I use auto complete on the command line all the time to avoid having to type the full name of a file. Love it. What I hate is how it's case-sensitive in bash, so I can't do "cd ~/desk" to go to the "~/Desktop" folder.
The fix for this is to use the shell input options file: .inputrc
Just set this one option and restart your shell:
echo 'set completion-ignore-case On' >> ~/.inputrc
Submitted by Armin on Wed, 2010-05-26 22:50
If you are using Dreamhost, or other similar shared server host, and are having problems with HTTP authentication then this is something to try. In my case I had a RAILS application where I was positive I was sending the appropriate HTTP Basic Authorization header (from PHP) like so:
$urlNew = curl_init();
...
curl_setopt($urlNew, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $strAuth);
curl_setopt($urlNew, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
...
Submitted by Armin on Thu, 2010-05-20 17:33
I ran into a bizarre issue yesterday. I had a Publisher 2007 document, with various different text colors utilized, and every time I exported it to PDF (using the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF) all the colors were lost. I ended up with black and white text.
Submitted by Armin on Thu, 2009-10-15 19:06
Everyone has their favorite code editor. Different editors suit different needs, but I personally like two of them currently: SlickEdit and Emacs. Both are extremely flexible and efficient editors offering:
- Column editing. If you aren't aware of this, you should look into it now. Here is a good column editing video.
- Macro recording and playback.
- Tagging.
- Efficient code viewing/editing (side by side pages, etc), and editing. I.e. mostly keyboard driven and customizable.
- Integration with debuggers.
- Support for many programming languages.
The big difference between SlickEdit and Emacs is that SlickEdit is commercial software and Emacs is open source. If you are on a budget Emacs is a good solution and also lets you run the editor from a console (emacs -nw), which is handy.
Submitted by Armin on Tue, 2009-06-23 20:29
If you want to set up a Flash video on your website, and you are using Linux, then this post is for you. I'll cover the steps one by one. Keep in mind that there are many different solutions and I have only documented one.
Submitted by Armin on Thu, 2009-05-28 18:55
If you are looking to register an Australian top-level domain (TLD) you have many choices for a registrar and host. Your first stop should be www.whatsinaname.com.au to compare the prices between all the different registrars. Obviously you want to select a registrar and host combination (they may be different) to meet your requirements for support, up-time, cost, and features.
If you already have a host set up (it can be anywhere, not necessarily an Australian host), and you simply want to buy the .com.au TLD and redirect it, I would recommend hostess.com.au. In my experience they were fast and efficient. The signup asked whether I wanted a redirect and what the DNS info was, so there was nothing to configure, and the paperwork (including invoice) was emailed to me within minutes.
Submitted by Armin on Wed, 2009-05-27 18:54
Digitally signing a jar file is one step among many before releasing your jar to the world. It can help you identify your program as one that genuinely came from you. It can also make it harder to people to alter the program (although not impossible). I recently went through this process with OBZVault where I integrated signing into the build process (Ant scripts generated by NetBeans).
Firstly you should do some background reading. There is a great article at onjava.com that covers Java vs .NET Security mechanisms. If you are familiar with .NET Security this is a very good intro into the Java world. The tool that does the signing of jars is called jarsigner, and key stores are created with keytool.
Next you need to:
Submitted by Armin on Tue, 2009-05-26 23:08
I regularly use Subversion (version control system) along with the Tortoise SVN shell client. I mostly stick to the command line tools, but its nice to have some shell integration occasionally. Tortoise SVN provides this integration well.
Just recently however I noticed a runaway process called "TSVNCache.exe" using up a lot (in my case one whole processor) of CPU cycles. I saw this happen on both Windows XP and Vista. TSVNCache.exe is the Tortoise SVN process that is responsible for all those icon overlays in explorer when you view your SVN repository. The process sits there and scans the status of your files and updates them with appropriate icons to indicate state (i.e. modified, added, etc). For some reason it started misbehaving on my machine and grinding everything to a halt (Tortoise SVN version 1.6.1).

Submitted by Armin on Tue, 2009-04-28 23:27
I run my own DNS server for my domain, and today I was trying to figure out why on earth my Ubuntu 8.10 machine would not persist the DNS settings I specified after a reboot.
Having my own DNS allows me to refer to machines on my local intranet via their machine name, not their IP (which is dynamic and allocated via DHCP). Any DNS lookups not on my domain get forwarded to my ISP's DNS. All this works fine for Windows machines on the domain, but Ubuntu wasn't playing nice. Every time I changed the settings via System->Preferences->Network Configuration, the details in /etc/resolv.conf would only stick around until the next reboot; at which time the network manager reset everything.
I initially thought this was an issue with Ubuntu, as threads like this seemed to indicate, but it turns out that the problem was with my DHCP server. I had configured my DHCP server to specify both IP and DNS settings to computers. These settings were overriding those specified on Ubuntu. So all I had to do to fix this was configure the DHCP server to include my DNS server in its list. Thats it, no custom DNS entries required.
Submitted by Armin on Wed, 2009-04-22 23:54
How many times have you used your code editor to look for some text and either didn't find what you were after, or worse yet - were told that it's not there when in fact it was? I bet this has happened to us all at some stage, and after some struggle you master the editor and life goes on, however I want to go over some basic tools/commands that you can always fall back to.
One of the most useful is searching through files. In the windows world you should all know about findstr. In particular the following variation:
findstr /snip /c:"string to look for" *.cpp
Submitted by Armin on Mon, 2009-03-30 20:02