Tue, 07 Feb 2006
Chocolate Coffee Jolt
I'm not into coffee, but this
looks like it might be worth getting a taste for it...
posted at: 20:42
| category: /knowledge/recipes
| permalink
Firebug: DHTML debugger
Firebug looks
interesting. From the homepage:
FireBug is a new tool for Firefox that aids with debugging Javascript,
DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM
Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
posted at: 20:20
| category: /knowledge/software/firefox
| permalink
Fri, 27 Jan 2006
Multiuser Screen
So, you have two people who want to share a common terminal, but they don't
want to (or can't) bang on the same keyboard and peer at the same screen.
Multiuser screen to the rescue!
You have two users, userH and userG, and one relevant machine,
hostH. Both users have a terminal window on hostH (because both
users have SSHed in, or one is on the local console, or whatever).
Requirements: ensure that the terminal window is the same size in both
cases, and that the screen binary on hostH is SUID root.
UserH (the 'host' user) runs the following:
screen -S <some name>
UserH will then have a running screen session named "<some name>",
and must then enable multiuser and allow the other user to connect by
typing the following in their screen session:
CTRL-A :multiuser on
CTRL-A :addacl userG
Now userG can run the following in their terminal:
screen -r userH/
And now both users are in a common screen session. Both of the users'
keyboards will enter characters, so have some sort of out-of-band mechanism
for collision avoidance. Either user typing 'exit' will quit the screen
session. Remember that the session is running with the permissions of
userH (who started the screen session), so don't do this with people you
don't trust to peek at your pr0n stash.
posted at: 11:35
| category: /knowledge/software/screen
| permalink
Fri, 06 Jan 2006
Disable source browser in Trac
Since I'm not a subversion user particularly (and some of my Trac uses thus
far aren't for code anyway), I want to disable the Browser tab in my Trac
UI.
Simply add the following to your trac.ini file:
[components]
trac.versioncontrol.* = disable
And then restart tracd (if you're using it).
Ref: The TracIni page in the Trac wiki, the [components] section. Specific
LHS for the line comes from the "About Trac" Plugins subpage.
posted at: 20:30
| category: /knowledge/software/trac
| permalink
Thu, 27 Oct 2005
Creating System Users in CFEngine
On many cfengine-managed systems, you need to be able to create users for
local purposes. Jamie Wilkinson,
CFEngine guru extraordinaire, does it like this:
For system users:
groups:
user_X_exists = ( ReturnsZero(/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/id -u X >& /dev/null")
)
shellcommands:
!user_X_exists.redhat::
"/usr/sbin/useradd -r -c X -s /sbin/nologin -d / -M -g nobody X
!user_X_exists.debian::
"/usr/sbin/adduser --system --gecos X --shell /bin/false --home /
--no-create-home --disabled-login --disabled-password --group nobody X"
I do it with macros, so I don't have to type all that crap for every system
user I need, and so things like home directory and default group can be
changed easily.
In a perfect world, this idiom would turn into a users: section, but alas
I've not yet had the time to write a patch.
For humans, I use LDAP, and cfengine just takes care of configuring the auth
system.
Michael Chesterton, on the other hand, prefers the modular approach:
module:users
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/getent passwd |\
/usr/bin/awk -F: '{print "+user_" $1 "_exists"}' |\
sed 's/-/_/g'
control:
AddInstallable = ( user_user1_exists user_user2_exists )
actionsequence = ( module:users shellcommands )
shellcommands:
!user_user1_exists.redhat::
"/usr/sbin/useradd -r -c X -s /sbin/nologin -d / -M -g nobody X
...
It seems to work without addinstallable, but the docs say to use it, so
I do, otherwise there is a little less typing.
posted at: 13:45
| category: /knowledge/software/cfengine
| permalink
Tue, 20 Sep 2005
Automated GUI unit testing
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 13:27:31 +0530
From: Nagappan
To: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
Subject: Linux GUI Automation testing tool
Hi,
GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project (GNU/LDTP) is aimed at producing high
quality test automation framework and cutting-edge tools that can be
used to test GNU/Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the
"Accessibility" libraries to poke through the application's user
interface. The framework has tools to generate "AppMap" by reading
through the user interface components of an application. The framework
also has tools to record test-cases based on user-selection on the
application.
