In this article, I'll show you how to enable hibernate support in Ubuntu 14.04 ("Trusty Tahr") by making a "Hibernate" menu entry appear in Unity's global system pulldown menu. The Ubuntu developers disabled this a couple of years ago because hibernate didn't work reliably on all systems - proceed at …
read moreRemote-Controlling a Sonos Device Using Python
I couple of months ago I bought a Sonos Play:1, a pretty cool wireless speaker that comes with free controller apps for major platforms (Android, Windows etc.). To give the speaker access to my music collection, I hooked up a USB drive to my home router and shared the …
read moreQuick Tip #6: Triggering Actions on File Close
Sometimes it's useful to trigger an action after a file is closed. Suppose you started a lengthy download on your notebook and you want to suspend it as soon as the download is done. There are several ways to achieve this.
If you started the download using a web browser …
read moreSetting Up a SOCKS Proxy Using OpenSSH
Web browsing on a public Wifi network is a security risk as it's quite simple to capture network traffic. Even if you only connect to SSL-protected sites, people can still find out which web sites you're accessing. Fortunately, there is a quick way to protect your privacy - all you need …
read moreMirroring an Apt Repository
When setting up a Hadoop cluster using Debian packages, it's often useful to work with a local mirror. In this article, I'll walk you through creating an apt mirror for Cloudera's Hadoop distribution.
There's quite a few advantages in having a local mirror, all of which should be familiar to …
read moreSetting Up a Web Proxy with Squid
Setting up a Squid forward proxy can be a pretty daunting task since Squid is an extremely flexible piece of software. In this article, I'm going to provide a minimal non-caching, authenticated configuration. I have tested this with Squid 3.1.12 on Ubuntu 13.04, but with minor adjustments …
read moreInstalling Ubuntu 13.04 on my Dell Precision M65
A few days ago I bought a larger and faster disk for my Dell Precision M65 notebook. If it wasn't for the new disk, I would have never tried the latest Ubuntu (13.04, aka "Raring Ringtail"), because 12.04 worked fine for me. Feature-wise I haven't noticed a lot …
read moreQuick Tip #5: Navigating in Source Trees
I often move around in checked out Subversion or Git source trees on a Bash command line. Directory structures tend to get quite deep (especially in Java projects), so one problem keeps coming up frequently: Changing back to the base directory of the source tree. Typing "cd .." ten times is …
read moreGetting Started With Kerberos
Recently, I have been playing with Kerberos, a popular Single Sign On system (SSO) that is used in many large organizations. My first contact with Kerberos has been at university in a network security course, but that only covered the cryptographic part, not the more practical issues like setting up …
read moreUndoing Things With Git