Just five gangs in Nigeria are responsible for most Craigslist buyer scams ...

Looking at the regular weekly backups, I saw a jump in size that was not accounted for by regular normal growth.

ls -ltrh /backupdirectory
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31G May 25 03:23 backup-2014-05-25.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31G Jun 1 03:22 backup-2014-06-01.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32G Jul 6 03:21 backup-2014-07-06.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41G Aug 3 03:25 backup-2014-08-03.dump
...

After upgrading my laptop from Kubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS, I noticed that the laptop runs hotter than usual.

Upon investigating further, I found that PackageKit was the process that was consuming lots of CPU and memory.

For example, here is a sample output from htop, showing packagekitd maxing out one core, and eating up almost a quarter of the laptop's RAM:

Sometimes when you are running Linux and have a weird bug, you wish you would know what the process is doing. For example, which files it is opening and such ...

The strace command is very useful.

Use case 1: Simple command as argument

However, its common use cases is when you have a single process running. Usually, you would run strace and your command as an argument, like so:

strace your_program 

Use case 2: Tracing a running command

On August 12th, I did a presentation on OpenWRT for the KW Linux Users Group.

The slides from this presentation are attached below, and the audio for the presentation is available as a podcast.

Hope it is of use for some.

In that presentation I mentioned wrtbwmon, the bandwidth monitoring script for OpenWRT. You can download my modified version from here.

Years ago, I wrote about the various tools available for monitoring bandwidth usage for individual devices in a home network.

Now, I have a definitive solution that will help with the questions: wrtbwmon. This is based on several variants that are floating around the internet, each a fork of another.

Here is an excerpt from the README file:

Description
===========

Here is another way to extract money from gullible people ... casting spells to get back an unfaithful husband! What stupidity ...

The best spell caster

Am Alicia Campbell from California.I want to use this medium to tell you all about my spell caster.

This article describes why I decided to move off Rogers for the internet, what options are currently available in the local Kitchener/Waterloo area, and the details on how to switch from Rogers.

Rogers: Good and Bad

Rogers internet service is quite good from a functionality point of view. Their technical support is also acceptable, though sometimes you need to have more than one call to get an issue resolved.

Some good points on the state of affairs in the web development world today ...

In the old days there was a respected profession of application programming. There was a minority of elite system programmers who built infrastructure and tools that empowered the majority of application programmers. Our goal was to allow regular people without extensive training to easily and quickly build useful software. This was the spirit of languages like COBOL, Visual Basic, and HyperCard. Elegant tools for a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web.