Documentation

To reset a mailman admin password on Debian, the easiest way is to locate the mailman's proper bin directory (use dpkg -L mailman), generally: /usr/lib/mailman/bin There, you'll find an executable script called change_pw. Use this one. If you want to change the password of all lists at once, use: sudo ./change_pw --all --password=newpassword Ref: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg34242.html

Today we had a server stalled on "Loading kernel modules" at reboot (after adding 12GB of RAM, to 24GB total). The datacenter didn't know what to do and they put us on a 32-bit rescue mode console from which we couldn't (obviously) launch a 64bit chroot to update the kernel. The situation seemed pretty desperate. Our sysadmin, Jérôme, once again came to the rescue. Waiting for the datacenter to respond would have potentially increased reboot time up to 45 minutes. The only possible thing to do: replace initrd with a similar version (just in case the first one would have been damaged).

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Many new videoconference systems nowadays are Flash-based. Of course, the main input for them is some sort of video device (e.g. a webcam). Under Linux, the framework responsible for this is Video4Linux (V4L), of which version 2 (aka V4L2) is current. That means that most recent webcams drivers are supported only by V4L2. Alas, some proprietary editors (of which Skype and Adobe with Flash) still only support V4L1.

Just publishing a list of references that I found about Mathematics and e-learning.

• The Effects of Blended E-Learning on Mathematics and Computer Attitudes in Pre-Calculus Algebra, Balara

Quite easy to start Chamilo Rapid on your own computer with OpenOffice.org v3 installed:

soffice -nologo -nofirststartwizard -headless -norestore -invisible "-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=2002,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;"

Then just go into your portal admin page and configure the Chamilo Rapid as localhost on port 2002 and save.

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).

This is an easy procedure to import any MyISAM table that you would have in .myd, .myi and .frm format, into a local database. I assume you have MySQL server and a MySQL client on your local machine.

• First, identify the name of the table (that's the name before the ".myd" extension).
• Connect to your local database and create a dummy database (let's call it "import")
• Create a table inside that database with the exact same name as the one you need to import.