Mind Circus

What with my new job, I’m currently looking for a place to rent in Cambridge. As I fully intend to cycle to work, it’s quite important that I know how long it’ll take me to cycle from where I live to where I’ll be working in the city.

After much searching and sighing I discovered that ViaMichelin allows you to choose “By bike” routes, as well as “On foot” routes. Very cool, and certainly much more forward-thinking than the AA and RAC journey planners.

Maybe Google, with their Green stance, should add this feature to Google Maps too?

A few of our websites receive high traffic and, as a result, the apache log files grow very large, very quickly. By default, Plesk rotates logs every 2,025,139 KB (2GB). This is way too large for a virtualised server such as ours, which provides 10GB of precious disk space.

To combat this, I set up a regular log rotation in Plesk like so:

• Log in to Plesk.
• Domains > yourdomain.com > Log Manager > Log Rotation
• Choose the log rotation condition.

I choose monthly, but if you’re rapidly running out of disk space you might want to set a shorter time span, or set a low size limit. Don’t forget to enable compression to save on disk space!

I haven’t posted, or replied to any blog-related emails, for a few weeks now. There’s a few reasons for that, but the main one has been that, after months of interviews, my job search intensified and I had to drop something to retain my sanity.

Crazy amounts of interviews, and six job offers later, I finally have things pretty much sorted now; and I hope to get back to posting, and replying to all my emails, some time this week.

I’ll be sure to write down some of my thoughts on job searching and the whole “recruitment” game in the future - I’ve certainly learned a lot!

To install smartctl (and smartd with it):

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Why would you want SmartMonTools?

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks. It is derived from the smartsuite package, and includes support for ATA/ATAPI-5 disks. It should run on any modern Linux system.

Ubuntu smartmontools page

Very handy; especially as the OS drive just died in the RAID5 box I’m now taking extra precautions!