I have a pretty good memory when it comes to juggling multiple tasks but I am (and have been for some time) trying to break my self of using my brain to store everything. One area a worklog benefits is when you want to look back over time and see what your were working on several months ago (this can be helpful for reviews). At any rate there are many tools to do similar things. At any rate I wrote a simple tool to try and help with this. Feel free to take it modify it or comment on the horrible code.
Some projects have production code that runs off of a git cloned repository. There may be a case in which you want to notify others when that clone pulls. It is a pretty easy feat with gits post-merge hook. The post-merge hook will run after a merge (think git pull). All you have to do it create a project/.git/hooks/post-merge shell script and chmod +x it. Next time you pull successfully that script will run.
I see Samuel Huckins just had a post about apachetop http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2008/12/top-for-apache-activity/ which I have been meaning to mention for a while, but being that there is a fresh post about it I will mention Mytop instead. Mytop is top for mysql. It can be used for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL. Its an easy install in debain with a quick aptitude install mytop. Here is some example output (sorry my mysql server isnt very busy atm).
I was recently asked how to change screens working directory. It took me a few minutes to realize the benefit of this as I typically have different screen sessions for different purposes. But after thinking about it for a few minutes I have been in situations where what I was doing in a screen session morphed and it would have been nice for new windows to be opened to a different working directory than where I started my session.
This is lifted from http://bashcurescancer.com/shell-function-which-webserver-does-that-site-run.html. Handy shell function you can put in your .bashrc. Quickly find out what server a host is running. what-http-server() { curl -s -I $(for h in "$@"; do printf "http://%s " "$h"; done) | awk -F': ' '/^Server:/ {print $2}'; } Now try what-http-server kernel.org google.com hotmail.com.
For those of you who are horrid at math like I am googles unit conversion is a great help. Want to know how many GB 1Mbps is in a month? Simple just ask google. Well I like to have the ability even when I am not online and I found units. Its in the debian repository and oh so easy to use. units -t '1Mbps' 'GB/month' 328.71798 units -t '1hour' 'seconds' 3600
I typically use /etc/cron.d to store all of my system crontabs. I recently ran into an issue that I had either not run into before, or fixed and paid no attention to. Files stored in /etc/cron.d/ or any /etc/cron.* directory need to adhear to the run-parts Debian cron script namespace which consists is (^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$) for the regex impared this does not include the dot character. If you have a file in /etc/cron.
As you by now well know I try to mostly live at the console (well multiple x consoles). Mutt is my mail client of choice. I’ve tried Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution, Sylpheed, and pine. For whatever reason I feel most comfortable with mutt. I also use IMAP for both my personal and work accounts. Mutt was originally designed to deal with local mail and while it does a very good job with IMAP I don’t like how it handles multiple accounts.
Rarely do I get emails that are worthy of even reading let alone sharing with others. This one however, is pretty funny, and seems to be fairly accurate.
Recently I had to move a website that gets a fair amount of traffic. I prepared for this by lowering the TTL on the domains associated several weeks in advance to 600 seconds. Originally my plan was to toss up a maintenance page on the old server, change the DNS, and figured that within a few hours max the vast majority of DNS servers would have the update being that TTL had been set at 600 seconds for several weeks and prior to that it was set at 48 hours. This was all planned for the middle of the night on a weekend (very slow traffic time). I was in for a rude awakening the next morning.