Tip

So here I was happy with my installation of program foo.exe under Wine in Linux (Kubuntu if you must know). All of a sudden, the program starts whining a little, wobbling a touch, and generally exhibiting wonky tendencies. While I could have uninstalled it and tried to reinstall it to see if that fixes the problem, there's a neater solution that is only available for Wine users.

If you run into the following error while adding a project into Eclipse from existing source using the New Project dialog,

Cannot create project content in workspace.

then you are very likely trying to create a new Eclipse project that contains Eclipse metadata files from a previous Eclipse project created at the same location. The fix for this is to import this pre-existing project into your workspace using the Import, General, Existing Projects into Workspace option.

A quick and easy way to join or merge multiple PDFs together on Linux (Kubuntu 14.10):

pdfunite toc.pdf chapter1.pdf chapter2.pdf book.pdf

This doesn't resample pages or any other nonsense like that either :) pdfunite is provided by the poppler-utils package which should already be installed.

If you want to do the opposite, i.e. split a unified PDF file into multiple ones, poppler-utils also provides the aptly named pdfseparate.

Hope this helps :)

Do you have a USB keyboard? Does it work fine? Does it also work fine once you boot into your operating system? Does it not work at all during the boot process before loading your operating system?

If your answer is yes to all of the above, then you've very likely been an idiot like yours truly and enabled the Fast Boot feature in your Intel motherboard's BIOS without reading the fine print.

If you see something like the following error message when you run a sed command:

invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS

then it (probably) means that your regex capture group has not been escaped properly.

So, if you are using a command like:

sed "s/foo(bar)[123]/baz\1/"

then it needs to be escaped like so:

sed "s/foo\(bar\)[123]/baz\1/"

In other words, round parentheses/brackets need to be escaped while the square brackets do not :|

Hope this helps :)

If you, like me, have the (off and on) pleasure of working with Unity3D (5.1.1f1), you are probably familiar with implementing cute li'l workarounds to get around the pesky li'l niggles that seem to plague the otherwise fun package. Today, I ran into an issue with the Inputfield nGUI component. From the looks of things, it doesn't like you playing around with its font size.

I had the misfortune of trying to install Microsoft's "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel" which creates, well, a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive that allows you to mount ISO images. There are a number of other programs that do this, but seeing as to how this was a M$ product, free, Window-7 compatible, and light of weight, I decided to give it a whirl. The README.txt that accompanies the installation file provides instructions for the manual addition of the vcdrom.sys driver to the Windows directory.

I was fiddling around with Unity3D (and C#) and I ran into the following error messages:

InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.
System.Collections.Generic.List`1+Enumerator[UnityEngine.UI.Toggle].VerifyState () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/List.cs:778)

and

Non-destructive healing allows you to "heal" the pixels of an image using a separate, dedicated layer so that you can undo or modify your changes at a later point in time. In (Photoshop and) GIMP, this essentially works by performing the heal on an empty layer using the Sample Merged option which allows you to perform the heal as if all the layers were merged together. While this works fine with the clone function, it is broken for healing in GIMP (2.8) due to this bug :(

Here I was simply creating a MySQL (5.5) table when suddenly up pops the following error:

#1071 - Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes

After a little trial and error, I found that since one of my VARCHAR fields was being used for a UNIQUE index, MySQL was basically telling me that it was using too much space. When I reduced the length of this field from its initial 512 setting to 256 & then 255, it still complained. However, reducing it further to 128 fixed the issue!