Lately I’ve been reading up on Django a bit in an effort to get back into programming.  It seems the preferred way of running Django is inside a virtualenv environment.  I try to stick to packages when possible for installing applications and saw that the python-virtualenv package wasn’t too far behind at version 1.4.5, where the latest is at 1.5.1.  This appeared at first to suit me just fine until I discovered the version of pip that gets installed along with python-virtualenv is at 0.3.1, where the latest is at 0.8.1.  The version of pip installed is so old that it doesn’t have support for the “uninstall” command yet, blech.  Luckily you can do the following from within pip to upgrade itself

At $WORK I’m currently working on deploying a pool of Varnish servers to sit in front of some Apache servers running Pressflow. On our current infrastructure we’ve been running Squid for the past few years with very good success , minus a hiccup or two along the way, one involving memory fragmentation (thank you tcmalloc). Varnish has a few nice features that Squid lacks.

• The ability to PURGE objects using wildcards

• Better support for multiple processors (Squid can benefit from multi procs when using AUFS)

A while back I found some notes on configuring the sensitivity of my trackpoint on my Thinkpad T43 and took the time to tweak the values to get it just right. The commands were

    /bin/echo -n 171 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity /bin/echo -n 119 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed

In order to keep those values the same on reboot, I placed those commands in /etc/rc.local. I rebooted and… values got reset. After struggling a bit and just giving up on the issue, I ended up just making a shell script that I would execute on boot each time (crappy solution). Finally I got annoyed with the issue enough and researched it again some more and stumbled uponthis post on Ubuntu Forums. A couple of things I learned from that…