Do you know that Linux automatically scales CPU utilization depending on processing requirements? This reduces power consumption and heat. However there are situations when CPU scaling monitor cannot properly identify CPU requirements. In such cases you may want to manually stop cpu speed daemon and restart it later again if required. Here are the required commands:

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Like GMail Chrome allows really useful shortcuts. Some of my favorites are:
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Here are few tips (with undocumented features) to help you export huge MS Access database (production database with real data) to MySQL.

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I am using Ant (Java based build system) for our project. Ant is an exceptionally powerful build system and should be the only build system you will ever need. You don't really need code monsters like Maven (or pile of …. as Bileblogger loves to say). With little effort here's what I achieved in few hours (aside from the obvious capability of compiling, running, building jar files etc.):
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Many like to twitter using IM (Instant Messenger) because it is very simple and fast to tweet and simple to get continuous updates on your topics of interest.

In the good old days Twitter used to provide IM support. You could use any Instant Messenger supporting Jabber (XMPP protocol) to connect to Twitter buddy (twitter@twitter.com) on Gooogle GTalk server and twitter to your hearts content. For several months however Twitter has stopped supporting IM. How can we satiate our twitter crush during their downtime? There is a way.

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Every one in my company knows about pkill, an obscure Linux command because we use Firefox (we are 100% Linux based) as the default browser. What is the relation, you ask? The answer is simple.

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I tried delving into Ruby couple of times in the past. Every time I had this weird feeling of what am I doing here when I am already very well conversant with a simpler language - Java, which gives me everything I need. Ruby just felt very syntax rich, may ways and interesting tricks to do stuff and so on.While these may be appealing to a script-kiddie, nice syntactical sugars do not help much in the long run or help you create robust code (unless you love flying whales and a service which fails every other day).

I am not afraid of developing CRUD interfaces nor do I find it time consuming. What value can I get from RoR? Every time I delve into Ruby & RoR, I come back feeling unsatisfied. What am I missing here?

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Also: How To Flexibly Pass JVM parameters to Apache Ant Java (Runtime) Task

Apache Ant is an excellent Java based build & deployment system using XML configuration file. In Ant properties are extensively used to configure tasks, conditionally run targets and more. In short they are an intergral part of build system. My requirement was simple. I wanted to pass JVM arguments to the Java runtime. However sometime I wanted to invoke it without passing any special runtime arguments. Unfortunately jvmarg element doesn't like it when its value is an empty string or even a string with spaces. Finding no way to fool it, I then tried to find a way to set the property to something when it is initially not set (while invoking). This proved surprisingly hard to do. Here is an elegant (I think) solution I came up with. Read more (231 words) »

Apache Ant is an excellent and popular Java based build system. It has several built-in commands (tasks in Ant lingo) one of which allows you to create Jar file from your existing class file and resources. What if you wanted to include not just class files but selective contents of other jar files too and make a single big jar file?

Ant provides an undocumented way to include the contents of multiple jar files within a single jar file.
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In earlier versions of Db4o we used Db4o.configure() to configure all Db4o database globally (across all ObjectContainer). However in 7.2 (and above) versions of Db4o Db4o.configure() has been deprecated and it is suggested to use Db4o.newConfiguration() instead. Unfortuanately they do not clearly mention anywhere that these two functions are not equivalent. I assumed they are equivalent like Db4o.set()is equivalent Db4o.store() or Db4o.get() is equivalent to Db4o.queryByExample().

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