Barack wins the el ection

The night of November 4th 2008 will go down in history as the first black president of America was chosen by the people of America. I would be a bad Kenyan if forgot to mention that his father came from Kenya, the scenes of Kenyans celebrating in the streets as the victory was announced was unforgettable. In case you missed the speech here it is I have watched it like ten times now and every other day its played over on the radio in his own words I leave you with this words Yes We Can.

Grub Error 17

I was trying to dual boot my machine and used the hide command on a linux partition on reboot grub started loading then stopped giving me the Error 17. I was able to resolve it after checking this site out.

This error can aslo be caused if you cange out HD’s without abdating the changes in grub or you overwrite a linux partition with windows in which case you can run fdisk /mbr from any rescue disk.

Imap: Fatal: listen(993) failed: Address alr eady in use

Booted the server the other day and got the message that dovecot can’t start because listen address 993 was already in use.

Any logins to squirrelmail received an error message. To solve this I run the command

lsof -i :993

This will list the application listening on the particular port and you can go ahead and kill it or assign it a different port. Remember to change the port number (993) to whatever port your imap server or whatever program you are troubleshooting is supposed to be listening on.
To start dovecot the command is:

/etc/init.d/dovecot start

Surviving this Hard Times

Like most people out there right now during this hard times I keep thinking of ways to save an extra buck for something else. One money hole is the car like or not you have to change your oil and brakes when they wear out. Solution get a tool box and get ready to get your hands dirty. After driving around with breaks so worn that i was starting to get worried they might fail anytime, I decided to change them for myself. I was suprised how easy the whole process was, it only took two minutes max to change out the pads. But my biggest problem was raising the car armed with a screw driver to operate the jack in a series of quater to half turns at best on the jack. It was around 15 to 20 minutes before the tire was off the ground.
Now with two cars the cheapest mechanic would have caused me $168, by doing it myself am looking at just $68. In future am looking at getting a hydraulic jack for around $30 to make my jo
b easier next time. Since my oil change is due am thinking of getting some ramps for around $34 and doing it myself, last time I went to walmart and had a high millage oil change I had to sit down when they hit me with the bill $45 for an oil change this made my head was spin, at least the minimum they could have done was use a top end product for that kind of change. By doing the job myself the first time am figuring i will save enough to offset the cost of the ramp, with all my future oil changes averaging $15.

To make a long story short with a little sweat and learning you might be surprised by the amount of money you might be able to save yourself by simple jobs around the house. My work mate armed with a plumbing manual tore down his bathroom plumbing after he saw a leak coming through the wall. At the end of it all a job which would have cost him $3000 minimum ended up costing $400.

Star trek

CBS has released the original star trek series videos on youtube so if you got some time to pass take a look. You really become aware of how much technology has advanced since then but to give credit where it’s due they also did some amazing stuff considering whatever little technology they had at the time compared to now.

copy files with smbclient

I am used to using the linux gui to do most of my stuff, but every now and then you have to drop to cmd line to expediate some tasks. I found this neat app that i haven’t been using called smbclient, it has been saving me a lot of time while copying files to and from my linux box since I started using it.

To log in to a share:

smbclient //IP/share  -> you enter password and you are in

To copy local file to share:

put test.odf  -> you can add path details if the file is not in your local directory e.g /var/doc/test.odf

To copy file from share:

get test.odf

To find out further uses of this app checkout this link.

Gmail shortcuts

Are you an avid user of gmail and would like to learn some shortcuts to make maximize your email sessions, the guys at google have put together a tutorial on couple of easy shortcuts that can help you do this, they have also given descriptions to help you memorize them check them out here. There are more shortcuts available but this are ok to start with. Happy Gmailing.