techie : blog : stuff

If you are like me and use firefox, you may have recently noticed that Ctrl-U doesn't delete the content of a box, rather it shows you the source to the page you were about to navigate away from. Ctrl-W rather annoyingly closes the window, and Ctrl-A doesnt go to the beginning of the URL. Well, there is a solution to this, and it turns out not to be the fault of firefox, rather the fault of Gnome. Gnome now defaults to some weird windows-alike keys rather than the finger macros that all unix users have programmed in (well, apart from those people who are so into VI that they have their shell using VI keybindings.

The solution is to go to the Gnome control panel -> keyboard shortcuts, thenset the Text Editing box from "GNOME Default" to "EMACS".

Changing Gnome to EMACS keys

Update: Alternatively, echo gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Update 2: For gnome 2.8 MozillaZine has an article on this: Emacs keybindings for firefox(Firefox)

Last updated: 12:59, 06 Oct 2004 [ /techie/blog/stuff ] Link..

Annoying IE click sound

It appears that if you reload a page with the javascript function "document.location.reload()", IE does not make that anoying clicking sound.


function Update() {
  window.frames["FooFrame"].document.location.reload();
  window.setTimeOut("Update()", 2000);
}

Or disable it locally at:

Control panel->Sounds&Audio devices->Sounds->Program Events->Explorer->Start Navigation

Last updated: 18:31, 24 Aug 2004 [ /techie/blog/stuff ] Link..

Rackmounting checklist

You need:

cable ties
duct tape
wire cutters
patch cables
serial cables (if you have serial consoles)
camera (to take photos for your album/guiding remote monkeys)
Labeling machine/sticky labels
Permanent marker
screwdriver(s)

Before going:

Take some good photos of the machines, front/back pannels, and the motherboard* Make sure it will come up with the new IP

Last updated: 11:49, 18 Nov 2003 [ /techie/blog/stuff ] Link..

Traffic Shaping

From the OxLUG list. For people with cable modems.

That can actually be fixed by ensuring you throttle your outgoing connection to match your upstream bandwidth. The cable modem has big buffers to aid upload throughput but introduces big delays for interactive tasks while your packets transit the buffer. Under linux some varient of:
tc qdisc add dev eth1 root tbf rate 120kbit latency 50ms burst 1540
Will shape outgoing traffic to match your real upstream bandwidth. This slightly caps your upstream bandwidth per app, but keeps everything flowing.

Last updated: 09:48, 24 Jul 2003 [ /techie/blog/stuff ] Link..

Postscript Sickness

Mandelbrot in 4 lines of postscript. One day I will expand it so that it is readable. (It wasn't written by me)

/D{def}def/P{pop}D/g{.01}D/O{-.01}D/o{rlineto}D/J{index}D/M{mul}D/i{2 copy}D 0 g
90 90 scale/C{dup M}D 4{0 g 4{0 2 J 2 sub 2 J 2 sub i 1 O 0{6 -1 roll P 5 1 roll
i M 2 M 3 J add 2 J C 2 J C sub 5 J add 4 2 roll P P exch i C exch C add 4 gt{%e
exit}if}for P P P P setgray i moveto 0 g g 0 0 O o o o fill P}for P}for showpage

Last updated: 09:40, 24 Jul 2003 [ /techie/blog/stuff ] Link..

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