tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79563573425176112072026-02-18T02:20:56.819-05:00The AHA! moments in the life of a "computer guy"S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-22773268981507949492024-11-08T23:17:00.000-05:002024-11-08T23:17:46.059-05:00

 It's been a while since I've written a post here but I stopped by to pick up my script to add an X-Commit-Powered-By header to my git commit messages using a commit-msg hook and realized it's hopelessly broken now. If you want to read what it does, you should read the original post. I decided, it was time to update it for 2020s! This post covers the most interesting thing I learned while

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-58483588351773626852015-07-28T15:01:00.000-04:002015-07-28T15:01:36.802-04:00

Just wrote this commit-msg hook for git that just has me looking forward to each commit to the project.  It's only for OSX and its sole purpose is to add a tag that looks like a custom HTTP header which shows what song was playing when the user created the commit.  It only works with iTunes and can handle when iTunes is paused. Here's an example of how it looks: X-Commit-Powered-By:

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-11659248838741051632012-10-01T03:30:00.003-04:002012-10-01T03:31:08.278-04:00

I just ran into an interesting issue while testing a Rails application with RSpec.  A spec with the following line in it was failing:     ar2.should_not be_valid Here ar2 is a model that was constructed in a way that violated a logical constraint.  I attempted to make this spec pass by adding a custom validation method to the model as such: class Registration <

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-84163226058394602282012-05-23T15:10:00.001-04:002012-05-23T15:22:03.925-04:00

I recently worked with Raju Chauhan to setup encrypted storage for a database and related files.  He brought up an interesting requirement to see if the encrypted storage could grow with the data as needed.  I hadn't dealt with that specific requirement in the past so I figured I'd see what my options were.  Thanks for that requirement Raju; I don't think I would've

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-24762492102316575492011-10-15T18:19:00.000-04:002011-10-15T18:19:51.508-04:00

If you're seeing stuttering in any MKV videos you've ripped, try out wipe0wt's suggestion and turn off loop filters in VLC altogether.  It results in a dramatic improvement in playback quality.  The gist is: Open up VLC and choose Tools -> Preferences from the menu In the bottom left corner of the preferences window you'll see a "Show settings" area.  Make sure you change it

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-86766215952924358482011-08-12T18:37:00.000-04:002011-08-12T18:37:38.794-04:00

I needed to copy over a bunch of photographs to my EON NAS so I put them on a USB stick and attached the stick directly to the NAS to get the maximum speed while copying.  It turns out, while on Linux you type something like: mount -t vfat /dev/sdd1 /tmp/usbstick to mount the FAT or FAT32 filesystem from /dev/sdd1 to /tmp/usbstick, that command doesn't work on Solaris which is what EON NAS

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-63586921263774846692011-04-30T20:49:00.000-04:002011-04-30T20:49:27.403-04:00

Lately whenever I've had to rsync anything to my E O N-based NAS from my Windows 7 machine, I've had permissions issues on the NAS.  Specifically, any sub-directories I sync over are created with ridiculous permissions e.g. 0500 or something odd.  No files are able to be transferred until I manually login to the NAS and run a something similar to: find -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-37987407977089309892010-08-30T14:48:00.000-04:002010-08-30T14:48:26.873-04:00

If you're looking for an elegant way to generate CSV files from your index views (or search views or anything else for that matter) you should look no further than this post on StackOverflow by rwc9u. The gist is to add a format line in the respond_to section of the index method in your controller that caters to CSV.  Then create an index.csv.erb file where you can generate the actual CSV

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-40814712328411410452010-08-27T14:44:00.001-04:002010-08-27T14:45:40.016-04:00

I'm writing a bit of Ruby automation code which requires me to connect to multiple servers using ssh and gather specific information from them using a loop like so: hostList.each do |h| Net::SSH.start(h, "user", :password => "password", :timeout => 10) do |ssh| end end However, my test script kept dying at various points due to issues with the ssh connection to specific servers.

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-21271276261803029212010-05-03T21:11:00.007-04:002010-07-30T10:55:03.240-04:00

I just upgraded to Mythbuntu 10.04 which was released just a few days back on April 29th.  Since I was already running Mythbuntu 9.10 on my MythTV backend server I was able to upgrade it to Lucid using the well documented and fairly simple steps on the ubuntu.com site: $ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core$ sudo do-release-upgrade After upgrading the backend server I decided to finally

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-61764759027819565722010-03-20T01:17:00.000-04:002010-03-20T01:17:17.643-04:00

I deployed a minimal new Rails application I wrote over a period of a couple of hours and started testing it with valid production data.  It's basically a very simple CRUD application for a very specific audience.  Very basic stress testing (using Apache's ab) showed me that it didn't work well when requests were coming in with concurrency > 2. I realized I'd started the project

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-16490434477683117592010-03-15T09:04:00.000-04:002010-03-15T09:04:50.645-04:00

I needed to mount a Samba share from my windows gaming / media center PC to my MythTV backend so I could navigate to all my videos from a single location instead of having to worry about which server they were on.  To that end I shared out the Videos folder from my account on the Windows PC.  Since my user on the Windows PC is "Shahbaz Javeed" that presented a problem when trying to

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-84767148191885907852009-12-29T17:23:00.000-05:002009-12-29T17:23:56.974-05:00