GNU/LDTP core framework uses "AppMap" and the recorded "test-cases" to
test an application and gives the status of each test-case as output.
As of now, GNU/LDTP can test any GNOME application which are
accessibility enabled, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, any Java application
(should have a UI based on swing) and KDE 4.0 applications based on QT
4.0 (based on the press releases by KDE).
We encourage you to join the project and help us to create robust,
reliable and stable test tool/framework for Linux Desktops.
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/Main_Page
posted at: 10:56
| category: /knowledge/development
| permalink
Fri, 09 Sep 2005
Remote-enable Terminal Services
Presumably only XP machines...
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/05/04/serverhacks_remote.html
posted at: 11:10
| category: /knowledge/software/windows
| permalink
SugarCRM: Concepts
(Distilled from
http://www.sugarcrm.com/home/Sugar_Suite_Documentation/189/)
- Activities
Offers the ability to create or update scheduled activities, or to
search for existing activities. By managing Activities within the
context of an Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, or Case, the true
value of Sugar Suite comes to light. Sugar Suite allows you to
manage the myriad of calls, meetings, notes, emails and tasks that
you need to track in order to get your job done.
- Tasks are for tracking any action that needs to be managed to
completion by a due date.
- Notes allow you to capture note information as well as upload
file attachments.
- Calls allow you to track all of your phone calls with leads
and customers.
- Meetings are like calls, but also allow you to track the
location of the meeting.
- Emails allow you to archive sent or received email messages.
If you use Microsoft Outlook, you can quickly archive email
messages with SugarCRM.s Outlook Plug-In.
- Contacts
Contacts are the people with whom your organization does business.
As with accounts, Sugar Suite allows you to track a variety of
contact information such as title, email address, and other data.
Contacts are usually linked to an Account, although this is not
required.
- Accounts
Accounts are the companies with which your organization does
business. Sugar Suite allows you to track a variety of information
about an account including website, main address, number of
employees and other data. Business subsidiaries can be linked to
parent businesses in order to show relationships between accounts.
- Leads
Leads are the people or companies with whom your organization might
do business in the future. Designed to track that first point of
interaction with a potential customer, leads are usually the
hand off between the marketing department and the sales
department. Not to be confused with a contact or account, leads
can often contain incomplete or inaccurate information whereas
contacts and accounts stored in Sugar Suite are core to many
business processes that require accurate data. Leads are
typically fed into the Sugar Suite system automatically from
your website, trade show lists or other methods. However, you
can also directly enter leads into Sugar Suite manually.
- Opportunities
Opportunities track the process of selling a good or service to a
potential customer. Once a selling process has commenced with a
lead, a lead should be converted into a contact and possibly also an
account. Opportunities help you manage your selling process by
tracking attributes such as sales stages, probability of close, deal
amount and other information.
- Cases
Cases are the handoff between the sales department and the customer
support department. Cases help customer support representatives
manage support problems or inquiries to completion by tracking
information for each case such as its status and priority, the user
assigned, as well as a full trail of all related open and completed
activities.
posted at: 11:10
| category: /knowledge/software/sugarcrm
| permalink
Nagios/RT integration
It's really handy to be able to automatically generate tickets in RT when
Nagios detects a problem. Complicating things slightly is the fact that
Nagios has a bit of issue management built-in (notifications and
acknowledgements) but not nearly enough to make it an RT replacement.
So, instead, we get this. It's a patch to Nagios to make it work better
with RT. Probably not perfect workflow for everyone, though.
http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/2005-June/031775.html
posted at: 11:10
| category: /knowledge/software/nagios
| permalink
Nagios/RT integration
It's really handy to be able to automatically generate tickets in RT when
Nagios detects a problem. Complicating things slightly is the fact that
Nagios has a bit of issue management built-in (notifications and
acknowledgements) but not nearly enough to make it an RT replacement.
So, instead, we get this. It's a patch to Nagios to make it work better
with RT. Probably not perfect workflow for everyone, though.
http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/2005-June/031775.html
posted at: 11:10
| category: /knowledge/software/rt
| permalink
