I use logrotate postrotate trigger to produce weekly stats from websites in Apache2.

Occasionally the postrotate script appears to run on days when no log rotation has taken place. Is it just me? (I removed an unneeded apache.dpkg-dist file from logrotate.d (but assume this is handled sensibly). I guess I should check in the script to see if the date on the logfile is sensible before doing the report, but it just seems "wrong" to me that it seems to trigger apparently randomly and I'm sure there is some sort of reason.

Seems the expected MYSQL 5 upgrade didn't materialize on the Windows box yet.

I'd mistyped a query clause as "NOT emailaddress IS NULL" when I meant "emailaddress IS NOT NULL" - MySQL5 does what I wanted inspite of the typo, MySQL4 does something else.

Amazing how hard it is to spot a clause like that even in a query of only ~200 characters.

I wanted to use a joystick with online games for my little boy as he struggles with the keyboard (occasional right click with the mouse in Flash is not so clever either).

After a lot of experimenting I built QJoyPad from source (there is a wnpp already). It expects to use the system tray, and defaults with "--notray" to displaying its icon (which is missing so you get junk). However it does work, and when I created a GNOME menu item for "qjoypad --notray" it even displayed a sensible picture, I'm guessing it works better under KDE.

I'm sure there must be a better/simpler way to get a Joystick to emulate arrow keys and space bar?

PS: Failed to pull the C64 games out of the EXE file that came with the Joystick for use under VICE, dare say if I setup wine, but I'm not really into the retro gaming scene, mostly it just reminds me how bad things were (even if it was what passed for fun at the time).

This takes the biscuit, opening a help file fails unless you tell it to not ask before opening. I can guess why this works but really....

http://helpmetocode.blogspot.com/2011/05/navigation-to-webpage-was-canceled-chm.html

This can have many causes.

In my case, printing from Debian Testing (Wheezy) it was due to selecting "draft" quality when the HP-PSC-1410 allegedly doesn't support it.

Found relevant bug reports by searching for the detailed error output in /var/log/cups/error.log, Launchpad suggests HP are probably aware of the issue.

With the recent update to our exchange, and the option of LLU to Thus at another exchange for work, I wanted to know what the speed impact would be of switching a slow line to ADSL2+.

The sales guy I spoke to said he didn't think it would help much, and that the expected speed on our line would be a fraction of the current attained speed(?!), and was I interested in "less contention?" (Not really).

Freeola have a graph of unknown origin here:

http://freeola.com/adsl2-21cn-rollout/

Which says basically if your ADSL performance is lousy it'll still be lousy, which is what I expected the answer to be.

To get the matchit.vim plugin working in Debian Squeeze which allows "%" to hope between HTML tags, C preprocessor conditionals, and all sorts of others, you also need to enable filetype plugins (echo "filetype plugin on" >>~/.vimrc or something similar if your vimrc is complicated), then then copy the macro file into your ".vim" plugin directory, (mkdir -p ~/.vim/plugins ; cp /usr/share/vim/addons/plugin/matchit.vim ~/.vim/plugin/matchit.vim).

Something I was vaguely aware vim did, but had never bothered sorting on this account till today. Now my "5" key (e.g. Shift+5) will become as abused during editing as the TAB key is when typing shell commands in the vague hope it will "do the right thing" when my brain is unsure what to type next.

Spotted this after I put TinyMCE into a textarea. A quick search gave a lot of possible causes none of which were applicable.

However the problem was simply that PHP html_entity_decode function was being called on the string that was posted to the server and nothing to do with browser, or TinyMCE, other than TinyMCE is keen on inserting   into table cells. Removing the PHP call removed the Unicode characters.

KDE Remote Desktop Argh moment.....

I wanted to send "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" to the remote server. This is going to be something a lot of folk want to do.

Basically the answer I found by searching around is disable the current function of Ctrl-Alt-Delete in KDE (which is enabled by default for logout).

Just combine comments 4 and 5 in this link....
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/452949-krdc-not-capturing-keys-using-rdp.html

I note that my prefered VNC client has a menu option to click to send this particular key combination.

Noted in passing that printing images from web pages was lousy.

CUPS had decided works HL5170DN should use a resolution of 300x300dpi.

Printer can handle a lot more than the offered resolutions, so I picked the maximum and the accurate half toning algorithm and now Firefox on my Debian box prints better than Firefox on Windows XP, rather than worse thus restoring the natural order of things.

Note I try to use printers only when looking at problems with printing so this is probably old news to everyone else.