Interested in getting Java to work in the just-released Google Chrome on your Ubuntu install? You can always try linking directly to the plugin binary:
$ locate libnpjp2.so
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
$ sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
$ cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins/
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .
Works for me!
Whoops! Chris Wilson had one good point, but some big misses in this article. I guess this is a danger for a writer — for example, the “PHP” input filter setting allows JavaScript by default, but Chris didn’t select that setting.
The biggest problem is that he claims that Drupal is impenetrable, which it is. For many beginners, it has a steep learning curve. But he never makes the connection; why do your site visitors care? If millions of them appear, and your site continues to work well in response because it was built with a solid operational foundation instead of being built with something that has a cute-but-heavy GUI on the backend, don’t they benefit? It looks to me like Chris has unfortunately conflated the needs of end-users with the needs of site developers.
Also, I’d like to take my hat off to the organization that landed the $18M contract to migrate recovery.gov into Sharepoint. That’s a lot of money for a site built using tables in HTML and containing leftover hidden cruft like “this Web Part Page has been personalized. As a result, one or more Web Part properties may contain confidential information. Make sure the properties contain information that is safe for others to read. After exporting this Web Part…”
Interested in flushing your Ubuntu DNS cache? Note: I’m running Jaunty Jackalope as of the date of this post.
Well, Ubuntu doesn’t cache DNS by default. Your cache rests within your router, or your assigned DNS servers. You could restart your router, if you have access to it. Or wait until the time-to-live has expired.
You can install a local resolver that will cache DNS addresses, if you like. It will speed up your Web access slightly, since your Web browser will check the local cache first. I imagine the time you save will be measured in milliseconds.
Do that with:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nscd
And to clear your local cache, restart the service:
sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart
Are you creating a new password for every login you create, at every new Web site you visit?
Of course you are, because that’s more secure than just using the same password for e-mail, banking, hotel reservations, online photos, and chat.
So, you need a way to keep those passwords organized.
I recommend KeePass Password Safe. It’s very easy to use and works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
And if you want to keep that password file synchronized with the other computers you might use (for example, your home computer, and a laptop), you should try Dropbox. Here’s my referral link for Dropbox. That will give both you and me an extra 250MB of space when you sign up. Dropbox will transparently keep your files synchronized between any number of computers, and will keep file revisions as well.
Can’t beat the command line for flexibility and power in accomplishing system administration tasks. Here’s one way to recursively list the filesizes and full paths of files with a particular extension from the command line:
nice find . -name "*.swf" -type f -print0 | xargs -0r ls -skS | less
This is a succinct way to say:
“Show me all Flash files in the current directory hierarchy, descending to unlimited depth. Print the full filename on standard output followed by a null character. Send each filename in turn to the ‘ls’ command, which will look up each file’s size and print that in 1K blocks followed by the filename. (If there aren’t any results from the first command, don’t even run the ‘ls’ command, since that will just give us a list of all the files in the current directory.) Finally, send all that output to the ‘less’ command, which will allow me to page through and view it easily.”
EDIT: Added -r switch to xargs command to ensure we don’t see a list of all files, if the first ‘find’ command doesn’t find any. That sort of thing could be confusing.
I recently came upon a New York Times Magazine article by Virginia Heffernan regarding Twitter’s “claustrophobic” feel; an experience where the constant chatter of strangers’ tiniest doings finally becomes mindless noise. At the center of that experience is an emptiness: the realization that we are alone in many ways.
The meanness, the smallness, of our connections becomes apparent. A deeper connection is independent of our Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Were I to imitate Bruce Sterling, I might refer to this as “poverty.” Where is the richness in life that comes from deep, satisfying relationships with others?
Using Twistori to observe Twitter’s emotional zeitgeist, Heffernan writes,
The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter…
“I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote another. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”
The inner vibe hasn’t changed. No matter how much or how long we distract ourselves with it, interesting technology is an empty shell. As an end in itself, it will never, ever satisfy.
You can use the “Crawl-delay” tag in your robots.txt file to slow down Web crawlers:
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 15
The time is specified in seconds.
Well, since you love that good ol’ command line, I’ll pass on to you something I found today out there on the Internets. scp (“secure copy”) is great, but it can’t resume a transfer that failed halfway in the middle.
What you can do instead, since you have rsync installed, is:
rsync --partial --progress --bwlimit=10 --rsh=ssh user@host:/remote/file/path /local/file/path
Works good!
