For some time now I have been more focused on my health, productivity and personal growth. The reason I started on this quest was that with age I have started to slow down and other than I want to live a long healthy life I also have a lot of people depending on me, my family, my partner, my friends, staff and customers. For me to deliver the maximum amount of value and help everyone succeed around me I have to be performing at 110% all the time.

Like a lot of people I have tried diets and a detox along with different sleep patterns and learning methods however I know believe I have nailed the key ingredients to being healthier, more productive and a lot happier. The best thing is it isn’t rocket science.

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Have you ever felt like there are simply not enough hours in the day or week to get all the work you done that you need to get done? Do you want to have more free time, but take productivity to the next level? I was asking myself the same questions recently, I knew I was spending way to much time working and there always seemed to be more work I should be doing. I decided it was time for a change, and re-visited Tim Ferris‘ popular book “The 4 Hour Work Week“.

I picked up some great steps that can save you easily up to 30 hours per week of work, and give you a laser focus on what’s really important to you. It will enable you to stop working for the sake of working, and work on tasks that deliver you results.

Here goes:

Steps:

1. Your Reasons:
Before you start cutting down your work hours, it’s important to define what you actually want to achieve in your personal life with the newly acquired free time. The idea is not to cram more work into the time, but to actually have something that you will enjoy doing in the new free time you have. Specify some huge travel goals you want to achieve, hobbies you want to revitalise, or personal growth you want to achieve with the new time you have. Do not start doing more work with the additional time you have, you want be as effective with your time that you are working and defeats the purpose of saving you the hours and improving your quality of life Read more →

Idera (formerly R1Soft) have advised all customers of an unforeseen issue effecting their Server Backup software (formerly CDP), which has been introduced in version 5.2. The issue occurs when Server Backup Agents (SBA) are upgraded to 5.2 before the Server Backup Manager’s (SBM) are updated to this version due to a change in the way mount points are discovered.

In the latest Server Backup 5.2 release, support was added for the ‘Cloud Server 6′ platform. This has reportedly changed the way Server Backup Agent’s discovers mount points. Earlier versions of SBM below v5.2 and previous CDP versions 3.x & 4.x stored the information in a different way. When Server Backup Agents are running on a higher version than the Server Backup Manager itself, the agent is unable to communicate mount points correctly ie. Client is out of Sync with the Server.

A potentially major problem when Server Backup Agents are installed & managed by yum – which means any yum update run on a client machine will update the Idera SBA version ahead of the backup server, introducing this bug.
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Atlassian have just released a new version of their flag ship Confluence 5 wiki platform.

The new version is Confluence 5.1.2 and with it comes some great new improvements.

I quickly upgraded my own personal Confluence 5 installation so I could give some of the new features a test run .

Before upgrading I read through the Whats New Page for Confluence 5.1, http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/whats-new/confluence-51

It seems the focus has been on improved collaboration by improving areas such as,

• Meeting documents and note keeping. 
• Attachment file list improvements including, versioning and instant previews.
• Ability to manage product requirements
• No more flash in the attachment document previews!

For me personally I think the most useful feature is the improvement to the file / attachment management and previewing. Whilst I try to avoid using Confluence as a file server, the ability to bundle all documentation for a particular project into one area is very useful!

Below I will run through some of the things I noticed after my upgrade to Confluence 5.1.2.

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Website speed is a wholly subjective topic; what some people find adequately fast, others will find glacial. Here are four readily available ways you can improve the general page load speed of your websites without changing the hosting solution that it sits on.

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You may remember in my last article I explained the undying love I feel for my Nokia N9, which has since been replaced by an admittedly awesome, yet much less unique Android phone. This change was prompted by the N9s MeeGo operating system becoming more and more dated, and me not wanting to be left behind.

So with the N9 receiving no more support from Nokia, and the team behind it having all moved on from the Finnish mobile giant, it’s pretty safe to say MeeGo is well and truly dead, right?

Wrong.

Meet Jolla:

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Everyone has there own way of approaching sales some like to research and take a slow approach making sure that they are meeting the customer needs at every step, others dive head in and look for the opportunities to close from the moment they say hi and of course there are some people who believe they cannot sell at all. I’ve learned over time that everyone has an incredible ability to sell however what they are missing is the ability to identify their own strengths and the one’s of those around them so that they can not only utilise their skills but also grow their own.

I have a friend who says that she isn’t a great salesperson because she isn’t outgoing, this same friend however has very high attention to detail and always does a thorough job no matter what she is doing. What she doesn’t realise though is that that her skills are also important within sales, without her ability to be thorough and keep an eye on the details a customers first impression of  her company may not be a good one.

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As any system admin knows, every log tells a story and you can never have too many logs. Unless of course those logs are filling up your disk and you forgot log & alert that!

As systems get more complex, it can quickly become time consuming to trawl through log file after log file. While there are numerous tricks to doing so efficiently, but multiply that by 10′s or 100′s or 1000′s of servers and you can quickly drown in a sea of data no matter how much of a bash wizard you are.

At Crucial we use a number of creative options, combining customised monitoring tools/scripts and real-time log monitoring for our own internal systems as well as individual customer systems. Log aggregation is an increasingly important necessity as virtualization & the cloud has taken off and systems continue to scale out further & further.

Fortunately, there are any number of open-source options & paid services out there to handle these tasks. Today’s post however is on something more of a novelty – Logstalgia, otherwise known as ApachePong, which is a neat little OpenGL log visualization tool. It works primarily with Apache & Nginx and similarly formatted log files and will provide a neat little 3d animation with a Pong paddle responding to incoming requests.

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Have you ever wondered how big is the Internet?  I’ve put together a few figures from various sources to explain just how vast the Internet is.

Total Number of TLD Domains Registered Globally:

According to Verisign: 252 million as of Dec 31, 2012

Source:  http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/why-verisign/research-trends/domain-name-industry-brief/index.xhtml

Amount of Global Internet Traffic Per Month:

In 2011 traffic per month was recorded at 27,483,000 TB/month (27,483,000,000 GB/month) or at a speed of 137.42Terabits/second

Traffic is predicted by Cisco to grow as followed over the next 3 years:

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns827/networking_solutions_sub_solution.html

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Free as in ‘free -m’

In this post, I’m going to walk through the steps to configure Debian with Virtualmin control panel and the Nginx web server. If you are hosting multiple sites and need a fast, lightweight configuration for your VPS then this setup is ideal. As discussed in this previous article, if you are reselling hosting, I’d recommend sticking with the tried and tested combination of cPanel/Apache as it is much easier for your clients to manage. The setup I’m building is best for webmasters or developers who are looking to host and manage their own sites and email on a low cost VPS. Nginx keeps your webserver’s memory footprint down, but makes day to day administration a fair bit trickier for end-users. Particularly because Nginx does not use htaccess files, meaning all site configuration (including redirects) need to be done in the main config file by root. However, if you are tech savvy and need to make the most of your VPS resources, this tutorial is definitely for you.

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