Eric Covener’s Journal

Lots of people quickly realize that Lotus Notes has it’s own unusual take of the systems default web browser — the only option it provides other than some built-in mozilla-based browser that uses its own awful eclipse workbench.

http://biounix.blogspot.com/2010/03/setting-default-browser-for-lotus-notes.html finally clued me in to how to change this thing (it’s not in synch with gnome, kde, or any alternative in /usr/bin).

$ xdg-mime query default text/html
firefox.desktop
$ xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop text/html
$ xdg-mime query default text/html
google-chrome.desktop


And Lotus Notes complies!

You don’t have to do this yourself with LD_PRELOAD, although it doesn’t really save you much!

--wrap=symbol
Use a wrapper function for symbol. Any undefined reference to symbol will be resolved to "__wrap_symbol". Any undefined
reference to "__real_symbol" will be resolved to symbol.

This can be used to provide a wrapper for a system function. The wrapper function should be called "__wrap_symbol". If it
wishes to call the system function, it should call "__real_symbol".

Here is a trivial example:

void *
__wrap_malloc (size_t c)
{
printf ("malloc called with %zu\n", c);
return __real_malloc (c);
}

If you link other code with this file using --wrap malloc, then all calls to "malloc" will call the function "__wrap_malloc"
instead. The call to "__real_malloc" in "__wrap_malloc" will call the real "malloc" function.

You may wish to provide a "__real_malloc" function as well, so that links without the --wrap option will succeed. If you do
this, you should not put the definition of "__real_malloc" in the same file as "__wrap_malloc"; if you do, the assembler may
resolve the call before the linker has a chance to wrap it to "malloc".

at com.ibm.lex.lap.lapimport.LAPConstants.(LAPConstants.java:53)

.. means install libXp before using IBM JRE 1.4.2

My DNS had been pretty laggy lately, on the order of seconds, and playing on he command line with /usr/bin/host it would always hang between grabbing the A record and all the MX info.

I told my router to ignore the DNS servers in the DHCP response, and instead uses googles 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 servers. Zippy once again!

For some reason even my local dnsmasq didn’t get in the way of debugging, which it should have!

Move to chrome is looking more and more likely to succeed.

• My most important greasemonkey script runs natively in chrome (chrome downloads and installs them as if they were compiled into their own extension already)
• Chrome supports the same syntax for quick searches, although it doesn’t let you add them from right-click on a form
• whatever native totem embedding extension I use is working for e.g. xmradio online
• native flash plugin works
• adblock port

My only remaining problems are no forward-slash-to-search and some frustrating slow DNS inside of chrome. I eagerly await a hung chrome tab that doesn’t take down 10 others!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/07/rsa_768_broken/

The team managed to factor the 232-digit number that RSA held out as a representative 768-bit modulus from a now-obsolete challenge. They spent half a year using 80 processors on polynomial selection. Sieving took almost two years and was done on “many hundreds of machines”. Using a single-core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron with 2GB RAM, sieving would have taken about 1,500 years, they estimated.

Touching my stupid thinkpad volume keys had been boosting PCM mixer setting to 100%, which usually makes the system sound terrible. Stumbled on this Karmic bug/FAQ:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/420578

sudo sed -i.bak -e ’s/volume = merg/volume = ignore/’ /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/*analog*

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1933299&postcount=3

Open gconf-editor and go to /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard.
All the options are there. Uncheck the “enable” [this is the name of a key, not a value] entry to turn off all accessibility options (better safe than sorry, right?) The gnome docs make it sound like these options are all in the preferences menu for vanilla gnome, but ubuntu seems to have removed them. Pesky options…

This little bastard gets me all the time when I hold down shift for page up/down in a terminal, then locks me out of the keyboard until I can find and dismiss the popup.

OOTB on my desktop, tab-completion of a symlink to a directory doesn’t include the trailing slash unless you tab twice. This apparently comes from readline and not bash itself, and your ~/.inputrc can change the behavior:


mark-symlinked-directories
If set to ‘on’, completed names which are symbolic links to directories have a slash appended (subject to the value of mark-directories). The default is ‘off’.


$ cat /home/covener/.inputrc
set mark-directories On
set mark-symlinked-directories On

Read the Chrome comic if you care about technology or the internet.