StokeBloke.com

I generated two new desktop backgrounds   The images are 1600×1280, which are ideal background wallpaper sizes.

They were both created with Gimps flame plug-in.

This hi-res wallpaper is based on a purple gradient background with a circular swirl over it.

This one is white and grey swirl background.  Its a low contrast version which is easy on the eyes.

I’ve been using Dropbox for quite some time to transfer files from work to my home PCs. This is worked well for months, but I finally filled my dropbox account.

watch life less ordinary a online As I have a linux box at work and a linux box at home I decided to try and setup some simply one way mirroring system.  I.e. mirror documents from work to my home PC.

I looked at using unison, which I used to mirror many other directories but I couldnt get it to connect out from my work PC.   It appears to lack socks support.  I know I could use ssh port forwarding to sync via sockets but this would be more complicated.

I decided to use rsync via ssh.

There was one main issue though, I needed to get ssh to work over our proxies.  We have a few http proxies and 1 socks proxy.  The http proxies will not connect to arbitrary ports so I ended up using the socks server.

I knew the socks server worked as I’ve used it with putty watch hannah montana the movie online for years, so I just needed to figure out how to setup ssh to use it.

After lots of search and finding articles regarding port forwarding and nothing about using a socks proxy I found 1 good article.

I use gentoo linux so I emerged net-misc/connect which supports socks servers.

emerge -auv net-misc/connect

Once I had the connect utility installed I needed to edit my ssh config file.  I only have 1 user configured on my linux box at work so I edited the ~/.ssh/config file.

This is what I added

Host stokebloke.com
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

Host www.stokebloke.com
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

Host homebox.homelinux.net
ProxyCommand connect -S user@socks-server:1080 %h %p

You can also do the same thing with cygwin too.  Instead of using connect program its called connect-proxy in the network section of the cygwin installer.

After I got this far I needed to configure rsync to work via this ssh connection which, it turns out, is very simple.

rsync --progress -avrz -e ssh src_dir/ user@homebox.homelinux.net:~/dest_dir/

This results in the src_dir existing inside the dest_dir.

Well I spent some time at the weekend making some more flame backgrounds. I use the gimp render flame plugin to make these high definition fractal desktop wallpapers.

All these are hi-res png files 1600×1280 in size.

watch mighty aphrodite online

Dont forget there are more at the gallery

Welll I finally got some time to make some more backgrounds.

I created two which I really like

and

Both are 1600×1280. Dont forget to look at the others here and the complete gallery here

I also added them to deviantart, here and here respectfully.

Well after reading an article on OpenRC at Roys webs, I decided to take a look at my current system. I started by emerging bootchart.

Firstly I needed to unmask bootchart

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

I then enabled the java use flag so I get the java code to generate png files

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart java" >> /etc/portage/package.use

then I emerged it

emerge -av bootchart

I had to add init=/sbin/bootchartd to the end of the /etc/grub/grub.conf kernel line like this

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.23-tuxonice-r11 root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/bootchartd

Then I editted the /etc/conf.d/rc and changed

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="no"

to

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="yes"

I enabled the auto chart creation by editing /etc/bootchartd.conf and changing

AUTO_RENDER="no"

to

AUTO_RENDER="yes"

This is what I got the first time.

Virtually all of my boot time is spent checking the internal tree of the 2 300Gb disks. One disk took around 17 seconds to check and the second one too around 15 seconds (its slightly smaller). Both are reiserfs. Both disks were unmounted cleanly and the fsck knew they were clean file systems, but the tree check still takes some time.

Do I really want it to not check the file system when it boot? That is the question…..

Heres the bootchart with the check disk disabled

I just changes the /etc/fstab entry from

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 1

to

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 0

I didnt enable the Process Accounting part so some short-lived process may not appear in the bootchart images. Ill try this next and see if I anything interesting.