Grep is a very useful tool in the Unix world. If you don't know it already, it is very much like a search tool. It can search for a text or pattern in one or multiple input files or data coming from (unix) pipes.

Most of the Linux distributions out there offer three ways to use Grep from the command-line (aka terminal): grep, fgrep, and egrep.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

I try to keep my VPS (Virtual Private Server) as light as possible. That's also why I don't have PHPMyAdmin installed and wouldn't want to install it. The only way of accessing MySQL and executing commands is through the mysql CLI (Command Line Interface), but I don't always remember the exact queries to create a user, database or to grant privileges.

I recently decided to look for some GUI (Graphical User Interface) tools to tweak and administrate a MySQL server. I found the quite well-known MySQL Administrator (and Query Browser).

MySQL Administrator

The problem is that by default (and for obvious security reasons), my MySQL server is not accessible from the internet (only accessible by localhost itself). This is where SSH tunnels enter the action!
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

If you are a developer or simply a command-line geek/fan, there are times where you type some documents using the command line, like for README's or for documentation. It is also important to have a very good writing in English if you wish to distribute those files.

Hunspell can help you with spell-checking. It is based on MySpell and contains a nice terminal interface to spell-check your files.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

Last month, I decided to drop Evolution and start using claws-mail. Now that I've been using it everyday, I see that it fits very well my needs as a mail user agent.

I will list the features I like in Claws-Mail, instead of writing a huge boring paragraph:

• Tree view (or Thread view) for emails that are related (replies for examples)
• GPG support through plugins (MIME or inline, and with SHA512 support too!)
• Very lightweight (almost all of the time less than 10mb ram used)
• Can display HTML emails in plain text (by stripping the html) and it works really good
• Rules/Actions can be added for a lot of events
• Bogofilter spam filter support through plugins
• HTML viewer, just in case! (added through plugin)
• Choose which headers to show when reading email (see screenshot: I chose to show the SPF header)
• "Next" button to quickly read the next unread email
• Extract email addresses from received mails and add them into your addressbook.
• Different Layouts, even one for small screens
• Many other features...

Claws-Mail is well worth the try, there are lots of nice features like those. And I'm quite happy to have switched to it.

You can either find claws-mail through your package management system (synaptic, yum, rpm, ...) or through the official website.
I also packaged it for Ubuntu/Debian without the maemo support for LPIA architecture (this was for my HP mini 1000).

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

scanerrlog offers the possibility to generate a summary or report about Apache errors and sort them depending on how frequent they are.

To install it (for Ubuntu users):

sudo apt-get install scanerrlog

or use Synaptic and search for scanerrlog.

It's written in Python, and it is very easy to use it. (type 'man scanerrlog' in a terminal to see the manual page)

I tested it with Apache2 log files using the following command:

scanerrlog -f text -o /tmp/log.txt /var/log/apache2/*.log

• -f : format (text, pdf, html, xml)
• -o : output file
• args : log files

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

My wife and I recently went to Fort Wayne, Indiana and we enjoyed it a lot. Amongst all the things we've visited, we went to a flower conservatory and they had butterflies there. A couple of them really seemed to like the Ubuntu logo on my T-shirt. ...And everyone knows that nature knows what's best!

See for yourself.

Full size image.

The two pictures are also licensed under CC BY-SA.

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

I just feel like I want to share some of my favorite songs from Jamendo (see previous post).

They are free to download and use (if you follow the creative commons licenses). I've put different genres so that you one that pleases you.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

Evolution is a complete solution for mail, calendar, tasks, contact lists, but it uses a lot of resources, and I'm not using all of those features.
Last week I was looking at multiple mail clients (aka mail user agents). I was really interested in Claws-Mail, a fork of Sylpheed. It is very lightweight, and has a bunch of features, not as much as evolution, but it can compete pretty well.
Memory-wise, I switched from 30mb used by Evolution to ~14mb (maximum, but usually ~10mb) used by Claws-mail.

The only problem I was facing is setting it up with Gmail. Here's how I figured it out after a couple days.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.