AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that allows daily, weekly and monthly backups of your local and remote MySQL Databases. It's meant to run on Linux/Unix through a cron job. Its highly configurable, and easy to setup as I will show you today!

First you will need to acquire the shell script and drop it on your server. You can download AutoMySQLBackup on their SourceForge Project Page

I woke up to a very big announcement today. I was browsing digg and found that MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems. You can read more about the acquisition on the MySQL blog of Kaj Arno about the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. My take, with Sun releasing Solaris into the Open Source realm, this is just another piece of software that they can put under their belt and package with Solaris. I have included some blurbs from Kaj Arno's blog below.

Daniel J. Bernstein has stated he is releasing his future and previous work under the public domain. You can watch the video of his announcement here.

Theres a feature on Lifehacker about a free piece of software called DriveImage XML, that provides backups and images of your Windows Based Hard Drive. The software has four different functions that you can use to backup/image your hard drive:

I was setting up a bunch of monitoring at work as we hadn't have that much implemented. I ran into this application in a random fashion. Sys Junction is an application that graphs out syslog data from Cisco PIX firewalls.

After searching for some time on an easy way to protect an internal wiki. I found the following article useful. It goes in-depth into what you would need to change on a base MediaWiki configuration to only allow registered users to see the content within the Wiki. After following all the steps I know am able to login to my private Wiki over SSL! Thus allowing me to keep all my private and important notes online!

If you don't know about Thunderbird, then you've been living under a rock. Its a small, lightweight, Email application provided free by the Mozilla foundation. I was looking around for Thunderbird add-ons this evening and found a couple that I found to be a "Must Have" for anyone that uses Thunderbird as their primary email client. I'll list them off in no particular order:

Enigmail - OpenPGP message encryption and authentication for Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

I had the chance to try Splunk out about 3 months ago. The software was rather easy to install, however one thing that did seem to a little hard to use was the interface and the general working with inputs for the software. The search function was really neat, and easy to find errors that were occurring. The free version is limited but still usable, in a larger environment this product would probably be a life saver. Single server deployments, not so much.

I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the FireFox extension called GreaseMonkey. The extension allows you to manipulate the JavaScript present on any website you visit. For instance, if you want to displaying text is a specific way, you can. You can also change the colour or look of site with your own custom JavaScript.

9. Flickr Follow Comments - This useful script helps you to view images that you have commented on - but only those that interest you. If you are writing lots of comments every day you know how hard it is not to get distracted by the overload of images when you click “Comments You’ve made”. With this userscript you have 4 different options to see only certain types of comments.

InstantBird is a mutli-protocol Instant Messenger that uses parts of Pidgin and Firefox, it is open source and is available to Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

Instantbird is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client. Using it, you can connect to all your different IM accounts. It uses the Mozilla rendering engine to display IMs, and the Pidgin libpurple to connect to the different networks. Instantbird is a free and open source software. So you are free to use, distribute and modify it. The project is just on its first release, many features are not implemented yet. We hope you will like it and look forward to get your feedback!

Visit the official InstantBird Site

More information about the supposed filters that Comcast has implemented to curb Bittorrent traffic on its network. Only now it looks as though the appplication suit Lotus Notes is affected.

Last week, we reported on mounting evidence that Comcast is targeting and disrupting BitTorrent traffic on its network. Further digging by interested parties has turned up more indication that BitTorrent isn't the only popular P2P protocol being tampered with by the United States' largest ISP.

Sandboxie will isolate the outcome of any website you visit, including any software or script installations, which can then be undone.

Microsoft is pumping out more free software for the masses. I've never heard or seen Windows Live Photo Gallery, but I thought about downloading and installing this application to give it a whirl. During the install, I asked to install a bunch more Windows Live applications. Specifically the Mail component, since my MSN account is attached to my Hotmail. After installing everything, I ran the Windows Live Photo Gallery, and it was pretty amazing.

After a fresh re-install I will usually install this application to be able to view all of the images/pictures on my desktop. It's light weight with many features, one of its greatest features is its batch processing. You can resize all of your photos in one folder with a couple of clicks of a button.

Read the full article on Life Hacker

A great article on how to turn drupal into a Digg like clone without any programming. If you've every played with Drupal or are actively using it on your site, like mine. Take a look:

http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2006/12/05/want-to-create-a-site-like...

If you have ever ran into a problem with trying to strace apache or other processes that spawn children, then this script will help you out greatly. This small perl script will grab all of the PID's of the current process and its children and then run an strace command on all of them to provide strace output from all of apache. You can modify the strace line to your liking as well as the log names, by default it logs to a file based on date and time to the /tmp directory. Code included, click 'Read More'.

