*** /dev/xvda1 will be checked for errors at next reboot ***

After proceeding to do a fsck and restarting, the message still kept appearing. After some debugging with wk, it apparently was due to a stale fsck-at-reboot file left around causing the message to keep popping up.

Here are the steps I used to make sure they stopped popping up again:

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo shutdown -r now
sudo rm /var/lib/update-notifier/fsck-at-reboot
cd /usr/lib/update-notifier/
sudo ./update-motd-fsck-at-reboot
sudo rm /forcefsck

Thanks wk!

The transform code you would want to stick into your Web.<transform>.config (was for a ASP.NET MVC project):

    <rewrite xdt:Transform="Insert">
      <rules>
        <rule name="HTTPS rewrite behind ELB rule" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="^(.*)$" ignoreCase="false" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO}" pattern="^http$" ignoreCase="false" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Redirect" redirectType="Found" url="https://{SERVER_NAME}{URL}" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>

This assumes you have the IIS URL Rewrite module installed on your IIS server.

References:

http://www.iis-aid.com/articles/how_to_guides/redirect_http_to_https_iis_7?page=1
http://serverfault.com/questions/304621/endless-redirect-loop-with-aws-elb-and-wordpress-site-using-wordpress-https-plugi
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/index.html?SvcIntro.html

More info on it here and here.

Whether or not the blocklists are of any use is up for debate, and definitely not something I’m going to go into in this post..

via here

My loathing for it got worse as it didn’t seem to be closing gracefully on quitting besides causing software restores which all ended up with iTunes.exe taking up 100% CPU. I decided to stop swearing at it and search around for the root cause as this behaviour wasn’t replicated on my work machine and on colleague’s variety of machines.

Turns out it wasn’t iTunes, but the antivirus (NOD32 2.7) which wasn’t playing nice. After adding various iTunes paths to AMON/IMON exclusion lists, there has not been crashes or 100% CPU since (instructions on how to do this here). Guess I was cursing the wrong software but anyhow..

Just a note, this is a fairly belated post as I was having this issue with iTunes 7.x and have since upgraded to 8.0.1 which may no longer require this workaround. ;)

For e.g., typing a very frequently used rendezvous point into Google Maps:

Swanston St at Bourke St VIC 3000

Would give you the intersection of Swanston St and Bourke St (ex-Nike Melbourne). Link to the page here.

Pretty nifty since it’s common place for shop lot locations to be listed as ‘corner X road and Y road’.

via MalekTips

Apparently, after I got moved over to the new version, I actually switched my language preference in the settings from English (US) to English (UK). :| I sort of left it as it is since then and finally decided to find out the root cause today (after much cursing at how evil it was for me to be given access to the updated version for just a few hours..).

So if you still seem to be stuck in the old version, try the following (was suggested here):

1. Click ‘Settings’ in your Gmail window (top right, close to ‘Sign Out’).
2. In the drop down for ‘Gmail display language’, change it to ‘English (US)’.

Oh well, Gmail is still in beta..

More screenshots of the new version here.

• Bypass any Firewall or throttling ISP with SSH
• 10 Private BitTorrent Trackers open for signup

Both links from TorrentFreak.

Again, Google came to the rescue for this, linking me to this site which gave a 2 step process for doing the shrinking. Do note that the instructions are for those who are using Windows as their host OS.