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    Category: tech


  1. Cleaning up Windows Line Endings in Vim


    I have a file which has been edited in windows with an incorrect setting. All the lines have


    ^M

    At the end of each line.

    To search for these in Vim, you can type ctrl+v (to mean “take my next key combination literally”) then ctrl+m. To clean up …

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  2. Social Networking Sites Are Pointless


    Social networking seems to be the buzzword of the moment, MySpace and Beebo are apparently a bit last year and now its Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t really “get” it. I mean, its not that I don’t have friends. I do, lots of …

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  3. Open Office Font Shortcuts


    When typing a long document the other day with sore hands, I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for applying headings in Open Office. Here’s a quick few:

    ._ Font Shortcut
    Heading1 Ctrl + 1
    Heading2 Ctrl + 2
    Heading3 Ctrl + 3
    Body Text Ctrl + 0
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  4. Bash Idle Timeout


    I’ve set an idle timeout on the development server at work in an attempt to cut down the number of sessions that have been left logged in on unattended PCs. It was really easy to set up!

    You can set this in /etc/profile but I realised that ours …

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  5. New Look Google Analytics: The Dashboard


    Google Analytics have been migrating their users to a new interface over the last few weeks. I like analytics (something to do with an unhealthy fetish for statistics I think) so I’ve been pretty impatient waiting for my mail to come through. Anyway its here and I’ve been …

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  6. Gender and the Tech Community


    I could post a whole page of links on this subject, I’m a woman in IT and its not easy. The women I know in the area will already have read all of them anyway, so there’s little value in that.

    This one is for the guys. If …

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  7. Mysql Mishap


    Last week I learned a valuable lesson about backing up MySQL, it was this:

    • It is not enough to copy the files out of /var/lib/mysql or wherever if you want to backup your databases.

    The thing with copying files is that if the mysql daemon is still running …

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  8. Fun With Unix: MOTD


    I’ve been having fun over the last few weeks, writing about the fun things that you can do with Unix (see earlier articles about cowsay, fortune, mesg and go fish). This is the last in the mini series unless anyone has any other good suggestions for things that should …

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  9. Making your blog number one


    I’ve come across lorelle’s blog challenges before but this one caught my eye. The challenge is to come us with a search phrase that you are the top hit for in google. Here’s mine:

    cowsay house

    I think that pretty much sums up this whole site in …

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  10. Fun With Unix: Go Fish!


    Following on from the other articles in the fun with unix miniseries, today its go-fish. This is a game, from the package bsdgames and its addictive :) There are a bunch of other games in the package too but this has been a personal favourite for some years. Basically its a …

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  11. Steps to Configuring Users on Mantis


    Mantis is a rather good open source bugtracker. Recently I’ve been using it across a small team working on a number of projects at once, and its going pretty well so far. It is especially useful when someone is testing something and someone else is bug-fixing. Today I’ve …

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  12. Fun with unix: Fortune


    The old ones are the best, so they say, and this is definitely the case with fortune. At the command line, type “fortune” and see what you get. Mine read

    “Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don’t
    have a lucky day …
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