Leo on Tech

Powered by
WordPress

  • Migrating from Google Reader to Fever

    The perfidious vandals at Google will kill Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Accordingly, it is time to wean ourselves off Google dependence and find an alternative. Perhaps this will prove to be a good thing, as Google Reader has strangled RSS innovation through its monopolist, good-enough position much like IE6 once strangled the web.…

  • Fix VPN hostname resolution by flushing your DNS cache

    Sometimes when my VPN connection to work goes down, certain applications that rely on intranet servers (e.g. Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime) become unable to reconnect to their servers even after I reconnect to VPN. This is due to the operating system’s DNS lookup cache reusing the failed hostname lookup from when VPN was down rather…

  • mkdir -p is your friend

    mkdir -p is a command second only to touch in succinct utility. touch creates a file if it does not exist, or updates its timestamp if it does. It’s handy if you want to write to a file without checking for its existence, as otherwise you’d need to determine whether or not append is the…

  • Deleting duplicates in Google Calendar

    I’m not sure if it was Blackberry, Android, or Facebook, but something caused all the birthday events in my Google Calendar to have 36 duplicate entries each. This not only caused visual pollution but also resulted in me getting 36 notifications on my phone for every birthday. The first two apps I tried that promised…

  • TurboTax 2012 crashes on startup

    I had an exciting tax year (lots of RRSPs, bought a house), so I picked up a copy of TurboTax 2012 to help file my Canada income taxes. Unfortunately, TurboTax crashed on startup and running it as Administrator did not help. It turns out there is a known workaround involving copying some DLLs around.

  • Startup order of services on RHEL or CentOS

    The startup order of services on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and very likely other flavours) is determined by the numerical prefix on the symbolic links in /etc/rc3.d/ (for run level 3), /etc/rc5.d/ (for run level 5), and so on. When adding a service (chkconfig –add my_service –level 35), you can specify startup order by including…

  • Firefox 10 and Firefox 17 side by side

    An enterprise-y web application that I’m using does not work with Firefox 17, Chrome 23, or IE 9. Accordingly, I’ve done the usual dance and installed Firefox 10 to run side by side with Firefox 17. By default, you can’t open Firefox 10 while Firefox 17 is running and vice versa. There’s a way around…

  • cpio: chown failed – Invalid argument

    I ran into this error while installing the IBM Java RPM on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: error: unpacking of archive failed on file /opt/ibm/java-x86_64-60: cpio: chown failed – Invalid argument The issue is due to /opt/ibm being an NFS mount on the system. There are known issues with running the chown command on NFS 4.…

  • Pixel-pushing in canvas

    By way of avva (Russian), I was pointed to this excellent analysis of Notch’s 4kb Javascript/Canvas demo of flying through a 3d labyrinth: Per the Hacker News discussion, this is not necessarily the way you should be using canvas for 3d — that’s what WebGL is for — but seeing what’s possible with relatively simple…

  • Posting more frequently

    I’ve been really enjoying Rafe Colburn’s technical blog since he made his pledge to post more frequently. It makes a lot of sense for a technical blog to also have linkblogging with brief commentary within the same stream of content. I would argue that the appeal of sites like Reddit and Hacker News relates to…