Daily Cup of Tech

Here’s a nifty Gmail tip:
There’s always little tips and tricks to gmail and I don’t know of a single person that knows them all. I may have accidentally found another feature (unless someone else found it first). Let’s say you have 20 emails in a row that you want to delete. Clicking 20 times before you can delete them is annoying. Click the first one. Hold shift and click the last one. All the emails between the first and the last ones you just clicked will be selected for you.

A URL Trick:
Do you ever get tired of typing the “http://www.” and “.com” and wish there were an easier way? There is and it works in Firefox, IE, and Opera (and very likely more). Type the name of the website. For Daily Cup Of Tech, it would be “dailycupoftech” and leave off the other stuff. Hold Control and hit enter. The extra gets filled in for you. Depending on the browser you’re using, Shift+Enter and Ctl+Shift+Enter take you to .net and .org domains (respectively). So stop typing those extra 15 keystrokes. Even if you’re a fast typist like me (100+ wpm sometimes), it still saves you a lot of time.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/31/increase-your-gmail-productivity-and-url-tricks/trackback/

FileHamster - A Personal Revision Control Solution for Content Creators:

FileHamster is a version tracking application focused on meeting the needs of content creators. FileHamster provides real-time backup and archiving of your files while you work. It enables you to monitor specific files on your hard drive and automatically create incremental backups whenever those files are modified. It also enables you to store notes about the changes that have been made, allowing you to quickly locate a specific revision or provide a detailed account of the work you’ve done on a project.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/30/file-hamster/trackback/

10 Reasons You Aren’t Rich:

The reason why you aren’t a millionaire (or on your way to becoming one) is really quite simple. You probably assume it’s because you aren’t earning enough money, but the truth is that for most people, whether or not you become a millionaire has very little to do with the amount of money you make. It’s the way that you treat money in your daily life.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/30/10-reasons-why-you-arent-rich/trackback/

DCoT’s favorite free…uh…NAS, FreeNAS, has released a new beta version - 0.684b. Here is what the website has to say about it:

Notes:

Here is the 0.684b.Lot’s of changes: Disk encryptions, iSCSI-target, swap, etc.. (check the change log for all details).

Important notice: The ‘lnc’ network card driver is replaced by ‘le’ driver. If you are using ‘lnc’ as interface LAN, plug a keyboard/monitor on your screen before upgrading FreeNAS.

LDAP doesn’t works: If you known how to configure LDAP client for authenticate all services, your help is welcome

MD5 Checksum:
FreeNAS-0.684b.iso = be63bd55c36201e0e73425ffcc05659d
FreeNAS-generic-pc-0.684b.img = 192475269c0ca6ef84bcfa6a8103e154

Changes:
Majors changes:
- Add disk encryption with geli
- Add iSCSI-Target: Permit to create specials files that simulate iSCSI target disk.
- Add swap feature: Permit to create a file on a mount point for memory swap purpose
- Add powerd/cpufreq system power control utility
- NTFS: Replace ntfs FreeBSD module with ntfs-3g: read/write support for NTFS
- Added growfs tools (usable from the CLI only)
- Add EXT2 filesystem creation support
- Add option for upgrading FreeNAS from CDROM (this can be used as recovery mode too).
- Multilanguage: Update languages files and add Japanese (Thanks to Hiroyuki Seino) and Russian (Thanks Ahmetov Shamil)
- Force only one UFS type: EFI GPT Partition with Softupdates, and permit to select percent of free disk space to kept (between 8 and 1)

Minors changes:
- RSYNC: Permit to configure multiple RSYNC local/client
- RSYNC: Add description attribute to RSYNC tasks
- SSH: Permit to enable SSH TCP forwarding (SSH tunneling)
- NFS: Permit to add more than one networks for NFS
- iSCSI: Upgrade iSCSI initiator to 2.0.1
- FTP: Add ‘Resume’ mode. Fix bug in enabling ‘FXP’ and ‘NAT mode’.
- FTP: Add ‘connected users list’ information page
- Samba: Try to improve samba performance by adding ‘large readwrite = no’ in smb.conf
(see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_Troubleshooting)
- Samba: Add dos charset CP866 (Russian)
- Little index page improvement : % used of TOTAL size display. Paul Wheels patch
- Permit to configure the system time: Paul Wheels patch
- Add hardware sensors information page
- Add syslog message for RSYNC local/remote synchronization
- Geom mirror: Change default algorithm to round robin
(http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html)
- Now it is possible to store the configuration on floppy disk and USB stick when booting FreeNAS from CD.
- Permit to select if a user is in the administrator group (wheel) or not
- Add WebGUI page (System/Advanced/Startup) to add/edit/delete commands executed pre or post system initialization (booting).

Bug fixs:
- Fix UPnP WebGUI bug
- Fix bug in user & groups WebGUI.
- FTP: Fixed: Deletion of files uploaded and owned by user was not able.
- FTP: Fixed PAM error (using MS AD account for example)
- FTP: Disable root login by default. Can be enabled via WebGUI.
- Fix DHCP problem
- Try to prevent “acd0: FAILURE READ_BIG ERROR” during install from CDROM (thanks to fortinde@isers.sourceforge.net)
- Modify FreeNAS make.sh build script for supporting AMD64 FreeBSD now…

Underlying changes:
- Use the FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (production) for FreeNAS base
- Upgrade twa kernel driver (e.g. 3ware 9650SE Series Raid S-ATA II PCIe)
- Try to improve performance on VM machine: http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/vmware.html
Replace ethernet ‘lnc’ drivers with ‘le’ driver (WARNING: NEED CONFIGURATION CHANGE AFTER UPGRADE)
Reduce Kernel’s timer frequency to 100HZ
- Samba: Upgrade Samba to 3.0.24
- Remove the tools ‘beep’
- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.1
- Upgrade ushare to 0.9.10 (should now support xbox)

Known bug in the 0.684b:
- Using iSCSI-target can cause problem for stopping/restarting FreeNAS
- French character not correclty displayed
- When pressing Ctrl+halt+del key, the rc.shutdown script generate an error

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/30/freenas-beta-0684b-released/trackback/

Just a quick reminder that you have until the end of Saturday to get your blog submitted for the tech blog of the week to be eligible for the first tech blog award.  I’ve only gotten a few submissions so far so the chances of your blog being featured are quite good.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/30/reminder-tech-blog-of-the-week/trackback/