Ubuntu 11.10 Running Dog Slow? Solved!

I took the leap of faith to install Ubuntu 11.10 - and a bad step it was! This has to be the most broken distro I've ever played with.

If you've done it, you probably had networking, NFS mount and video issues. Or if you were very lucky only one or less of these problems.

The biggest problem of all is that it runs ultra slow. Horribly, agonisingly slow.

So - here's a fix:
Open a terminal.
Type "top" and you can see what processes are sponging your CPU.
You may see one called "tracker-extract"... and look how much CPU the little sucker is chewing!

Uninstall it, reboot and peace be with you... and a more usable machine using less power.

Have fun.

Bugger me. It's back up.

Twitter, that is.

Twitter is Down

After surviving an onslaught of 10000 messages per second when Steve Jobs iDied, Twitter is now down.

Hooray. Maybe some folk I've been trying to contact can now go fully retro and use the damned phone.

Peace Out.

Joomla 1.7.1 Broken RSS Feed - How to Fix It!!

OK - probably the two fastest posts to this blog I've ever made.

There is a fix for the broken RSS feed (Syndication) problem in Joomla 1.7.1 and it's not hard. In fact, there are two fixes.

The easiest one is to turn off the system caching plugin (System - Cache). Definitely not ideal at all as it will have detrimental performance characteristics for your install.

The least easy one is to modify a line in libraries/joomla/cache/cache.php - Line 529 to be precise.

Check it. It should be "if ($loptions['nohead'] != 1) {"

Go ahead and change it to "if ($loptions['nohead'] != 1 && method_exists($document, 'getHeadData')) {" and re-test.

Worked for me, should work for you.

Good luck!

Cheers - TheTechnoHippie.

Joomla 1.7.1 Released - and Still Buggy.

It's good to see that Joomla! has progressed far beyond its original scope and has improved so dramatically.

The jump from v1.5.x to v1.7.0 was massive and made so many improvements that make life for users so much easier. It's great.

However, about twelve hours ago, news of the new release of v1.7.1 came up and noted that it fixed a whole heap of interested niggles. My pet niggle is that the syndication feed feature wasn't working properly, even though there was a patch to fix it released a month or so ago.

The patch didn't work. The upgrade still doesn't work. And I'm still in RSS hell.

If anyone has any clues how to fix it, please make contact with me!

Here's what happens:
- Create a Syndicated Feed through the usual Module method, selecting the category/categories you want
- All looks like it works, until you try to test it in Feedburner, or just plain old fashioned click on it.
- The error message is "Fatal error: Call to undefined method JDocumentFeed::getHeadData() in /var/www/web1/web/libraries/joomla/cache/cache.php on line 530"

I've exhausted my Google-fu on this and can't seem to find a known fix.

So, if there is anyone out there who has had this problem and knows how to solve it, please reply here.

Best Regards - TheTechnoHippie.

A bit pissed at Google Places.

Many moons ago, my business applied to Google Places. We used our company PO BOX as the address.

It was accepted and was successful for us.

Somehow, they changed their rules and suspended the account, without actually telling anyone about the change in rules.

Google, you suck.

That's very poor customer service and is rather akin to a dictatorship. You could at least tell someone that there is a change in rules and ask that the information is updated rather than summarily cutting a business off.

The importance of the "sales@domainname.com" address

When you're in business for yourself, you're ever so busy and quite often don't find out about the latest trends. Things that could be ever so important to you.


Likewise, without an e-mail address that anyone can guess, it can be hard to find you. It's even worse if your web designer is one of those arty types who obfuscates e-mail addresses!


By using "sales@yourdomainname.com" you can be very sure that you can know everything you've ever wanted to know and more. Truly!


The "sales@..." address at some of the business domain names I own are such busy addresses it's not funny. If I had erectile dysfunction, wanted a huge vibrator (that looks more like a Thermos than anything else, actually) or fake luxury goods - well - so many kind purveyors have already told me where to find those! All kinds of amazing offers! I can get an extra ten thousand Facebook friends for only a hundred bucks! Same goes for Twitter. One cent per friend? Who knew bots were that cheap!


And they even prefer Western Union as their payment method. So generous!


Amazingly, so many of my relatives are dead and there are unclaimed funds. It's amazing because in total, my relatives have made close to one billion dollars. Even more amazing? My surname is really rare. I didn't know that there were so many people in my extended family who kicked the bucket... let alone who were born!


The best part - and I love this - is that I won the lottery! And I didn't even pay to be in it. Isn't that amazing? Talk about the providence of faith! The funds processor only wants a few hundred bucks and then I can have millions remitted to my personal account.


419'ers come along too. They're so nice. Lost funds which they want to give to Christian charities but they want my staff to be the intermediaries. So very generous, despite being thieves... and wanting pre-payment for their efforts.


Yup. We get our tits spammed off.


We even occasionally hear from genuine customers too.


Use some form of obfuscation for real e-mail addresses.