You run a medium-to-large size MySQL server with lots of databases, possibly for hosted websites. You've experienced performance degradation. You've fine-tuned your database engines, and no joy. Then you finally realise you need to run mysqloptimize, and the day is saved! Good on you. Of course, running mysqloptimize on a large server still takes half an ice age.
Bash
Data Recovery... Not
This guy wrote a message to linux-greek-users, a Linux-related mailing list for Greek users. Although he's Greek, his message was in (less than perfect) English.
This sort of thing sets my IS_FLAMER flag. I replied in a similar manner (this is funnier if you can read obfuscated UNIX shell scripts). There's an explanation of the script and a translation of the (latinised — by necessity, the mailing list only talked US-ASCII) Greek bits at the bottom.
Cleaning Up a Debian APT Archive Cache
You have a Debian, Ubuntu or similar installation, and your /var partition keeps getting full when you upgrade. You check /var/cache/apt/archives and find it full of the usual mix of current and old versions of downloaded packages. Somehow, they haven't been deleted after installation, or you keep downloading them but not installing them. You now need a quick and clever way of cleaning up this mess, so only the latest version of each package remains.
