. Normally i would be enjoying a cold beer with my colleagues at work but due to the broken bone, i am somewhat immobilized.

My colleague, Arjen, started all this, this friday, and tweeted:

@sndrsmnk je kan vandaag wel een vrimibo-biertje gaan drinken @dekleinebaron alleen lastig met gips. Tenzij [ze] een vers tapje komen brengen.. zou leuk zijn wanneer @dekleinebaron mee leest. Wellicht komen ze heel #spontaan een glaasje brengen. #vrimibo #mank

Translated: You could go get a friday-afternoon-beer at dekleinebaron, but that might be hard with a plastered leg. Unless they come over and bring you a fresh beer.. Would be fun if dekleinebaron was reading this. Perhaps they could spontaneously bring it over.

A few tweets and one direct message later, De Kleine Baron responds:

@steinfortschaap als het een steenworp afstand is kan @dekleinebaron wel een biertje komen brengen.

Translated: If it really is a short distance away, dekleinebaron could come and bring a beer.

I was astonished to see who turns up at my doorstep:

A cold, half a liter of Jupiler beer delivered to my doorstep by De Kleine Baron. These guys are the top-dogs. I am now ashamed that i have only been there once, despite living here for almost 4 years now.

Thanks, everyone involved in this social media thing.
This warms my heart, and no, that’s not the alcohol talking. :D

I’d like to share with you how i configured my host-os to support VMs with secure and flexible storage.
My setup is based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, 64bit, running on an Intel Core i7 with 8GB of memory. Storage is provided through a, four 1TB Western Digital disk, RAID-5 array with LVM on top. Each VM also runs with LVM.
Read more

To disable ‘Plymouth’, the graphical boot screen in recent Ubuntu installs, as best you possibly can, the following steps are to be taken:

Using the ‘grub-pc’ package for your bootloader, change the following lines in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”nosplash INIT_VERBOSE=yes init=/sbin/init -v”
GRUB_TERMINAL=console

Read more