Tech

Setting up a network printer

jenny — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:59:44 -0800

Providing you have a working local printer using CUPS, it's quite easy to share it across a local subnet.

In /etc/cups/cupsd.conf on the CUPS server, add a line directly after this line:

Listen localhost:631

...using the IP of the server:

Listen localhost:631
Listen 10.0.0.2:631

In the same file, locate this section:

# Restrict access to the server...
<Location />
  Order allow,deny
</location>

# Restrict access to the admin pages...
<Location /admin>
  Order allow,deny
</location>

Renaming a printer

jenny — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:58:12 -0800

Occasionally, CUPS will magically choose a printer name for you that you didn't specify and don't like, and then not give you the option to change it. Fortunately, you can fix this by editing the config file:

sudo vi /etc/cups/printers.conf

Locate the offending line, eg:

<Printer Printing_Protocol>
...
</printer>

...and change it to something more palatable:

<Printer Canon-i960>
...
</printer>

Restart CUPS:

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart

411 Length Required

jenny — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:30:13 -0700

Was getting a 411 error response with the message Length Required when making an ajax call from jQuery... the unexpected solution is to pass in an empty data object, like so:

$.ajax({
  url: url,
  type: 'POST',
  data: {},    //  <- set empty data
  success: function(data, textStatus) {
    // do something
  }
}); 

Source: http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-en/browse_thread/thread/22828981cf...

Flashing a BIOS with an exe in Ubuntu

jenny — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:22:47 -0700

For step-by-step instructions, go read the mastermind's article, from which this is derived. This is mostly for my future reference. I was given an exe (M1330A12.EXE) by Dell and told to flash my BIOS with it. Right. Then I was given the world's most incomprehensible instructions on how to supposedly get it working with linux. Thank god for the aforementioned article -- the following worked like a charm.

Setting a CCK default value for old nodes

jenny — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:21:08 -0700

I added a brand-new cck field to a content type which already had a bunch of nodes, but previously had no cck fields. This new field needed to have a default value set for all existing nodes. Of course, editing an old node and saving it without making any changes would set an appropriate default value... but I couldn't manually do that for all the nodes.

UPDATE using JOIN

jenny — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:58:29 -0700

update content_type_message ctm join node n on ctm.nid = n.nid set
  ctm.field_message_recipientalert_value = unix_timestamp(date_add(n.created, interval 24 hour)), 
  ctm.field_message_senderalert_value = unix_timestamp(date_add(n.created, interval 24 hour));

From 12.2.10. UPDATE Syntax:

Reading a single character from stdin

jenny — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:56:52 -0700

Why there isn't an easier way of doing this, I have no idea. It'd be nice if this would work:

sys.stdin.read(1)

...however, because the file is a tty, nothing gets read until the user hits enter.

Enter getch. It's a utility written by Danny Yoo and stolen from a posting I found on google: ASPN : Python Cookbook : getch()-like unbuffered character reading from stdin on both Windows and Unix.

Description:

Paging output

jenny — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:19:57 -0700

Let Python determine the best pager available:

import pydoc
pydoc.pager(text)

This may pipe the text into an external program like less or more.

...or explicitly use the built-in pager:

import pydoc
pydoc.ttypager(text)

Source: http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t584112-paging-in-python-shell.htm...

Resolved: Logging to Firebug console breaks IE

jenny — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:05:15 -0700

The firebug console is great for debugging javascript -- but it's really annoying when you want to quickly check something in IE and can't without first removing all your debug statements to avoid a bunch of javascript errors.

Here's a handy log function which checks first that firebug is in use before trying to log to the console. The function is a no-op in IE.

log_debug = function() {
  if(window.console && window.console.firebug) console.log.apply(this, arguments)
}

log_debug('foo', 'bar', 'bash')

Setting up puppet on Debian

jenny — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:54:45 -0700

Debian seems to think the default puppetmaster port is 18140... but all the documentation I found and my puppet client running on Ubuntu says the default port is 8140. Strange.

Opening the configuration file /etc/default/puppetmaster and changing the last line to the right port did the trick.

PORT=8140

I also got the following error when trying to use my newly-signed client certificate:

notice: Got signed certificate