This is a personal account of my effort to clean up my web presence. My web pages of personal and semi-professional nature needed weeding, and I ended up moving from sporadically maintained multi-lingual blogs and manually edited HTML pages to a set of Google Sites. Generations of cruft are being superseded by a solution based on a weighted balance of contemporary ease of use, versatility and my limited available time.

Before joining MySQL AB in 2001, I had lived through a set of personal web pages that I had set up with PHP. My mental mode was one of combining some fun PHP coding, a bit of editing of pics, and manual uploading of HTML files with scp with emacs editing on the server, that I hosted at my then-employer Polycon Ab. Once at MySQL, I continued in the same mode, but from 2005 onwards started blogging on …

This is a simple matter with a simple solution that might help someone save time and confusion. Emacs wasn’t coloring my comments correctly so I went ahead and had it change them to red-italic. If you are having similar issues you can drop the following into your home directory’s .emacs file. Enjoy. Keep in mind that if you are using emacs in a terminal session as opposed to the X-server gui then you will not see the italics.


(global-font-lock-mode 1)
(custom-set-variables
'(gud-gdb-command-name "gdb --annotate=1")
'(large-file-warning-threshold nil))
(custom-set-faces
'(font-lock-comment-face ((((class color) (background light)) (:foreground "red" :slant italic)))))


Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to …

If you are a GUI-oriented person, you need not read this. But if you are like me, you make heavy use of the console. If you are managing many machines as well as your own Linux workstation, it’s VERY important to know where your console session is.

Too many times in the past I had wanted to bring down my workstation, and would type “shutdown” or “reboot” in the console window, only to find out to my horrors that the console was really a remote session to one of my web servers serving up hundreds of web sites.

Whoops!

Well, that prompted me into developing a solution where I can tell at a glance where I happened to be logged in. This way,  I wouldn’t be in danger of issuing dangerous commands on the wrong server. And if you are working for someone else, it also keeps you from being FIRED!

I use KDE to do my development and …