In the process of mirroring Fedora Core updates repository over a slow (256 Kbps) connection using rsync, I realized that the process can be extremely frustrating as you spend lots of time looking at the console, waiting for something to happen...anything. Then I found the magic option to show a progress meter - --progress. Add this to your rsync command options and you can see in realtime the status of your download, the current connection speed etc. While it will not speed your downloading it will at least make the pain bearable.

I was recently introduced to Mercurial, a new distributed version control system people are talking about. Version control systems are central to any development team and a choice shouldn't be made lightly as you will often find your development process limited by the limitations of the system. We use Subversion, a decision I made after long exposure to it and making myself fully confortable with the system and finding a way around its limitations. I haven't done a similar exploration with Mercurial yet. However as I am always interested in improving my process, I briefly looked into Mercurial documents and went through the wonderful presentation by Bryan O'Sullivan, Senior Principal Engineer at QLogic, in Google Tech Talk session. Here are few observations.

The Trashcan on your Fedora Core desktop (tested for gnome) is actually located in ~/Trash directory. So a simple commaond as below should clear your trash: rm -rf ~/.Trash/*