Nifty tidbits!

Yahoo! mail fixed for Firefox 3 beta 2

9 Feb, 2008 Firefox news Very Cool Web

Used to get an error on opening Yahoo mail beta in Firefox 3 beta 2 - and had to switch to the plain 'ole yahoo mail. Here’s the bug report Was pleasantly surprised today morning to see that Yahoo! mail beta now works properly in FF3b2. Thanks!

Pesky little bash quoting problem

23 Jan, 2008 shell bash troubleshooting

Have to admit it - this happens every time I sit down to write a some shell script that manipulates paths on windows (where path names often end up with spaces). Soon I find my nifty little script running into problems when it doesn’t handle spaces properly and I find myself reading up on bash quoting rules once again… Anyway, so this post is mostly for self reference :) and to put down some simple rules in the hope that writing it down will help committing it to memory.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 on Ubuntu Gutsy

10 Jan, 2008 Firefox Troubleshooting

I’m having weird problems with firefox 3b2 on ubuntu gutsy - and as far as I can tell, I seem to be the only one. Did not find anything similar on ubuntu forums too. Installed firefox 3 beta 2 from Mozilla to /usr/lib/firefox3b2 folder and created lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2007-12-30 23:44 /usr/bin/firefox-3b2 -> /usr/lib/firefox3b2/firefox When I launch firefox3b2, I get firefox alright, however, in the location bar if I type in a url and press Enter, nothing happens - absolutely nothing at all.

HOWTO: Access your machine from the internet without a static IP

10 Jan, 2008 HOWTO Linux Tips

For machines to be accessible on the internet, usually you need a static IP that’s leased from your ISP so that when someone types in your IP address, so that packets can be routed over to your machine. However, getting a static ip is costly and for the most part, internet users have dynamic IP address that the ISP allocates each time an end user connects to the internet. Since the ip address keeps changing on each connection, there’s no straightforward way to connect to the machine without knowing the IP address that’s been allocated - or so it was at least till Dynamic DNS came along (it isnt new - has been around for ages, but for some reason isn’t that well known)

Back in circulation

3 Jan, 2008 general tools utilities

I’m on vacation in Bangalore, and guess what - fixing my home computer. Mostly things like lost drivers, screen resolution, cruft in the drives - its an old machine - a P4/512 Meg, but good enough for surfing the net. Did a few fun things in the midst, and its been ages since I’ve added anything to this blog. Will summarize for now and put in longer posts with more details in cases someone’s interested.

Sluggish Firefox - and what a hog!

3 Jul, 2007 Firefox Tips Troubleshooting Utilities

Okay - for the past few days I’ve been irritated with the browsing experience at home. Pages (google reader, Yahoo mail etc seemed inexplicably slower than before - but they’d load alright - just seemed that teeny weeny bit slower that’s enough to leave you suspicious). I first suspected my ISP (verizon) for frequent dropped connections (saw the DSL modem lights reset a couple of times a day), then my wifi modem (not a high end one), then spyware/malware.

Piclens - full screen slideshows with flickr (and others)

28 Jun, 2007 Tips Tools Utilities Very Cool

discovered Piclens Its a great addin for firefox - and integrates with Flickr to give you full screen slideshows a’la Picasa slideshows on your machine!! Its a bit tricky to figure out how to get it to work - Just hover any picture on any page and click on the blue bubbly overlay button that appears

Python, cygwin, TurboGears, mysql hell

28 Jun, 2007 Cygwin Python Rant Troubleshooting

Ok - here goes - I’ve always liked python, though definitely a noob. I was interested in python on the web and after a bit of googling, seems like TurboGears is the way to go. First things first - decided to use mysql as the database (already have it on my machine and didn’t want to install one more database (postgresql/sqlite). Now it turns out that MySQL doesnt have a cygwin package.

Maven Emma plugin - filters dont work

24 May, 2007 Java Tips Tools

Using v0.5 of the Maven emma plugin. Found that if you specify an include/exclude filter, no classes are instrumented….On digging a little deeper under the covers, it seems that there’s a bug with the Maven emma plugin - I’ve edited the plugin’s jelly script and using it here. Posted the bug and the fix to Maven’s sourceforge developer forum. You can find it here The fixed plugin.jelly’s here - Maven emma plugin 0.

Building a FC6 server for Java development

4 May, 2007 Linux Tips

It has come upon me to build a FC6 server with a Java build environment that is going to serve as the build machine. This is the first time I’m coming to Fedora - always having used Debian in the past. OS installation was smooth. I installed with KDE since some folks prefer the GUI. During the installation, I chose Java Development - and all the gcj components got installed.