I repeatedly ran into the following warnings while trying to update my Debian box using apt-get.

If you've ever worked with Debian or Ubuntu servers, you've very likely had to set up a firewall at some point or the other. However, any changes that are made are not saved and loaded if the server is ever rebooted. The following is a quick guide on how to get this happening:

(root or sudo access is required)

I often find myself in situations where I want to download a file from the command-line using tools such as wget. While there are many reasons to doing so, today I needed to do it due to the size of the file and the fact that I needed it on a webserver of mine. So instead of downloading it first to my desktop and then uploading it to my server, I wanted to simply download the file directly from my webserver via the command-line.

I accidentally unpinned my Windows 7 Firefox taskbar icon. While I was able to re-add it easily enough, clicking it to open FF resulting in a duplicate icon being spawned which was where FF was opened. I had to google a bit to find a fix and here it is:

I was wondering earlier why the predominant color of Islam is green. This led me to wondering why it's also associated with emotions like envy and jealousy. Here are a few of the fruits of my dig deep down into the "emerald mine of knowledge" that is the Internet.

From Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:

I was wondering earlier why the predominant color of Islam is green. According to Wikipedia, green is the color of the garments of the "inhabitants of paradise". But, this article in Slate provides a far simpler (additional) reason:

If you've ever visited a webserver's error page, it will usually state the error followed by information about the server. This will customarily tend to include the webserver software, its version, possibly information about some of the modules compiled in as well as the server's address and port. While this might look generous and helpful, it also allows bad guys as well as other parties to probe the server to find out what it is running as well as other details such as version information. This information can be used for nefarious purposes.

Every now and then I find myself subconsciously typing miniscule when I should actually be typing minuscule. I know that the latter is the correct spelling. Nevertheless, the former is so widely used nowadays that, and a lot of sources back this, it has become the spelling of choice when it comes to non-literary (colloquial) usage. Seeing it used so widely and so often is impressed on my brain and I literally can't help myself spell it that way when I'm in .. auto mode.

The new Google Analytics interface is quite nice if often annoying. One of the many issues I have been having with it is linking the Adsense account for one particular domain to its equivalent Analytics account. Most of the help documentation is for the previous version of the Analytics interface and the newer docs are not terribly helpful at all. The latter simply keeps asking me to go to the Admin tab and linking the Adsense account by clicking on it or something trivial like that.

Since it wasn't working well enough in Eclipse, I had to muddle around for a solution for the command-line. I found the one below and it's nifty:

Deleting a branch:
git push origin :mybranch

Deleting a tag:
git push origin :mytag

IOW, the syntax is identical for both tags and branches.

Cheers!