It turns out that the CheckPoint VPN-1 SecureClient for Leopard (OSX 10.5) doesn't work on Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) due to differences between the two versions in the kernel and the way kextload works.Harald has a blog entry detailing how to fix the Leopard package so it installs on Snow Leopard and then fix the installed files so they properly run as well.  He alludes to a method to fix the

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-75437787269847586432009-12-20T00:58:00.000-05:002009-12-20T00:58:46.726-05:00

Apple says that only certain models of Mac are x64 compatible when using Bootcamp 3.0 that comes with Snow Leopard and possibly Leopard.  Imagine my surprise when my 17" MacBook Pro wasn't one of them.  I'd hoped their flagship portable would be on the list.  I got the somewhat curt error message "Boot Camp x64 is Unsupported on this Computer Model" and the Bootcamp installer

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-56138786304088147272009-12-15T11:52:00.000-05:002009-12-15T11:52:24.029-05:00

I recently went back to a Mac laptop and encountered an interesting issue.  I needed to make some changes to /etc/resolv.conf to reflect a modified search path and since /etc/resolv.conf is a symlink to /private/etc/resolv.conf I edited the latter file.  All was well until I connected to a different network.  Now my /private/etc/resolv.conf file, which clearly states that it's an

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-444386308372913842009-11-10T16:51:00.023-05:002009-11-11T08:54:37.636-05:00

I needed to write a script that would contact my Exchange server at work via IMAP and list all the messages in the Calendar folder. The idea was to see if it was possible to perform a one-way sync from the Exchange server to a specific calendar in Kontact. I was going to embed my IMAP password in the script - security hole, I know - but we have a password policy that requires the password to

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-2821114720304173892009-11-09T21:33:00.003-05:002009-11-09T21:36:52.363-05:00

With Mythbuntu 9.10 out (simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10), apparently the "Diskless Server" plugin for the Mythbuntu Control Center is missing. According to this thread on the Ubuntu forums, it's because the developer who was working on that has had to step away from it for the moment. However, manually building the diskless client/server setup still works. That same thread has all the

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-73735708766997174372009-11-07T23:05:00.004-05:002009-11-07T23:13:06.849-05:00

I don't particularly like the Seagate FreeAgent line of drives. Ever since I tried the first one - a 500GB specimen - and it died on me while still connected to a machine running CentOS. One moment it was fine, the next it was gone or remounted read-only. I figured out it happened whenever the drive went idle. I've stayed away from them ever since.Lately, however, I had to work with a FreeAgent

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-40940499246865353122009-10-30T11:20:00.005-04:002009-10-30T11:32:17.767-04:00

It looks like /proc/cpuinfo isn't the only way to find out whether your CPU is 64bit capable. In an effort to determine the most reliable way to find out this information I came across this page. A quick summary:If you see any output from the following command, you're running a 64-bit capable CPU.grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep ' lm 'The following command, if it exists on your system, will

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-33788923323555743602009-10-09T10:50:00.005-04:002009-10-09T10:52:06.380-04:00

I got a number of comments from sasha2048 about the modulo, division and remainder operators for the interval data types in a previous blog entry. After playing with all the suggestions I figured it would be best to devote another blog post to the revised code for the functions and operators. The main quibble sasha2048 had with the functions was their precision - they were only good for

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-41039415021447134902009-10-01T03:27:00.004-04:002009-10-01T03:31:17.405-04:00

As part of a disaster-recovery exercise I needed to make available an NFS share to various machines that needed it. It turns out the Solaris machine designated to be the NFS server had the NFS service deleted from it for some reason. We ended up getting an error while mounting the NFS share that indicated we needed to restart /etc/init.d/nfs.server on the Solaris machine.While looking for a

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-35455025412561266992009-09-19T21:28:00.004-04:002009-09-19T21:38:38.254-04:00

Avast! It be that time of yearrrr when all me pirrate chums and I gatherr 'rround and celebrate our inner pirrates! Arrrr! Thank ye Cap'n Slappy and ol' Chumbucket for this rroisterous day! Enjoy!The 5 A'sI'm a pirrate!More from the Pirate Guys here.

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-7261676379530663702009-08-23T14:51:00.003-04:002009-08-23T14:58:10.836-04:00

I ran yum upgrade on a development box running CentOS 5.3 and came across this error message:--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: gamin-python--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: libxslt-python--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: libxml2-python--> Finished Dependency Resolutiongamin-python-0.1.7-8.el5.i386 from installed has

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-56550566524088094812009-08-16T23:51:00.005-04:002009-08-16T23:58:57.597-04:00

I've never had to extract just a small part of a tarball before so it took a little bit of digging to determine how to do that. It's simple with other archivers e.g. zip, rar et al but tar requires just a couple of extra options to make it happen.Let's say you have a gzipped tarball that contains all your logs from /var/log with fully qualified paths. One thing to remember is that tar will

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7956357342517611207.post-16450986037267973592009-06-30T11:43:00.008-04:002009-07-01T23:46:31.980-04:00

I've been playing around with PostgreSQL 8.3.7 lately and while manipulating intervals realized a few key operators were missing. It turns out it's fairly easy to define operators in PostgreSQL as long as you have an existing function in the database. As a proof of concept I loaded up pl/PgSQL in a working database and created the following functions and operators:interval_divide (used to power

S Javeedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443697062900423307noreply@blogger.com7