https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.colinrrobinson.draughts

I’ve been hovering around 95%-100% for a few weeks now. Being at 95% is fine, but 100% can cause all kinds of problems. I was testing a form on my local web server and couldn’t do file uploads because “the disk was full.” I was writing code and my editor couldn’t save the file because “the disk was full.” Its frustrating because you have hundreds of free gigs where you’re saving the file, but because rootfs is full, you can’t!

I’ll start by showing you the output of df

$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs          10209220  9625988     71164 100% /
/dev             4055116        0   4055116   0% /dev
run              4058036      252   4057784   1% /run
/dev/sda3       10209220  9625988     71164 100% /
shm              4058036      796   4057240   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            4058036     3160   4054876   1% /tmp
/dev/sda1          99590    34166     60205  37% /boot
/dev/sda4      449789792 23726068 403549860   6% /home

Not good, but its my own fault. I only allocated about 10g to /dev/sda3 when I setup the OS. I should I have predicted that I would need more.

The real solutions is to boot to a livecd and resize /dev/sda3. This can take a long time, break your grub install, and cause other headache inducing effects.

Here are some tricks I’ve picked up to get your rootfs down from the dreaded 100% to something you can actually work with.

Clear your pacman cache

When pacman downloads a package for you, it keeps a version in its cache (usually /var/cache/pacman/pkg). This is great if you ever want to downgrade a package, but its not necessary and it takes up space.

Clearing your cache is as easy as:

$ pacman -Sc

There are more complicated scripts on the net which do things like manage how mange revisions back to save packages for, but this is fine for now. Lets take a look at the difference that made

$ sudo df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs          10209220  9303916    393236  96% /

Down to 96% already! This is all the difference in the world, now I can actually save this document I’m writing. Lets see how much further we can get this down.

Remove software you don’t use

Now might be a good time to remove unused software. I normally run a pretty tight system anyways, but I still found room to improve.

For example, I use Xfce as my Desktop Environment but I use Compiz as my Window Manager rather than xfwm4. This let me remove xfwm4 and xfwm4-themes and shed a few MBs. I originally installed both VirtualBox and VMware but I only use the latter. See you later Vbox!

Kill the orphans!

Or rather… remove orphaned packages. First do a pacman query -Q for all dependencies -d that are unrequired -t.

$ pacman -Qdt

If you have unrequired dependencies, why not remove them. This simple command with recursively remove all unrequired dependencies.

pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

Where are we at?

$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs          10209220  9090832    606320  94% /

BleachBit

Similar to CCleaner on Windows, BleachBit clears out temp files, system caches, and other junk. You can find it here in the AUR (There is also a CLI version).

Figure out what’s taking up space

Still not satisfied with the size of rootfs? Get down into the file structure and find out what’s taking up space. The arch wiki has a list of disk usage display programs. I’m personally a fan of ncdu (home page) (package details).

Have a suggestion of your own? Still having problems with your file system? Make a comment!

Most code review software is designed for pre-commit comments. A reviewer looks at the code before it gets added to the version control system and then approves or denies the changes. This is obviously vital for large projects involving multiple developers, but what about small shops where people work mostly independently and on different projects? What if you don’t have the resources or the need for an extensive review process and would rather casually browse your colleges code to add constructive criticisms or notify them of best practices which they might be unaware of?

To me the ideal tool will interface with subversion and allow reversion specific and line specific post-commit comments. I want to be able to browse our source code whenever I feel like it, write a comment about a specific line, and then have the author notified of the comment.

The PeerReviewPlugin for Trac looked like a winner, until I read this review

PeerReview Screenshot

In my company, we looked briefly at the “peerreview” plugin on TracHacks, and were very disappointed with it.

It seems obvious to us that a code-review plugin would naturally default to assuming that an entire Subversion commit should be code-reviewed. Unfortunately, the peerreview plugin forces you to manually identify the lines of code that you want to review. It doesn’t even give you hints in which lines might have changed with a particular commit, which means that if you don’t enter the line that changed carefully, you could end up re-reviewing the same lines of code over and over.

It still looks promising, and I don’t expect to find an out-of-the-box solution that is perfect for my specific situation. Right now ReviewBoard is looking up and I could always modify the PeerReview plugin to suit my needs (hooray, opensource). Please, leave a comment about how you and your company do code review. What code review systems have you worked with? What other solutions might I have passed over?

Its worth pointing out that I made this other developers. If you’re looking for a plug and play solution, this isn’t quite it. But if you’re a developer with the same problem, I’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

How to use:

First make sure you’re not using the default query type (?post=24&blah=foo) style of permalinks.

Suppose you have two custom post types: “book” and “author”. For posts of type “book”, you have: book1. For posts of type “author”, you have: author1.

1. Go to Settings > Custom Permalinks
2. Enter “library” for your slug
3. Drag the “author” block from “Custom Post Types” to “Permalink Structure”
4. Drag the “book” block from “Custom Post Types” to “Permalink Structure”
5. Click “Add New Permalink”

Now you can go to example.com/library/author1/ to read the post named author1 (assuming that the slug for the post author1 is in fact “author1″). Suppose that book1 is a child post of author1 with a similar slug, go to example.com/library/author1/book1/ to read about book1.

