A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Jaunty is out of the door and first traces of Mark Shuttleworth's promise to bring a beautiful OS that can rival Mac OSX are surfacing. I must be honest, when I upgraded I installed ubuntu-restricted-extras with Microsoft Fonts, but I never did enable them. I ended up using default fonts. These fonts are easy to read and really do look cool. Themes that are shipped with 9.04 are also great. The one I ended up using is called "Dust Sand". It looks a little like OSX theme but it is different. I prefer it over the default "Human" theme. Slight opacity is also a nice touch that comes with this theme. I really dig it..

There were a lot of changes to my podcast collection since the last time I talked about them. I recently found Knightwise (KWTV) and Category5 TV. These two podcasts concentrate on users and provide really good tips and resources for people learning Ubuntu and other software. Knightwise has a really good attitude and blogs from Belgium. You can also find him on Facebook. Category5 TV is another great resource. These guys are in Canada and I found them when they were featured on Ubuntu UK podcast. What I don't like about Category 5 tv is that you need to register on the website and go through a few clicks to get through RSS feeds. Once you do though, you have a lot of choices to pick from. For the people with a lot of time, I suggest to subscribe to a full feed. For the short attention span people like me, I am going for the meat, that's what it is called. However, if you subscribe in iTunes, there is no feed h.264 feed for iPhone yet. So you should settle for Miro for now. I pr...

Well it happened. I finally wiped my Ubuntu installation after three full years of work. Let's take it back to the end of March for a minute. Beta of Ubuntu 9.4 was just released and what do I do, upgrade my Ubuntu 8.10. I've had problems before with my upgrades of Beta Ubuntu but never like this. What happened this time is that when everything completed successfully, I tried to boot into Ubuntu and at logon screen I realized that my mouse and keyboard were not working. I could see a cursor but I could not move it. I rebooted into recovery mode and tried to fix it with my limited Linux command knowledge. It didn't work. Then from that time and on until yesterday I would boot into root shell with networking and run "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade", hoping it will fix my broken system. It didn't work. That's why for the past month and a half I had to use XP exclusively :(. I really missed Ubuntu. So yesterday I spent the whole ...

With all this conficker mumbo jumbo, my security admins restricted blogger.com access. Well, guess what, with it, they took my rights to blog from work. So just to confirm this I yahoo’ed my blog name “Artem’s blog” and found my blog and another Artem’s blog. I had to rub my eyes because topics covered are almost identical to what I would cover, Ubuntu, apps, etc. Turns out there’s another Artem in Ukraine, (I am in the U.S.) that blogs about similar topics. This is pretty funny and I’m kind of proud to have a namesake with similar interests. So everyone, please check out his blog and subscribe. You can also find him on Facebook at Artem Kudymovsky. Here’s a link to his blog. p.s. I just looked through his articles, there’s a post where he says he changed the title of the blog from Artem and Darya;s blog to Artem’s blog, that explains why I didn’t find it before.

Over the past few years I've been shifting away from cable television towards internet. I have about 25 HBO, Starz and Encore channels, yet I find myself watching more and more tv on the net. A big part of my internet tv addiction is podcasts. My 16 gb iPhone holds 6gb of video and audio podcasts at any given time. Podcasts have a great advantage over reading blogs because I can listen and watch them on the go. I don't need an internet connection, I can listen to podcasts while I walk, drive and work. Lately, I've been noticing a trend between most popular podcasts. Shows like Hak5, commandn, dltv, etc. are including a lot of extra chatter in their episodes. For example, a bunch of shows have bloopers at the end. Yes, they're funny and entertaining but a lot of people watch these shows for some specific reason and it's not bloopers! Let's take Hak5 for example. I love their show, I learn a lot, however, once they moved to Revi...

Have you ever had a problem deleting a maintenance task in SQL 2005? Today I am going to show you how to delete a maintenance task due to the following error: This error is elusive, there is no problem with connection! Most likely you cannot delete the task because there are records of it's execution stored in two tables that I will introduce shortly. First let me show you a table where maintenance tasks are listed. This is the same as viewing the maintenance tasks in Management Studio except doing it with T-SQL. SELECT * FROM MSDB . DBO . SYSDTSPACKAGES90 Now that you know ID name of the maintenance task you're trying to delete we can review which tables hold the deletion. If you try to delete with T-SQL you will get the following error: It means there are records in MSDB.DBO.SYSMAINTPLAN_LOG table that are preventing you from deleting the maintenance task. In my case, there are four records in the table that belong to this maintenance task. Now that you run a delete statem...

I am constantly searching for best practices and security checklists on the internet for Microsoft SQL Server. One day I came across a gem, a godsend of sort; Department Of Defense Generic Database Security Checklist. It applies to SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and any other RDMS. If this checklist is good enough for DOD, I would think it would apply to my databases as well, no? This security checklist along with other security checklists ranging from Active Directory, Network Security, Apache Server, Linux, VMWare and even Mainframe can be found at http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/stig/index.html . You may also subscribe to their mailing list and receive notifications when a new checklist is available http://iase.disa.mil/help/mailing-list.html .   -- Artem

I just found this feature in Blogger that definitely beats Ping.FM. Just to summarize, ping.fm lets me publish my posts written in an email. Limitations are that I cannot differentiate between micro-blogs and actual blog entries. So all my blogs would go to Twitter or Facebook and get cut off or small text entries would get published on my blog instead of Twitter. That creates a lot of mess. With this email feature on Blogger, I know exactly where it is going and I can control whether to publish right away or save as draft until later. To shorten the steps I created a contact in my Google Contacts called Blogger with email address created in Blogger, so if I have something to post, I can take a picture with iPhone let's say, embed it in an email send it to blogger contact and later publish the post. Easy and great, enjoy! -- Artem

This is in no way an advertisement for Microsoft Services but I must admit this week was a great learning experience for me. It made me realize that I know less about SQL Server than I thought and made me doubt myself a bit :(. SQL Representative showed me a few tools like syscompare, sqlnexus and PAL. These tools helped me tie all the information I needed for performance tuning together and packaged this information in a beautiful report that you may submit to managers. If your shop has a contract with Microsoft and your SQL Servers do not perform as well as they should be, definitely seek these services. Download SQLRAP Datasheet here . -- Artem

Sometimes you come across a killer app and you say where was this when I needed something like this? Well, at the end of last year, our Exchange guys made us copy our email manually to a network drive so that they could archive the emails. The task took me hours to backup my email. Today on Tekzilla, I hear about MailStore Home edition. It takes much less time to backup and archive email and you can burn it to CD/DVD media as well. It can archive mail from Exchange, Outlook/Express, Gmail, Hotmail, IMAP, POP3, etc. I am definitely impressed and highly recommend this tool, however, I didn't test restoring from DVD yet so use at your own risk. I recommend archiving email but not deleting it from source. Once you confirm it can be recovered, purge away! This is great if you want your email locally, off of those pesky Google servers. Enjoy! -- Artem

in Firefox address bar type "about:config" no quotes. Hit Enter. Right-click and click new, pick Boolean. Type "config.trim_on_minimize" no quotes, hit OK. Set the value to Boolean and now when you minimize, RAM will be released to the OS.