Author Archives: kerneljack

Creating EBS based Amazon EC2 instances

Posted on February 21, 2011 by kerneljack

So I had to create an Amazon EC2 instance quickly and ideally it had to be as plain a CentOS instance as possible. Now the first thought that I had was to find a way of creating one from scratch … Continue reading →

Posted in aws, centos, ec2, operating systems, virtualisation | Tagged | Leave a comment

Turn off the linux console display

Posted on July 1, 2010 by kerneljack

I needed a way to turn off the display on an old netbook that I am using as a low-powered server. I installed CentOS 5.5 on the netbook and set the ‘inittab’ to boot into console mode by default however … Continue reading →

Posted in centos, computers, howto, linux, operating systems, software, troubleshooting | Tagged | 1 Comment

Creating a bootable USB stick with Centos 5.4

Posted on March 19, 2010 by kerneljack

OK, other people have also written about this, but the information seems to be cluttered all over the place in different forums or the CentOS wiki. The most straightforward way I found to do this is as follows. Credit for … Continue reading →

Posted in centos, linux | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Fix for strange white borders with Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu

Posted on August 30, 2007 by kerneljack

I’ve just installed Compiz Fusion on my 3-year old ASUS laptop which is running Ubuntu Feisty. I’m quite pleased at how stable it is. I tried Beryl a few months ago and it was not usable at all on the … Continue reading →

Posted in beryl, compiz, fusion, hardware, linux, software, troubleshooting, ubuntu | 8 Comments

Such an insightful essay …

Posted on August 28, 2007 by kerneljack

Paul Graham has impressed me time and again with his stunning insight. Whenever I read his writings, it’s as if he plucked his ideas out from my own head and then put pen to paper. His latest, Holding a Program … Continue reading →

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Some writing tips

Posted on August 23, 2007 by kerneljack

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks on and off reading ‘Bugs in Writing’ and have definitely learned about some mistakes to avoid in writing. In order to fix these mistakes, it is best to do a lot of your own … Continue reading →

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Been too long …

Posted on August 6, 2007 by kerneljack

I know I haven’t updated this blog for a while … in fact I frequently abandon it for a few months while I carry on with life’s struggles. Keeping up with my job, finding time to spend with my beautiful … Continue reading →

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Links for June 3, 2007

Posted on June 3, 2007 by kerneljack

Fedora 7 is released!: I really liked the last Fedora release, but I believe it was slightly plagued by problems with some of it’s package management utilities. I have already installed this release and am quite impressed. Wireless now works … Continue reading →

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Some web links for today

Posted on May 17, 2007 by kerneljack

I’m going to occasionally post links here that I find particularly insightful, interesting or geeky. Three things that caught my interest today: PowerTOP: Released by Intel, this utility builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel … Continue reading →

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Switzerland Trip

Posted on April 5, 2007 by kerneljack

We have just come back from a brilliant trip to Switzerland! The weather was awesome throughout our trip. We spent most of the time in Lucerne, where we stayed at the Hotel Drei Koenig. On our first day we decided … Continue reading →

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Passed my driving test!

Posted on March 31, 2007 by kerneljack

Wow, I finally passed my driving test about after 3 or 4 tries! It is quite difficult to pass in this country, they can fail you for very simple mistakes like forgetting to turn your indicators off when stopping or … Continue reading →

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GLLUG Meeting

Posted on November 12, 2006 by kerneljack

I helped out yesterday at the Greater London Linux Group’s meeting, held at my old alma mater, the University of Westminster in New Cavendish street. It was a blast going back after so many years, I met one of my … Continue reading →

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LinuxWorld 2006

Posted on October 26, 2006 by kerneljack

LinuxWorld started yesterday here in rainy London and I had a great time! It was the first time ever that I wasn’t a visitor, but was helping out at the Jokosher stand. I did several demos of the app to … Continue reading →

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Surrey Street, Croydon

Posted on October 18, 2006 by kerneljack

Since we moved to Croydon in July I have grown particularly fond of our Saturday morning food shopping. Surrey street is not very far from our place and hosts a farmers market every day, except Sunday. There are a great … Continue reading →

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Wierd Java error on my Mac

Posted on October 16, 2006 by kerneljack

I turned my computer on today to get some work done, started Eclipse and started coding. When I tried to use the command-line though, I got this strange error: Error: no known VMs. (check for corrupt jvm.cfg file) I couldn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in apple, coding, computers, mac, operating systems, osx, programming, software | 1 Comment

WordPress finally supports WXR imports!

Posted on October 13, 2006 by kerneljack

I’ve been waiting for so long now to import my old WP blog from my old web server to this site. The problem has been that until now, wordpress.com blogs did not have an ‘Import Self-Hosted WordPress Blog’ option so … Continue reading →

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Always buy RAM from Crucial

Posted on May 2, 2006 by kerneljack

I needed some extra RAM in my 512MB laptop to do some Java heavy lifting (Eclipse, Netbeans, JBoss, Profilers, etc). Those things can take up a lot of RAM, not leaving much for Firefox and other apps. Seeing that my … Continue reading →

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Apple’s Boot Camp – easily install XP on a Mac!

Posted on April 5, 2006 by kerneljack

Wow this is unbelievable! Apple has officially released a public beta of Boot Camp which allows anyone to take a Windows XP CD and install it on a Intel Mac complete with dual-boot! I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere today … Continue reading →

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Scoble’s Dashboard Spy

Posted on April 2, 2006 by kerneljack

With all the April Fools jokes flying around, The Scobleizer Dashboard has got to be funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. It would be great if someone actually came up with something like this so a blogger can instantly … Continue reading →

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Doing quick tasks in Python

Posted on March 31, 2006 by kerneljack

A lot of the time at work I have to come up with quick solutions to various programming problems, and I mean *real* quick. There is usually very little time for finding the right library or open source toolkit that … Continue reading →

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