Friday, June 27th, 2008
I’m inches away from shoving my fist through my laptop screen! I don’t know how something like this could happen, but Evolution, the Mail Client I’ve switched to, has somehow mixed my email messages up. This is a real pain in the neck because while there was a solution for fixing it up by moving the files into a new folder so that they will be in sync again, it doesn’t fix the emails that I have received in the past few days - and these were the most important ones!
With this, I’ve decided to ditch Evolution. Such a pity, I liked how it worked and all that, but this is the second time this has happened. Evolution is out, good old faithful email workhorse Thunderbird is back in action.
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Number pad not working in Ubuntu? I feel your pain. After an upgrade to Hardy, my numberpad stopped working in Ubuntu Linux. I decided to look around in the Keyboard preferences and found my answer. I found that mousekeys was enabled. To get the use of my num pad back, all I had to do was disable mousekeys. More…
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Being a web developer, I need to make sure that the web pages I develop are rendered correctly (or in some cases “close enough” to correctly) across different browsers. Back when I was using Windows that wasn’t a problem for me, I can run all the major browsers for PC - Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox Browser and Opera. I could test how the site looks on all three.
On Ubuntu linux however, it’s a different story. While the default browser for Ubuntu is Firefox and Canonical has a version of Opera in their repository, there is no linux native version for Internet Explorer. This would have been a problem had it not been for ies4linux.
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Here’s a quick tip on disabling the touchpad on the Ubuntu Linux distro. It’s been bugging me for a while now that I have to use a non-gnome native solution to disabling my touchpad qsynaptics written in QT.
For those who are impatient and just want the quick instructions, I recommend that you install synclient, and issue a synclient TouchPadOff=1 usually SHMConfig is already on and this would be enough - in addition, synclient is usually installed by default (it is in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon).
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Why are there so many examples of bloated PHP methods out there?! I see a lot of bloated methods being used in examples through sites like phpclasses.org and a very large chunk of a project I’ve recently picked up which a few developers have worked on. Guys! remember! There is no good reason to bloat your methods to over 10-20 lines long and on the rare occasions that you do exceed 10 - 20 lines it would be more the exception to the rule as opposed to being the rule itself!
Let’s not forget what classes and its methods are supposed to be: Classes are blueprints for specialist components and their methods are singular actions which address one to a few (2 - 3 at most!) procedures at a time whether it be through the use of other classes or just through simple logic!
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Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been in maintenance mode for a little bit that I’ve forgotten how to import a SQL file generated by applications like mysqldump into an existing database, but earlier today while dumping existing data from DevScripts and trying to install it on our testing server, I drew a complete blank.
So I guess this is more a note for me and anyone else who has a tendency to forget nifty little tricks like this one.
A quick way to duplicate MySQL databases is to do the following:
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Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Well, to be “correct” the title of this should have been “how to add your key to the list of authorized public keys on a remote or local linux machine”, but being a newbie like myself, I would not have known to search for it. If I wanted to find out about logging in automatically to a remote machine using a generated public key, I myself would have used “Passwordless SSH” - so there you go.
To get started, I’ll assume that you have OpenSSH set up (it’s setup by default… well usually) and that your remote machine has OpenSSH-server set up.
If not, then do the following on the remote machine:
$ sudo aptitude install openssh-server
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Monday, February 18th, 2008
I was surprised that there was no built in way of adding multiple files to a SVN repository. I did a quick search and it seems that there is “one easy way” - execute the following piped command line from a Terminal window.
you@yourmachine$ svn st | grep "^?" | awk ‘{ print $2}’ | while read f; do svn add $f; done
I could have sworn that I came across an easier way of doing this without resorting to doing the above.
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