It seems to be quite popular to move away from custom build IT solutions to so called COTS - commercial of the shelf solutions. The idea being, that to software solution fulfil a functionality which long has been commoditized and standardized to such an extent that it offers no “competitive edge” nor core value to the business. For most companies and organizations the office suite would be a pretty safe bet for a piece of software which is magnificently suited for a COTS solution.

Google has come up with a nice new image format called webp. Currently support for this format is fairly limited, so if you need to use webp images else where it might be nice to convert them to a more widely supported format. To do the conversion, Google has made a small tool available called dwebp. The tool however does only seem to support conversion of a single image, not a batch of images.

So I’ve installed a Raspberry Pi and it’s been running smoothly day in, day out. I’d like it to stay that way, but as the server is running it’s gathers lint in log files, databases grows and knowing how the load on CPU and memory is utilized through out time, I was looking for a tool which could help me to solve this problem. As fun as it might be to build your own solution, I’ve learned to appreciate ready to use solutions, and it seems a nice little tool is available called RPi-Monitor.

Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled. (In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.

For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving. I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.