Even if you’ve only dabbled with python for a minute or two, you’ve probably already figured out that you can print variables using placeholders. You might have tried concatenation too. However, did you know you can print using %s but with the variable names directly?

It doesn’t get much easier than this. However, you must add routes for static files such as style sheets and images. These are things that you may take for granted if you’re used to relying on standalone web servers.

I was curious about using NTP to keep a few stand-alone machines synchronized. None of them have access to the outside world, or access to another host that has access to the outside world – they’re completely cut off. So how do you run a NTP server with no upstream time source? Easy!

GNU GRUB is easy to set up, it’s just got it’s own funky syntax that you don’t really see anywhere else.

===GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader===
GNU GRUB is a multiboot boot loader derived from the original GRUB. It is the first software program that runs when a computer starts. It loads the kernel and … that’s it. It’s the kernel’s job to load the rest of the OS. GRUB was originally created by Erich Stefan Boleyn.

===Quick, easy, & painless===
Install grub. In gentoo i’ll just emerge it from the portage tree. You may have to download the source manually or perhaps use your package manager to install from a binary.

Build it and run it
====# emerge -a grub && grub====

You should eventually find yourself at the grub prompt grub>. The hd syntax starts numbering from zero. If your drive is the 2nd device and you want to install grub on the 8th partition, you would use (hd1,7)
====grub> root (hd0,0)====

====grub> setup (hd0)====

Type quit to exit. You will need to customize the barebones menu.lst to boot whatever operating systems you want.

Run Wubi, give it a password, and click “install”. The installation process from is fully automatic from here. The rest of the installation files will be downloaded and confirmed, after which you’ll get the standard windows wants to reboot. Do so and select Ubuntu at the boot screen. The installation will continue for another few minutes depending on how old your machine is and will reboot once again. Choose Ubuntu at the boot screen again and enjoy.

I hate PDFs! I hate opening the viewer and sitting there, waiting for it to load, then dealing with the pop up asking me to update my software. I wish they were like regular text files or images, and not some twisted mutant hybrid of both with all the shortcomings from each side! So… now I just convert PDF’s to JPEG images!!! I love ImageMagick. It’s just so freaking useful… and free.

Here’s a very simple script to convert PDF’s to JPG’s:

Here’s my notes from trimming a little off the top of an apache server. This was just a quick chop at the default install. I haven’t looked at how the webapps are used or how many connections or the length of time per connection or anything… I’ll go back later and tweak how many threads and processes are started and used.