This is a similar application to PC Backup, both are software managed backups which are open sourced and free as in beer. I will be doing a review of this software if time permits, as it does look really good instead of manual rsync backups.

RESTORE 4.0a28-1 (Default branch) - RESTORE is an enterprise network backup and recovery solution for Windows, Novell, Mac OS X (data fork), Unix, and Linux systems. It is scalable to a complete backup solution for multiple workstations, servers, and data centers. It operates over local area networks, wide area networks, and the Internet.

LifeHacker Has a walk through of how to customize Microsoft Windows XP with Tweak UI, with included screen shots.

Customize Windows XP with TweakUI - One of the best tools for fine-tuning Windows XP is the free TweakUI PowerToy utility from Microsoft. TweakUI digs deep into Windows' settings and can customize its behavior dozens of ways, from how many icons appear on the Alt-Tab dialog to Explorer context menu choices to what your program shortcuts look like. TweakUI's been around forever and we've mentioned it here and there throughout the years at Lifehacker, but it's high time we gave it the full walk-through it deserves. After the jump, take a gander at 15 useful adjustments you can make to your XP system with TweakUI.

A small review of Movable Type 4 and WordPress, its mostly talking about why the person switched from WordPress to Movable Type 4 and how Movable Type 4 worked for this person.

Why I Don't Use WordPress - You may be surprised to hear that this blog does not run on WordPress- like much of the blogosphere- but rather, Movable Type 4. I've given WordPress plenty of chances to be my CMS of choice, but for my own blog, it just doesn't cut it for me. [Digg Main]

Thunderbird is a pretty great open sourced mail client that is available on multiple platforms and for free. From the beginning its development has been mostly be shadowed by FireFox. The two core developers of Thunderbird have left Mozilla, which is a big blow to the ongoing development of Thunderbird. Will Thunderbird not longer get as many updates or new features? Will development complete stop? Only time will tell.

Again Microsoft is trying to bully open source distributions and projects to buy into their patent protection that Novell has already sank money into.

Microsoft Offers Further Open Source Patent Threats - An anonymous reader writes "Via Groklaw comes comments from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at a UK event, in which the company once again threatens Linux distributions that haven't signed up with their program. '"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week ... Ballmer praised Novell at the UK event for valuing intellectual property, and suggested that open source vendors will be forced to strike similar deals with other patent holders. He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
[Slasdot]

Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 due in Q1 '08 - The first service pack for Windows Vista is on its way, and PC Magazine has a preview of an early private beta version. [Digg Main]

If you run MediaWiki software, then you really need to check this plugin out. This paticular plugin allows you to pick specific criteria, the below example shows some of the parameters you can pass:

category=+Africa|Europe
category=Politics and conflicts
ordermethod=category,sortkey
headingmode=ordered

You can setup a list of last modified articles, top articles, newly created article.

For full documentation on what parameters are available you can view the DPL Manual at

The official link on MediaWiki's extension page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList

FBI Seeks To Restrict University Student Freedoms - amigoro writes with a link to the Press Escape blog, which is discussing new guidelines suggest by the FBI for university administrations. The Federal Bureau, worried about the possibility of international espionage via our centers of learning, now sees the need to restrict the freedoms of university students for national security. "FBI is offering to brief faculty, students and staff on what it calls 'espionage indicators' aimed at identifying foreign agents. Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
[Slasdot]

BlockHosts 2.0.5 (Default branch) - BlockHosts is a script to record how many times a
local system is attacked, based on configurable
scanning of system logs for sshd or other
services. When a particular IP address exceeds a
configured number of failed login attempts, that
IP address is blocked using hosts.allow files, or
by using null-routing, or by using packet
filtering. An email notification facility is also
available.
License: Public Domain
Changes:
This release updates the vsftpd rule and adds an --enable-patterns option to enable specific rules at run-time. Email notification is now sent on both adds and deletes of host IP addresses, and the source distribution includes the test routines.
[FreshMeat]

Floola 1.0 - Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes) under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. Take a look at the feature list to find out what it can do and feel free to suggest anything that might be missing. Features * Cross plattform - Works on any Windows (98 and above), any Mac and any linux distribution with GTK installed. * No installation required - Put the application on iPod and launch it on any PC, immediately. * Playlists - Easily manage, import and export (m3u, pls) playlists. * Last.fm - Join the social music revolution. * Localization - Available in different languages. * Lyrics - Lyric support even on older iPods (3G and above). * Search for duplicates - Easily find duplicated songs on iPod. Read full story...
[NeoWin-Software]

Notepad++ v4.1 released - Notepad++ is a free generic source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

The version 4.1 is available. In this release not only the interface of Find in files dialog is improved distinctly, but find, replace and find in files dialogs are now 3 in 1.

