Month: May 2009

  • rrdtool and No font found

    Recently we did an upgrade to CentOS 5.3 and rrdtool stopped working, specifically, rrdgraph. The reason is that there is no font installed in the system (not sure why, you can check it via “fc-list”). To fix this, do an “yum install xorg-x11-fonts-Type1” and make sure you see some fonts listed in “fc-list”. Also assume…

  • apf vs. newly assigned IP address

    If you try to ping/traceroute and got this message, there are several places to look. First, disable the firewall and if it works again then you know it’s the firewall. In this case, APF. An call to “iptables -L -n” might be able to narrow down the root cause. PING 173.x.x.x 56(84) bytes of data.…

  • Will WolframAlpha make the lazy lazier?

    WolframAlpha is launching right now. I just tried a few and see the cheat sheet. The interface is nice and the results were presented beautifully and logically. I’ll definitely use it for its designed purposes and Yahoo for the rest of search queries. If this type of computational search engine were widely available like it…

  • How to make a cheap tomato cage

    You can buy the small and flimsy one at the store. Walmart, HomeDepot all has 42″ tall for $2. The strong one are selling online for about $20. Or you can make a super strong one for about $4 each. What I got is a wire mesh from Home Depot. $7.65 makes 2 cages that…