HOW-TO: Increase your wireless network card speed in Debian GNU/Linux

I recently replaced my cable modem and wanted to measure the increase in speed that I used as the rationale for the upgrade. (For those of you that are married, you know exactly why I needed to do this.) But along the way, I ran into a few surprises–most notably that I wasn’t getting anywhere near the speeds I expected until I tweaked the settings of my wireless network card. A quick hardware inventory Grepping the output of lspci, my network controller appears as: I picked up this RaLink card for about $8 US in a bargain bin at the local MicroCenter, and it has worked out pretty well. I knew beforehand that this chipset had Linux support, but I didn’t realize until later that the firmware implementation [...]

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HOW-TO: Get better audio quality when ripping CDs in Rhythmbox 0.12.8

So, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released last week and it shipped with Rhythmbox 0.12.8. I thought I’d provide an update to one of the more popular posts on this site: HOW-TO: Enable MP3 ripping in Sound Juicer 2.22.0, and blather on a bit about how you shouldn’t be ripping to MP3 in the first place ;) As noted in the comments in that previous post, Rhythmbox uses the same audio format and quality settings as Sound Juicer, so setting them in one place affects them in the other. But let’s focus on getting the results we want out of Rhythmbox, since that’s the Ubuntu default. When you insert an audio CD, Rhythmbox will recognize and display it as a CD device in the left side pane (F9 toggles [...]

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Live Free or Die: Debian

Admittedly, I am not a big fan of most things even remotely related to New Hampshire (save for my until-recently-homeless-and-unemployed friend, Kevin), but this has got me rethinking my stance: a license plate that aptly reads “Live Free or Die: Debian.” Of course, the “Live Free or Die” part is the state’s motto/ethos/battle cry/pre-wrestling-cage-match chant. But the “Debian” part is what it actually means to be free. Whoever owns this vehicle is my compatriot in spirit. UPDATE:

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Stranger in a Strange Land From a guy named “Linus.” Last name, “Torvalds.” Enough said.

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Recently, my company’s corporate wiki started to sputter. It isn’t that Atlassian Confluence itself is a dog, but when you load it with over 100K+ pages, hundreds of simultaneous users, many GBs of attachments in the DB, and try to run it on Windows 2003 Std and SQL Server 2000, things get rather dicey. (Add in the fact that the same hardware is used for a half dozen other production apps, including our enterprise JIRA install, and you have a recipe for failure.) So, for various reasons, we decided to move Confluence to its own dedicated environment: Ubuntu 8.04 with a MySQL backend. I don’t intend to make this a detailed HOWTO — I can’t imagine that any two migrations will ever be identical. Instead, I’ll point out [...]

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