If you administer or program websites etc., you often find yourself wondering what the specifics of a particular website or its server are. For e.g., you might want to know if a server is running on Linux, or if a site is based on Drupal or Mambo. The following sites all assist in this endeavour:

I tried searching for something in Chrome a few minutes ago and found that my search was being handled by something sinisterly named Facemoods. Aghast, a few more checks confirmed that I had a toolbar installed on my system of the same name, the Chrome search engine was set to Facemoods by default and that I had an extension installed as well. A little more digging revealed that all this was jDownloader's fault as it installs the toolbar during its own installation process. Not good.

Removing all this junk involves the following steps:

Some people like to indent their code using TABs. I used to like doing this. I still think that it's a good idea. But circumstances have dictated for the past several years that I need to indent using spaces instead. My favourite command-line editor in Linux and text editor in Windows is VIM / Gvim (where Gvim is basically Vim with a GUI). To configure this editor to override its default and use spaces instead of TABs for indentation, perform the following steps:

Today's Song of the Day is a track from the Cowboy Bebop! OST, off the disc titled No Disc. The song is heavy and yet sounds like a decidedly odd pot-pourri of speed metal, surf, punk and pop all mixed together in a batter of parody. The result is quite hilarious. However, the clincher is the lyrics (attributed to Gabriela Robin) which are included at the end of this post.

I had to reinstall W7 yesterday and after some initial setup shenanigans, I found that the best feature of Windows 7 - the Start Menu program search field - was missing. These things are usually sorted via the Customize option which can be reached by right-clicking the Start Menu. However, I could find no option for the search field. After much hemming and hawing around, I decided to retrace my steps during the initial setup that I did and wonder upon wonder, organised strategies do work!

I've previously written a short tip on how to perform batch rename operations using ls, sed, and xargs. One of the issues with xargs is that it breaks down when dealing with filenames which include spaces as it assumes that each word in the filename is a separate argument. Looking around on the Internet threw up a number of solutions mostly utilising find and xargs with the -print0 and -0 switches respectively.

If you've upgraded Drupal recently and noticed that the admin page is empty and returns a You do not have any administrative items error message, then this basically means that your menu table is a little wonky. Another tell-tale sign that you've got the same problem as I did is that the admin page will have the title, Administer rather than Administration. Fixing this is pretty straightforward, if a little painstaking. To do so, make sure that the Menu module is enabled and perform the following steps:

If you ever run into a git-receive-pack not permitted error when using Git, chances are that it's a configuration issue on your end. In my case, I had cloned the repository using via https (which required authentication). However, pushing failed with the aforementioned error. This was due to the fact that I was only allowed to push via SSH. Therefore, once I changed the protocol in the configuration for my checkout, all was well again.

So, if you, like me, have to resort to PuTTY sometimes to SSH into a Linux box, I'm sure that you have also subjected yourself to much gnashing of teeth at the lack of a Windows solution to password-less logins into your server. For the uninitiated, password-less SSH allows you to log into a server without manually authenticating yourself.

Finding all the members of a group is an occasional requirement and while there are a number of ways to do this by parsing the /etc/group and /etc/password files, Debian/Ubuntu come with a simpler solution that performs all this skulduggery for you. This is the members function that can simply be installed using sudo apt-get install members . Once this is done, members of a group named foo can be listed using:
members foo.