Windows 7: ping outputs a general failure message

Here I was, earlier today, simply trying to swap the default gateway of the Ethernet card of my Windows 7 box, and ran into the following peculiarity. First off, as soon as I swapped the gateway, my Ethernet connection went down. To investigate this, I popped into the command-line and tried pinging the new gateway only to run into the error message below:
General failure.

Configuring Samba share on Lucid

I performed a fresh install of Kubuntu's new distro - Lucid whatever - today. As per usual, there is no front-end to configure Samba and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. The following are steps that should walk you through a basic configuration on creating a share that can be accessed from Windows:

  1. Install Samba using sudo aptitude install samba smbfs
  2. Navigate to /etc/samba/

SotD: Dream Theater: Erotomania

Today's Song of the Day is Dream Theater's Erotomania off one of their earlier albums titled Awake. The album also happens to be one of my favourites not least due to the presence of this track.

Jojo's bizarre Bizarre adventure

For the last couple of days, I've been reading a manga named JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It's alright, I guess - decent premise with slipshod execution. But something that I initially perceived as humourous became disconcertingly distracting enough for me to post about it. This certain something is to do with the majority of the character names in the manga being named after western music artists.

Gmail's account suspension quirk

Earlier today, I set up a gmail account for an elderly acquaintance of mine. Due to his really forgetful nature, once I created his account, I logged into it and mailed myself the username and password. As soon as I clicked "send" however, I found that I had been logged out of gmail. Trying to log back in proved futile as I was met with a "This account has been suspended" message!

OOO Calc: Autofilter hiding rows after removal

Off late, I have had to use OpenOffice.org's Calc quite regularly. While it generally works quite well, it has a lot of wonky little bugs that can be quite frustrating. One of these has to do with the autofilter.

When using the autofilter, you will, on occasion find that once you are done using it and try to remove it, a number of rows, usually empty, will be missing post-removal. The following are steps/tools that might help you recover these rows:

SotD: Aerosmith - Boogie Man

The Song of the Day (as if I'm holding to my promise of updating this every day :S) is a rather simple but entrancing instrumental by Aerosmith. It's the last track on their Get a Grip release, titled "Boogie Man". I believe that it's based on a Fleetwood Mac song which I've never heard. But it's got lovely atmosphere and I dig the backing bassline muchly.

Luckily I speak Leet

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while.

apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

While trying to check the vhost configuration on my Kubuntu dev box, I had to run httpd -S. Of course, since ubuntu renamed httpd to apache (a bit like calling a Veyron a Bugatti), I had to run apache2 -S. This however led to the following error message:
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

Finding out CPU temperatures

Last week, I noticed that my computer was becoming really sluggish and the fans, extremely noisy. Seeing as to how I had an inkling that this was due to my CPU heating up or rather, not being cooled enough, and the fact that Windows wasn't telling me what the temperature was, I was in the hunt for a utility to report CPU temperatures in real time. I could, of course, check it via my BIOS. But I wanted a utility to be able to run under load.

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