The piece of software that I test at work has an option to enable debug logging to a file. Normally, I run with this enabled so that I have a record of what I did and any errors that I encounter. However, this file can become extremely bloated and if often hundreds of [...]

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I just finished installing VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) and ran into some issues.  During the configuration, when VMWare is compiling drivers for the system, I got an error saying “include/asm/bitops_32.h:9:2: error: #error only <linux/bitops.h> can be included directly”
From my reading this seems to be related to version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. [...]

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I work at a place that blocks most outgoing ports, including Google Chat (port 5222). While I don’t use chat much at work it is nice for me and my wife to communicate short messages quickly. Of course I’ve never let a little thing like a firewall stop me, so I figured a way [...]

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My desktop computer at work is basically held hostage by the powers-that-be. It is part of a NIS managed network, where all the user accounts and login info is on the network. I am running Ubuntu Linux 7.10 which defaults to having the audio device belong to the audio group. That’s fine [...]

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I recently upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu Dapper to Ubuntu Edgy. In doing so I lost my sound. Mostly it’s no big deal, but there are times when I actually need to listen to some audio. After much poking around I found this guide. After following the first few steps and [...]

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I much prefer Firefox over IE, but my corporate Intranet was created only for IE and will absolutely not work with anything else. So, although my OS of choice is Linux I am forced to use Windows when I need something from the Intranet.
I’ve tried a few Wine helper tools designed to install Internet [...]

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After some annoyance at how fast the battery in my laptop drained once I installed Ubuntu, I finally found the answer.
Type:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
and answer yes to SUID the applet.

Posted in Linux 1 Comment »

Believe it or not this actually took some time to find, so I am posting it here for future reference. To do a find and replace recursively in Linux type:
 
find ./ -type f | xargs sed -i ’s/string1/string2/g’
 
That will replace every occurrence of “string1″ with “string2.”

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Character
Definition
$*
Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion occurs within double quotes, it expands to a single word with the value of each parameter separated by the first character of the IFS special variable.

$@
Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion occurs within double quotes, each parameter [...]

Posted in Bash/Shell, Linux 1 Comment »

Although there are about a million different bibliography formats for LaTeX, there are still times when you just need to customize your own. If you’ve ever looked at the bibliography definition files (.bst file) then you know that creating one from scratch is not something that you want to do. Fortunately, LaTeX often [...]

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