kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: howto

Adobe Air on Ubuntu 11.04 x64

I was having a devil of a time trying to get TweetDeck to even install under Ubuntu 11.04 until I came across this fantastic tutorial by deepok1968 on YouTube. The problem boils down to the Adobe Air installer not being all that happy with x64 systems in its native state.

If you visit the video page you can get a copy of the commands that he uses. I stuck them in a bash script so that I can re-use them if I need to do the install again.

Now I just need to figure out how he got that wicked looking OSX style dock…

Creating ISO Images from the OSX Command Line

A super fast way to create ISO images (or any kind of bit for bit copies) from the OS X (or linux, or unix) command line is to use the DD command. This isn’t without it’s risks since the DD command will duplicate byte for byte all data from one location to another, but once you’ve found the necessary information you can easily replicate data.

I needed to create a copy of my Windows XP installation CD to use for setting up new virtual machines. Since it’s quicker to install VMs from an ISO image rather than from the installation media I wanted an ISO of my CD. The built in OS X disk utility can make this work… in theory. My copy of disk utility (on Snow Leopard) didn’t want to recognize the CD. So I turned to my command line knowledge.

I should also note that before you can read the CD using DD, you will need to unmount it:

sudo umount /dev/disk1s0

You’ll be prompted for your administrator password, then you’re in business.

To create an image of a CD (or DVD or anything else…) use the following:

dd if=/dev/disk1s0 of=/Users/kdmurray/Desktop/WindowsXP.iso bs=64k

  • if= input file, in this case our Windows XP CD
  • of= output file, the actual ISO file you want created
  • bs= block size, the size of chunks the tool will work with

I did a few speed tests at 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, 256k and 1M and found that the 64k seemed to be the ideal block size on my machine. This will vary by CPU, and possibly by hard drive controller, so do a few contolled tests first. To do a test, start the copy process, then stop it after 20-30s (ctrl-c). Whichever one copied the most in 30s is the one you should use.

That’s all she wrote, folks. Happy command-lining. :)

Mac Tip: Showing All File Extensions

Finder Preferences in OS XOK, for many of you out there, this is probably so basic you didn’t even need to search for it.  That said, I figured I’d post it anyway (partly because I’ve been so lax about blogging recently).

If you’ve ever wanted to have OS X show file extensions for all files, all the time, it’s a very simple process.

  1. Click on any finder (or the desktop)
  2. Select Preferences from the Finder menu
  3. Click on the Advanced button
  4. Check off the Show all file extensions box
  5. Close the Finder Preferences window

Voila! All is revealed.  Wasn’t that easy?  It probably took you longer to read this than to actually make the change. :)

Disable Anonymous Edits in MediaWiki

It didn’t take me forever to find this, but I felt it was simple enough that it bore re-posting.  If you’ve ever wanted to disable anonymous editing of articles in a mediawiki-based wiki (the ones that look & feel like wikipedia…) there’s a simple one-line fix:

In your LocalSettings.php file, add this to the bottom: #Disable Anonymous Editing $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

It should be noted that this fix is for MediaWiki 1.5 and later. If you want some ideas on additional things that you can do with MediaWiki security, check out the MediaWiki Manual.