The version 1.73 of Scintilla include the CMake lexer. And just by chance, I worked a lot with CMake recently at work, so I updated Scintilla from v1.71 to v1.73, and supports the language of CMake. CMakeLists.txt is also available for the source code of Notepad++ (in "src" directory). It's tested only with the generation of VC project file, but not with the generation of MinGW makefile.

3 new plugins are added in this release : SpellChecker, NppExec and QuickText. SpellChecker help you to corect the tipos in your document. You should have aspell instaled to make it work. With NppExec plugin you can execute your commands or saved scripts without leaving Notepad++. It makes you triple your productivity! QuickText is a snippet manager. Once you define all your snippet in you beloved language, type the macro keyword then Ctrl+Enter - I can hear you say "wow".

Another new feature is the clickable URL (http only). It's rather a gadget, but I like it.

v4.1 fixed bugs and added features (from v4.0.2) :

1. Fix the crash issue while saving settings on quit.
2. Fix the crash issue while using the command line with one launched Notepad++ instance.
3. Enhance Find in files feature :
* Improve Find in files user interface (more intuitive).
* The search result (also for find in all opened files) is docked on the bottom of Notepad++.
* Recursive search is optional.
* Search result is collapsable by file.
* User defined keywords for search result.
4. Add tabbing interface in Find dialog : Find/Replace/Find in files
5. Add clickable URL http link feature (double click to trigger).
6. Add cmake language support.
7. Add mark all without launching Find dialog (Ctrl+M).
8. Fix the ROFL (Recent Opened File List) bug : try to open a non-existing file from ROFL, the full file path doesn't be removed from ROFL.
9. Enhance the backup feature : in verbose mode, the file will be backed up in .\nppBackup directory.
10. Update Scintilla component to v1.73

For further information about this project, see :
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
and the project page :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/

Don

[SourceForge]

This is a very interesting application, if you have lots of domain names that you're looking to sell. This application can do everything for you.

Domain Name Portfolio 0.6.2 (Default branch) -
Domain Name Portfolio is a Web based application to help domain owners better organize their portfolio. It allows you to list your domains with their expiry date, registrar, price, status, and category. It also allows visitors to your portfolio to contact you about a given domain.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
A bug in the emailer class which caused a parse
error was fixed.
[FreshMeat]

If you're a hard core HTML/CSS/PHP hacker, this list will come in handy. It has lots and lots of tools that will help you with the average day hacking. Some will shave off minutes from development time and other hours.

Essential List on Firefox Extensions for Webmaster The Essential List and Resources on Firefox Extensions is a popular post here, due to one reason - Firefox has too many extensions and it is difficult and time consuming for a user who just wanted to install some cool extensions to get started on their Firefox journey. Because our original list was more toward normal and daily usage - and being a part time webmaster and blogger, I want to introduce some of the extensions I used to assist my webmaster responsibilities and tasks. Oh yes, I will only display extensions that save my web developing time for other tasks and projects in my life. Same drill here - I am going to list some must have, should have and good to have extensions, based on my experience and usage:

Unfortunately there is no swiftweasel for debian etch/testing:

I had to browse to the SourceForge project page, and download the appropriate version for my machine, which is a athlon64/32bit.

I just untar'd the file, and ran ./firefox from within the directory and it picked up all my settings and everything. Next I had to set it up so that I just had to type firefox within a console. So I created a symlink in my 'bin' folder with all my other custom perl scripts and other command line programs/scripts:

I also had to setup my fluxbox keybinding like so:

I originally was using "iceweasel" which is the Debian fork of Firefox, you can read why Debian had to fork Firefox on WikiPedia

I do notice a difference, pages load pretty fast and the FasterFox Plugin helps. However they packaged an extension called "AdBlocks" which I've never used and I don't really like. But for now I have just removed it.

Swiftweasel 2.0.0.4.1 (Default branch) - Swiftweasel is an optimized build of the Mozilla
Firefox Web browser for Linux. It offers builds
for both AMD and Intel processors. Swiftweasel is
100% compatible with all Firefox themes, plugins,
and extensions.
License: Mozilla Public License (MPL)
Changes:
The update notifications feature that made its
first appearance in 2.0.0.5pre is installed. When
a new version is available, you will be notified
so you can get it. Further font rendering
improvements were done. Automatic detection of
plugins is done in common directories in the file
system. A few more build tweaks were made. The
"Release Notes" option in the Help section brings
up the release notes.
[FreshMeat]