The fix was committed to the ZSH source in Jan 2008, but still has yet to make its way into all the machines being sold by hosting providers.

If you get stuck with a box with the new SVN but the old ZSH you can fix this yourself by editing /usr/share/zsh/x.x.x/functions/_subversion and replacing

arg/:arg:

with

(arg|ARG)/:arg:

both places it occurs.

Voilà! SVN tab completion works again.

wget --output-document=- --quiet http://feeds.americanpublicmedia.org/MarketplacePodcast | grep mp3 | head -1 | sed -e "s/^.*\(http.*mp3\).*/\1/" | wget --input-file=- --quiet --output-document /tmp/marketplace.`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.mp3


If you’re running the Rails app on a Windows box you’ll first need the the DevKit toolkit in order to build gems:

Regardless of platform you’ll need to install the ODBC Binding for Ruby and SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Adapter For ActiveRecord. Add the latter (at least) to your project by adding config.gem "activerecord-sqlserver-adapter" to your environment.rb config section.

Configuration

On Linux we’ll need the FreeTDS libraries in order to talk to the MS SQL. You’ll need to add an entry to the freetds.conf file specifying how your database can be reached. Be sure to confirm the installation to make sure it’s possible to connect to the database.

To bridge the gap between Rails and FreeTDS you’ll need to add your database configuration settings to two additional files, /etc/odbc.ini and /etc/odbcinst.ini.

In /etc/odbcinst.ini add something to the effect of:

[FreeTDS]
Description = TDS driver (Sybase/MS SQL)
Driver = /usr/lib64/libtdsodbc.so
Setup = /usr/lib64/libtdsS.so
CPTimeout =
CPReuse =
FileUsage = 1


Make sure the Driver and Setup paths point to the actual libraries.

In /etc/odbc.ini add something to the effect of:

[DSN_NAME]
Driver = FreeTDS
Description = ODBC connection via FreeTDS
Trace = No
Servername = SERVER_NAME
Database = DATABASE_NAME


Then, in your database.yml file:

development:
adapter: sqlserver
mode: ODBC
dsn: DSN_NAME
username: USER
password: PASS


Customize the all-caps strings as needed, except the mode, which really is ODBC.

1) install Tomcat 5.5 using EasyApache (see this .pdf for details)

2) download and expand Tomcat 6 in /usr/local/jakarta

3) change the tomcat symlink to point to your new version (i.e. /usr/local/jakarta/apache-tomcat-6.0.XX)

4) from http://trulymanaged.com/blog/installation-of-tomcat6/:

#cd apache-tomcat-6.0.18
# cd bin
# tar xvfz jsvc.tar.gz
# cd jsvc-src
# chmod +x configure
# ./configure
# make
# cp jsvc ..
# cd ..

5) copy over any Host blocks from tomcat/conf/server.xml from the old Tomcat install to the new Tomcat install (you may or may not be able to set up new hosts through WHM)

6) copy over conf/workers.properties from the old Tomcat install to the new Tomcat install

7) start tomcat normally (/usr/sbin/starttomcat)

The /manager/html/ Tomcat manager application doesn’t load, though, so it’s not perfect.

If you ever need your old Tomcat back just stop Tomcat, flip the tomcat symlink back to the old install, and restart Tomcat.

Dreamhost has a handy “Google Hosted” feature where with a single click they’ll completely configure your domain to use Google Apps. You can then use Google Sites and the rest of the Apps suite for your entire website. Unfortunately, while Google Sites allows you to map a subdomain to a Google Site page, mapping naked domains (e.g. example.com) are not supported. If one maps the www subdomain to a Google Site then the traditional www.example.com will resolve, but example.com gives a Google-served 404 error. When using the Dreamhost “Google Hosted” feature all of the generated domain DNS records are non-editable, so you’re stuck with an A record which maps the domain to a nonexistent site.

My solution was to not use the Dreamhost “Google Hosted” feature at all, but to instead use the “DNS Only” option. I copied down all the generated DNS entries from the “Google Hosted” setup and manually recreated them, with one exception. The A record for the naked domain I directed to 174.129.25.170, which is the IP address of WWWizer, a free service which handily redirects any naked domain request the the corresponding www subdomain.

Now I have a site set up on my www subdomain with Google footing the hosting bill, and naked domain requests are seamlessly redirected to the www-based home page.

The Google Help page on the topic, at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143, is pretty weak. “If you require assistance making these changes in your domain host account”, they offer, “we suggest contacting your domain host.”

The change involves adding SRV DNS records for your domain. The records to be added are:

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

where gmail.com is replaced by your apps domain name.

Wikipedia takes a SRV record in the form

_sip._tcp.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 5 5060 sipserver.example.com.


and breaks it down thusly:

_Service._Proto.Name TTL Class SRV Priority Weight Port Target


Where:

• Service: the symbolic name of the desired service.
• Proto: the transport protocol of the desired service; this is usually either TCP or UDP.
• Name: the domain name for which this record is valid.
• TTL: standard DNS time to live field.
• Class: standard DNS class field (this is always IN).
• Priority: the priority of the target host, lower value means more preferred.
• Weight: A relative weight for records with the same priority.
• Port: the TCP or UDP port on which the service is to be found.
• Target: the canonical hostname of the machine providing the service.

Taking the first of the Google provided record definitions as an example,

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.

we have:

• Service: xmpp-server
• Proto: tcp
• Name: gmail.com.
• TTL: (none given)
• Class: IN
• Priority: 5
• Weight: 0
• Port: 5269
• Target: xmpp-server.l.google.com.

where, again, gmail.com is replaced by your Google Apps domain.

My DNS settings provider doesn’t offer a “Name” field while adding SRV records; instead they have a “Record/Hostname” field where the domain fixed but with the opportunity to enter a subdomain. This is usually not necessary with Google Apps, unless your primary Google Apps domain is actually a subdomain. For me I just left the “Record/Hostname” field blank and the “Name” was set correctly.

You can test that your new SRV records were created correctly using dig:

dig SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com


You should get back, in the ANSWER SECTION, just what the Google Help page listed for that service (with a TTL added):

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. 86400 IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. 86400 IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. 86400 IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. 86400 IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. 86400 IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.


If you don’t want to wait for the DNS updates to propagate you can ask your domains name server directly:

dig @69.28.203.75 SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com


Where 69.28.203.75 is replaced with the IP address of your domains name server.

:(){:|:&};:

ImgBurn is great for burning .iso files to a DVD. Just insert a DVD, choose your source file, and click the button.

DVD Shrink will create a 4GB .iso from a double-layer disk!

See:

http://lifehacker.com/5444274/five-best-dvd+ripping-tools
http://lifehacker.com/5446090/best-dvd+ripping-tool-handbrake
http://lifehacker.com/208866/hack-attack-one+click-dvd-rips
http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/CD-DVD-Rip-Other-Tools/DVD-Shrink.shtml
http://paininthetech.com/2006/04/30/how-to-back-up-a-dvd

For encoding for iPhone I like that HandBrake has iPhone presets. Just open the disk, select the preset, and click Start. When it’s done just drag the .m4v into iTunes, sync, and go.

tee is useful for redirecting stdout to a file, but what if you want to send the same output to another command too, like mail?

You disguise the command as a file, that’s what. Through process substitution you can say things like

echo "hello world" | tee >(mail -s "notice")

and have the message go to stdout and your mail program. You can chain process substitutions to do as many different things with the same output as you want.

Process substitution is supported in bash and friends, but not, as far as I can see, in sh.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/dev

A few PPAs I like are

• PPA for Ubuntu Chromium – Dev Channel
• PPA for Shutter Team