You’re probably wondering how you make book1 a child post of author1. In WordPress, you can’t set the parent of a post to one of a different type through the usual methods. So how to do it? That’s up to you to figure out. You can set it manually in the database, but that’s boring. I’d personally make a meta box for the custom post type that serves as the child post (in this case, “book”). In the meta box, create a drop down menu of posts of the type of the parent (in this case, “author”). Reference the functions add_meta_box and wp_dropdown_pages for help doing this.

You might wonder why I don’t do this automatically. I also don’t automatically change the permalink for the posts. Calling the function get_permalink on book1 will just give you example.com/book1/ not our custom permalink. The reason is that you can create as many structures as you like. Use the slug “american” and create a link like example.com/american/MarkTwain/. Whatever you like.

Comment if you need help or have suggestions.

The steps break down like this:

1) Download the latest version from here.

2) Extract and move to /opt/

# tar xvfz xampp-linux-*.tar.gz -C /opt

3) Set passwords for MySQL and stuff

# sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security

4) Only listen for local connections
- Open /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf
- Change “Listen 80″ to “Listen 127.0.0.1:80″

You could stop here, but I’m going to make a virtual host (with SSL).

5) I’m going to leave my document root as /opt/lampp/htdocs/ but I’m going to keep all my vhosts in /var/www/
- Create /var/www/
- Let make a wordpress site, create /var/www/wordpress/htdocs/ and /var/www/wordpress/logs/

6) Download the WordPress files
- Move to /var/www/wordpress/htdocs/
- Checkout the trunk from SVN

# svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .

I like using svn, because I can quickly do “svn up .” and update my wordpress install. More info here.

7) Create some blank log files

# touch /var/www/wordpress/logs/error_log
# touch /var/www/wordpress/logs/access_log

8) Make your vhost definition

# sudo nano /opt/lampp/etc/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

- Change “Listen 443″ to “Listen 127.0.0.1:443″
- Add “NameVirtualHost *:443″ right below it

- And something like this to the bottom of the file:

<VirtualHost *:443>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/wordpress/htdocs"
ServerName wp.localhost:443
ServerAdmin you@wp.localhost
ErrorLog /var/www/wordpress/logs/error_log
TransferLog /var/www/wordpress/logs/access_log

SSLEngine on
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
SSLCertificateFile /opt/lampp/etc/ssl.crt/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /opt/lampp/etc/ssl.key/server.key
<FilesMatch ".(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
    SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</FilesMatch>
<Directory "/opt/lampp/cgi-bin">
    SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

9) What’s this wp.localhost nonsense all about?
We need to add a hosts definition

# sudo nano /etc/hosts

Mine looks like this

#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#      
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost arch-pc
::1             localhost.localdomain   localhost
127.0.0.1       wp.localhost

# End of file

Obviously you can just keep adding lines for whatever you want. Learn more here.

10) Start up xampp

# sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

11) Go to https://wp.localhost/ and check out your site!

You might notice that if you try and browse directories with index files (idex.html, index.php, ect) then you get an error, not the familiar directory listing. If you want to change that, open up httpd.conf and add

<Directory "/var/www">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Learn more here.

12) Post your troubles in the comments and I’ll do my best to help

Here is the LESS website. The proposed method of using LESS is to write a style.less file and then include less.js which uses javascript to render your stylesheet dynamically. I really don’t like the idea of having to load an extra JS file and then generating the stylesheet on the fly. Talk about unnecessary overhead. But the LESS website loads quickly, even on my phone, so I guess the results speak for themselves. Visiting the page with javascript turned off was disappointing, but not unexpected. Thankfully they also made a command line tool that you can use to compile a .less file into a .css one. Use the compiler for production releases and the JS framework for prototyping. I’ll definitely being using LESS in my next project.

You would write something like this in LESS

@color: #4D926F;
#header {
    color: @color;
}
h2 {
    color: @color;
}

and then get back this

#header {
    color: #4D926F;
}
h2 {
    color: #4D926F;
}

You can even write functions! This code

.rounded-corners (@radius: 5px) {
  border-radius: @radius;
  -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
  -moz-border-radius: @radius;
}

#header {
  .rounded-corners;
}
#footer {
  .rounded-corners(10px);
}

would be compiled into

#header {
  border-radius: 5px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
}
#footer {
  border-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
}

This is how CSS should have worked from the start.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

then went to the end of the file (ctrl+w+v) and added the line

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

All good. Hopefully this helps someone.

2) Extract it

tar xzf eclipse-SDK-3.7-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Or just be lazy and Right Click > Extract Here

3) Move to /opt/ folder

mv eclipse /opt/
sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo chmod -R +r eclipse

4) Create an eclipse executable in your path

sudo touch /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo nano /usr/bin/eclipse

copy this into nano

#!/bin/sh
#export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/mozilla/"
export ECLIPSE_HOME="/opt/eclipse"

$ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

save the file (^O = Ctrl+o) and exit nano (^X = Ctrl+x)

5) Create a gnome menu item

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

copy this into nano

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Eclipse IDE
Exec=eclipse
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

save and exit nano

6) Launch Eclipse for the first time

/opt/eclipse/eclipse -clean &

I think its fair to assume that when the University stops supporting Windows XP we can stop worrying about it. See the thing is… wait for it… IE7 can’t run on Windows 7! Internet Explorer 7 makes up 7% of web browsers usage. Come August 1st 2011 Google will officially stop supporting IE7. The death of IE7 might come sooner then you think!