I finally found the problem!

When dragging and dropping text inside the guest VM I was dragging outside the VMWare container. This is what caused the problem.

To fix it so that never happens again I’ve disabled the ability to Drag & Drop from the guest. You can set this in your virtual machine settings, under Options > “Guest Isolation”.

There must be a better way!

There is!

Setup a custom search engine in Chrome like this:

1. Click the wrench icon
2. Click on Preferences
3. Click on Manage Search Engines
4. Scroll to the bottom
5. Add a new search engine with these fields:
   1. Google Instant
   2. !
   3. http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky

Bam!

Now you can do an I’m Feeling Lucky search just by hitting the exclamation point, a space, and then the keyword. Like this:

! ruby arrays

If you ever have that problem try this to fix it:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
2. Press Esc.

This worked great for me. Your results may vary!

By the way: Thanks Microsoft for yet another reason to use a Mac instead of a PC.

Source: superuser.com

It was driving me nuts, but thanks to this website I was able to finally find the answer:

1. Open task manager on the PC
2. Kill the rdpclip.exe process
3. Run the program rdpclip.exe from the CLI or close and reconnect the RDP session.

Update: After the break is a script that will automatically kill and restart rdpclip.exe.

rsync -av --force --delete --stats --size-only -e ssh --exclude="ethumbs_vista.db" --exclude="Thumbs.db" --exclude=".DS_Store" --exclude="iTunes\ Library.xml" --exclude="Mobile\ Applications/*" --exclude="Movies/*" --exclude="TV\ Shows/*" ~/Music/iTunes/* /Volumes/itunes

Thanks to MacRumors for the base of this command.

Now you can! This single command will grab the last X lines from a remote file, remove any ANSI color codes, and then compress the output right on to your local computer.

Just replace the green text with your information and you’re all set.

ssh username@my.server.com "tail -n 3000 /var/log/mylogfile.log | sed -r 's/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}((;[0-9]{1,3})*)?)?[m|K]//g' | bzip2" > /my/local/file.log.bz2

The log will be trimmed, cleaned, and compressed all on the remote server before transport.

RVM let’s you install multiple Ruby versions side by side. You can easily install a new ruby version just by typing:

rvm install ruby-1.8.7-p160

or

rvm install 1.9.2-preview1

And you can quickly switch between versions by typing this:

rvm ruby-1.8.7-p249

Note that you will need to install gems independantly in each of your ruby environments. But they make it easy with gemsets. Also note, that if you want to preserve your custom ENV settings on your Mac, you should place the bash source line into your .profile file and not to .bashrc as it notes.

Have fun!

Anyway, this script used to take around 18 minutes to complete a full copy of a bucket with about 2,000 keys. What a pain when I had to run this script multiple times for some testing!

So I finally got around to rewriting it today, and wow, what an improvement!

I upgraded the delete and copy operations to run multithreaded, and boy does it fly.

On my main bucket (with about 2,000 keys) it now only takes about 1.5 minutes to complete! That’s 12x faster than it used to be!

So if you are looking for a multithreaded Amazon S3 bucket copier or duplicator, check it out!

One problem with (at least) the latest release of right_aws is that it tries to connect to the Amazon API at the bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com. This causes the connections to the API to thrash when you are working with more than one bucket. I’ve taken out the code that makes that connection so that it will now only connect to s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name by default.

You can find the code on GitHub. And see extra documentaion here.

So what I want to do is stop having them automatically renew my credit card for Xbox Live Gold Service ($49.99/yr). I go to their website and poke around the account settings page, and come to find out that I can’t do that online, I have to call and talk to someone. Fine.

I call Xbox Live at 800-469-9269 and go their voice menu prompt system and choose the “Accounts & Billing” -> “Other account questions”. Apparently I went to the wrong place. After explaining what I wanted to do the CSR said I had to be transfered, I guess I am cancelling my subscription, instead of just turning off auto renew.

The first problem started here, it wasn’t too obvious where I needed to go in their menu system. The second problem was immeadate: the CSR asked me to verify my account information, screen name, email, address, phone, last 4 digits on my credit card.

He then transfers me to the billing who procedes to ask me the same questions again… waste of time there. Starting to get annoyed.

Now after I explain again that I want to stop the auto billing “feature”, he asks me if he can give me some Microsoft points to keep my subscription. Further annoyed.

I say no, that I don’t want to have my card auto billed. So he asks me why I want to stop the auto renewal, and I reply that its more than $20 cheaper to buy the Xbox Live Gold Cards then to have them auto charge my card.

So he suggests that I reduce my plan to the $7.99/mo plan because it is less expensive. Ugh! I just want to stop the dang auto renewal. So by this point I’m over it, I ask him to just remove my auto renew plan and be done with it.

About time. By the way, that wasted 15 minutes of time. Add another 10 minutes for this rant.

Thank you Microsoft! If that had been Apple or some other customer focused company I could have done the whole thing online in 30  seconds.