March 26th, 2010 — unix
Problem:
I have a directory structure from one server that I need to mirror onto another server. The directory structure/tree is deep and contains hundreds of subdirectories. I do not want to spend hours manually creating the directory structure on the other server. I also do not want to have to back up and restore the content in the subdirectories.
November 22nd, 2009 — mac
How can we ‘stop’ macmail from automatically marking mails as read when we scroll through them? Answer is practically we can’t. A simple problem that’s very annoying.
There’s a work around. The so called ‘preview’ pane is, in mac mail, actually a ‘reading’ pane. Because it is a reading pane, your email is, obviously, marked as read as soon as it shows up in the reading pane. The work around is to close the lower window (so called preview pane) by dragging it’s edge down to the bottom of the page then mac mail won’t mark any selected messages as read. Still … very annoying and not a solution I want.
So come TruePreview (http://christianserving.org/project/truepreview) to the rescue. TruePreview adds a preference panel to Mail’s preferences that allows you to mark messages as read immediately (Mail’s default), never, or after a delay. It also allows you to specify these settings independently per-account, if desired. That’s just what I need … now mac mail is so perfect. Thank you!
October 1st, 2009 — mac, unix, windows
My job requires that I maintain a lot of ssh sessions to various servers for a long time. It is very annoying when you leave a session idle for 5 minutes or so and come back to find that the sessions is dead because it has timed out. The time out is controlled by the server itself or firewall. The time out value can vary. If you are lucky, you ssh session can stay up for hours but if you are unlucky, you can get booted out every 5 minutes. The bottom line, you need a mechanism to beat that unpredictable time out.
September 19th, 2009 — mac, perl
For some unknown reasons, CPAN on my macbook suddenly stopped working. This is the error I got whenever I tried to use CPAN to install a module:
Catching error: "Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen called at /Library/Perl/Updates/5.8.8/CPAN/Tarzip.pm line 122.\cJ" at /Library/Perl/Updates/5.8.8/CPAN.pm line 390 CPAN::shell() called at /usr/bin/cpan line 198
I found a lot of suggestions from googling for it. The best solution for my case was to remove all Compress::Zlib (Zlib.pm) from every perl libraries, manually and re-install a new one.
February 2nd, 2009 — windows
One of the default MS Outlook behavior that I really don’t like is its automatic marking of email item as ‘read’ after a certain time (5 seconds default) and when selection changes. When we converted to Outlook 2007, I had a lot of problems figuring out how to change that behavior. Last week, my Vista guest OS on my macbook’s vmware fusion had to be rebuilt and thus I had to reinstall outlook. Afterward, again, it took sometimes for me to figure out how to configure/disable this feature.
