David Trebacz Blog

My upgrade to 9.10 Karmic Koala was less than smooth. Some of it may have to do with the machine being upgraded many times (starting with Hardy Heron -I think) and some of it may be due to running on PPA repositories during the last release to get the benefits of a of KDE 4.3.2 and upgrade Kopete and Digikam. The initial instalation failed leaving the machine at a command prompt. I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a The only complaint was about my Apache configuration file. I decided to merge it and move merrily on. I rebooted, and everything seemed fine. That is until I realized that BackupPC (a backup solution I really like), wasn't running and neither was Apache. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start started Apache running. Apache started without any complaints, but BackupPC wasn't running. sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc start Everything was running as planned. Unfortunately on restart Apache started, but BackupPC didn't. I assumed it was something hosed in the init.d ...

In order to save space and be more efficient in creating tasks, I love to include a link to a network document or network folder that I have to do as part of the task. I tried a bunch of ways to get a link to a network resource in my outlook tasks note. I found a method that seems to work all the time including dealing with spaces in either the path or document name. Place brackets around the path. To create a link to a network server named "bigserver": \\bigserver\directory\this is the document.doc just enter: <\\bigserver\directory\this is the document.doc> Outlook will then create a hyperlink to it and either open the file in the associated program or open Windows Explorer to the proper directory. Why this was so hard to find -I don't know.

I'm always annoyed that I can remember how to add strike through font to part of the text in a Microsoft excel spreadsheet cell. It's easy -select the text you want in strike-through and hit "CTRL" and "5" key at the same time or CTRL-5

Over the weekend I decided to update the storage on my Kubuntu (9.04) 64 bit machine running running KDE 4.3.2. I was beginning to run out of space for backups using BackupPC. I've used it for over a year to keep versioned disk copies of all my machines (Windows 2000, Windows XP, kubuntu, and Ubuntu server). I added a 1TB Samsung energy efficient drive ( SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive ) from NewEgg for $80 with free shipping. I then got a ton of useful information on redirecting where BackupPC stores it's backup file pool from this article ( moving the BackupPC pool to a new hardrive ). I installed, formatted, mounted the new drive as /media/1TB and created a directory called /media/1TB/backuppc. I used the process: stopping BackupPC (sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc stop) copying the backup pool (sudo cp -dpR /var/lib/backuppc/. /media/1TB/backuppc/) renaming the current pool (sudo mv /var/lib/backuppc/ /v...