Technology

I recently wrote about installing SSDs in my Laptop and Desktop. I thought I would write a quick follow up post to mention how things are going.

I’m really happy with the changes to the performance of the desktop. As mentioned previously, it is now much quieter and really fast. A lot of my VMs run from the 1TB internal data drive, but the things I use most frequently are now sitting on the SSD. I’m starting to forget what life was like before SSD, except when I go to work and use the slowest PC that was ever built.

I wrote a couple of days ago about replacing my MacBook Pro hard drive with SSD. At the same time I bought a little SSD to use as the system drive for my desktop. I fitted that this morning, installed a fresh copy of Fedora 18 and mounted the original 1TB hard drive as a data drive.

Like the MacBook Pro, my desktop is a few years old, but still has plenty of grunt (Quad Core and 8G RAM) for what I need it for. I do run the odd VM on it, but any heavy stuff is run on my server, so there is no incentive to go out an buy the latest kit for what is essentially just a client PC.

I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Pro since the mid 2009 refresh and it’s been really reliable. Apart from one brief visit to Apple to replace a noisy fan, I’ve had no worries. A few years ago I upgraded from 4G  to 8G RAM, so I’m not stranger to taking the back off it.

Even though it’s quite old by computer geek standards, I really don’t have any performance problems. I do demos with a couple of Linux VMs running Oracle and it works OK. Despite this, I was bored the other night and decided to buy an SSD to replace the internal hard drive. It arrived yesterday, so during last nights insomnia, I decided to fit the hard drive, rather than stare at the ceiling.

The actual hard drive replacement is pretty simple. You can see an example of it here. It takes about 5 minutes.

Thanks to Norman Dunbar for pointing out that MobaXterm 6.3 has been released. You can find the download and changelog in the usual place.

I’ll be interested to see how the performance improvements to SFTP work out. I’ve seen some issues with this during transfers of large files before. The built in NFS and VNC servers sound interesting too. I can think of one situation where the NFS server would come in really handy.

Great stuff!

Cheers

Tim…

Followers of the blog know I’m a Linux fan, but over the weekend I needed to fix some stuff on a Windows server at work and I took my first tentative steps into the world of Windows PowerShell. It was very much a case of “scripting by Google”, but I managed to get the job done pretty quickly. That episode prompted this tweet.

That resulted in two little exchanges. The first from Niall Litchfield, who must have been a little under the weather.

With all the recent press about global brute force attacks on WordPress I decided to install the Better WP Security plugin last Sunday.

It includes loads of security features, including the big ones mentioned in the recent attacks:

• Changing the name of the “admin” user.
• Changing the ID of your renamed admin user.
• Changing the table prefix.
• Max login attempts lockdown.

Of the 5 blogs I manage, 4 worked straight off with this plugin. Unfortunately, one required a few attempts, so remember to take filesystem and database backups before you start or you may not end up in a happy place.

In a previous post I said that UltraEdit moves through beta really quickly. Today I’m rocking UltraEdit v4.0 Release Candidate on Fedora 18…

Cheers

Tim…

Hot on the heels of the recent UltraEdit v19 release for Windows, comes the UltraEdit v4 Beta II release for Linux/Mac.

I’ve just started using it and so far so good. They usually progress through the betas pretty quick. I didn’t have time to install the beta I before this one dropped.

Cheers

Tim…

Were you thinking, “I’ve got nothing better to do this weekend than to download the latest version of VirtualBox and update the guest additions on all my VMs”? Well your luck is in!

Oracle have just released VirtualBox 4.2.10. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

The internet has been awash with people bemoaning the decision by Google to close Google Reader. Probably the next biggest talking point has been people asking what they can use to replace it when it’s gone. I’m planning on giving TheOldReader.com a test-drive, once I can get my feeds imported.

The problem with free