Speeding up Liferea

August 21st, 2009

Liferea was taking a couple of minutes to open for me, so I thought I’d look for a solution to that. I have >100 feeds, but I’m not about to cut the amount down (not addicted, honest).

Liferea stores a lot of information in an sqlite database. If sqlite databases aren’t vacuumed every now and then, they bloat and slow down.

Most people know about speeding up Firefox by vacuuming the sqlite databases every now and then. Well, the same can be done with Liferea.
Close Liferea and paste the following in a bash terminal.

sqlite3 ~/.liferea_1.4/liferea.db "VACUUM;"

Open up Liferea and you should notice it load much faster. Unless of course, it was fast to begin with.

I am not THAT Anthony Batchelor

July 27th, 2009

I am not THAT Anthony Batchelor. ok.

Handy Hints: Emptying log files

April 16th, 2009

When emptying log files, don’t just rm log_file.log as the disk space won’t be freed until the application that is logging is restarted.

It is better to use > log_file.log as that will allow the file system to free the space that is used by the open file.

Handy Hints: What is using up my disk space?

April 6th, 2009

Here are some commands I use to find out what is eating all of my disk space on a remote server:

df -h Shows how much disk space is available. The -h means that you get G for gigabytes, M for megabytes etc.

sudo du -k / | sort -n Shows which directories are biggest (starting at the root directory /). The biggest ones will be printed at the bottom of the list. The sudo allows du to check directories that your user doesn’t have permission for. To check your home directory only use du -k ~ | sort -n

du -ka | sort -n Shows the size of all the files and sub-directories of the current directory. The biggest ones at the bottom of the list.

watch 'du -ka | sort -nr' Shows the size of all the files and sub-directories of the current directory. The biggest ones at the top of the list. The list is updated every 2 seconds. This is useful for watching disk usage in a particular directory, such as an upload directory on a web server.

The Shadow Factory

March 30th, 2009

The Shadow Factory is now the name of the band. We nearly have a website, it can be found at http://theshadowfactory.net. New songs will be posted there, and the ones on this site will be migrated over.

DEMO: To Live With Rich People

March 28th, 2009

A slower heavier one again. Like the last one, there wasn’t too much to do in the way of mixing. There are some “bass farts” where it seems like the bass saturated the mic when we recorded it. (If you listen closely, there are some in 2001 too).

To Live With Rich People –

I think I’d like to add a deep swirling bass synth in there sometime.

DEMO: 100 Years

March 27th, 2009

Another day another demo.

100 Years –

There’s not so much going on in the mix for this one. Quite simple and a bit short, but you get the idea.

DEMO: The Runner

March 26th, 2009

Here is the third demo song that we have waiting for a singer…

The Runner –

Maybe the panning is too wide on the solo. Maybe I should listen to these through a stereo instead of just my headphones ;)

Enjoy!

Demo songs

March 20th, 2009

I have a band with Adam and Fraze in Dundee. We don’t have a name yet, or a singer…
If you want to sing with us, let us know.

Here are a couple of demo songs:

They were recorded in different rehearsal rooms at Stage 2000 using a SoundBlaster Live! (I think), then mixed using Ardour. I will upload more when I get them mixed.

git-svn new branches don’t show up…

February 23rd, 2009

Working with git-svn I noticed that new branched didn’t show up when I did the usual git svn rebase to get the remote changes. After a bit of searching and not coming up with much, I worked out that git svn fetch pulls in the changes for the whole module, not just the current branch. After running that command, the new branches, tags etc. show up.

Hope this helps someone…