MS-Windows is extremely flexible. So one of the things you can do is delete your Start menu. It's a good way to prevent people from starting the "wrong" software. Now, without that menu and a few icons, what do you do?!

The Start -> Run menu is accessible using a Window key (held down) and the R key (W-R). This will open the Run window in which you can run all sorts of programs. It is a console reduce to its minimum! (Invented by Microsoft, thank you!)

I had Ubuntu 6.04 and there were many errors about Audio drivers and devices not working. I turned it off and that was it at the time.

Now that I have upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 (avoiding the bug in October Debug in regard to a huge error in generating an SSL key and all of that!), I thought I'd try again.

I use VLC so I tried to run with that. I could see the audio equalizer so I thought that it should be working and we should hear the audio... but nothing at all. And VLC would spit out an error about the pulse audio deamon not working properly:

VLC media player 0.8.6e Janus
[00000354] ...

Use at your own risk! These are links to other pages outside of this website:

• My AMake project
   
• JavaScript beautifier (to restore an ofuscated script!)
  The original can be found here: http://jsbeautifier.org/
  Other beautifiers: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Nov-16-1.html
   
• 7-Zip
   
• The SSWF project
   
• The odbcpp library
   
• Draw complet 3X models using XML
   
• Make your computer play solitaire!
   
• apt-get -- a useful tool to keep your system up to date, but no actual dedicated ...

I'm a Unix pro, but I still learn things every day! Today, this what I learned: ps -ef will not always show a user name. This is because the field is limited to 8 characters and if the name does not fit, the decimal number of the user is shown instead.

So ps does not show all users... and specifically that applies to hald and dbus-daemon. Beacuse the hald tool uses a small name but has a slightly different full name as haldaemon which is too long (9 characters.) And the dbus daemon tool uses the name dbusmessage (11 characters.)

That's it...

Well... I knew that a firewall could generate a few problems, but this one, I did not expect!

I just could not FTP anything from my FedoraCore box. I checked the source system firewall, tweaked all sorts of options in the vsftpd.conf file to no aval.

The error I was getting was this:

Error about a local certificate?!

The other day, I got a new certificate from godaddy.com. I installed the certificate by replacing the files and simply restarting Apache. I then checked in Sea Monkey and it worked great. Checking the certificate it told me "valid for another 3 years."

A few days later I got an error from eFax saying that our certificate could not be verified. Weird... I tried with wget and got the error! Hmmm... I tried again with SeaMonkey, just fine. Then I tried with FireFox, error too! The error with wget is like this:

ERROR: Certificate verification ...

Copying an entire partition to another when both are not of the exact same size (in blocks) can be tricky, especially if that partition includes special files such as /dev/hda and FIFOs.1

Yet, there are several ways to do so:

cp can be used, but I find it tricky to make sure that it ...

• 1. Note that was the case especially in the 90's. As of today, things have come a long way and there are command line options one can use with the cp and tar instructions to copy pretty much anything. You will still have problems with some files such as locks, though. But you should not have to copy them!

Since my last upgrade, I had many small things that went awry on my computer. From tsearch2 in a Postgres database to ownership of files to the following authentication problem:

root@mycomputer:~# su - www-data
su: Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info
(Ignored)
www-data@mycomputer:~$

Note that with su it ignores the fact. With cron it was not being ignored, so I'd get no work done!

That one, I was really not too sure what had happened. The upgrade asked me whether I should accept to (finally) change from apache to www-data and I agreed. The fact it that ...

Error 16

Today I got an error 16 with GRUB on one of my machines. This had happened before so I did not worry too much. It is just quite annoying.

Ubuntu CD

A Ubuntu boot CD has a cool feature one can use to rescue such a system (i.e. re-install GRUB properly.) More or less, boot the CD, select the rescue mode, let it do its things for a moment (after you select options like keyboard, etc.)

Drive Selection

At the time it tells you to select your drive, choose your boot drive (/dev/sda1 maybe? In my case, it was /dev/hda5.) The system says something like Which disk do you want ...