Some hours ago I decided to write a small rant about google because they update their index so slowly currently. When looking at the index snippets and cache entries of some of my blogs this morning they were from the first of november.
Now as I’m starting this post the index has just been updated and everything is fine - looks like I’m too slow 
I did at least make it to the richest percentile of the world. This site makes you wonder about the level we are living on.
Have you ever wondered how much bandwidth you are really getting to your server? Or how much of the advertised 54 mbit of your wifi are left when the access point is upstairs?
netio is designed to answer such questions, it measures transfer rates for either tcp or udp connections between a client and a server.
Installation is simple:
On most linux distros you can simply install netio via the internal package manager, i.e. on Gentoo type “emerge netio”. Another solution would be to download the zip file from the homepage, extract it and run one of the contained binaries (linux, windows and (!) os/2).
You will have to start netio on two computers: One will be the server and just generate and send data. The other will act as a client, receive the data and display the measured results.
To start the server simply start netio as follows:
netio -s
You can add the switches “-t” or “-u” to run the test explicitely via tcp or udp.
The next step is to start netio on the client system like this:
netio <server>
If you have specified “-t” or “-u” for the server you need to give the same parameter to the client. With <server> you have to specify either the ip address or hostname of the server machine.
That’s it, netio will send some data and show you the transfer rates.
netio homepage // netio on freshmeat
This plugin should really be included in every wordpress installation: Spam Karma 2. Using blacklist, ip-filters and some other magic Spam Karma is catching at least 100 comment spams a day on every wordpress blog I own. I have just made a small donation to thank for this great help - without Spam Karma I (and probably many other bloggers) would probably already have given up blogging.
Using Linux on a laptop/notebook still isn’t easy. When I got my notebook it took me a lot of time to get everything running and I’m still having hassles with suspend to disk (to ram doesn’t work at all) and the video drivers (is ATI ever going to get a working opengl driver?). Today someone mentioned linux-on-laptops.com on digg which is really a great site for information about all kinds of laptops and how to get them running with linux. After all the work I have had with my laptop I can only encourage you to look at that site before you buy. Another great site for installation help is tuxmobil.org (formerly know as Mobilix)
It also reminds me that I have been planning to write a short guide for getting the Sony VGN-A215 to run under linux for two years … but probably I will have a new notebook before I manage to write that.