languor.us

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:

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}

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.

Windows 7, much as I enjoy using it (although the shine has worn off a li'l bit), has a few niggles. One of these, which really annoyed me was the sudden seemingly random spike in CPU usage that, once it occurred, never went away until I rebooted the system. The task manager did not list any application as consuming any significant attention from the CPU. However, the resource monitor (which can be reached from the performance tab in the task manager) provided the answer as I found the innocuous sounding "system interrupts" process consuming a steady 40-45% CPU.

If you, like I was, are alarmed at the number of console-kit-daemon-s being listed by htop, calm yourself. It is a misrepresentation of threads as separate processes. To get a better view of what's going on, select "Setup" in htop and under "Display options", check the "Tree view" and "Display threads in a different colour" boxes and save the changes.

Seeing as to how I listen to a lot of classical music, I was asked earlier to identify the classical piano pieces used in episode 12 of the anime, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (a recommended watch, btw)... I'm posting this to help others who are trying to find out the same thing...

The first piano piece played by Eugenie is Rachmaninoff's Piano concerto no. 2.

I'm pretty sure that this wasn't happening with the 9.x releases. But, I found that when I middle-clicked in Opera to get the scroll icon and scroll up/down a page, all that happened was that whatever was in my clipboard got pasted into the page, with the page trying to navigate to the clipboard text. In Opera's defence, the paste action is generally the default action across all applications in Linux. However, this also made this behaviour inconsistent across different platforms and even across other browsers on the same platform.

I had no idea how long the windows box I'm using has been up for... While on Linux, I could've just typed uptime to find out, it appears that m$ never expected their systems to be up long enough to bother with such a utility.

A little digging around and some experimentation unearthed the following methods for finding this out on XP:

1. Open a command prompt and type "systeminfo" and look for "system up time". This might require an updated system.

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.

While doing some routine cleaning up of installed programs on my Windows box, I ran into an entry that simply said "vjOcx1.9"... I had no idea what this was, nor was any related information terribly helpful. Some googling later, I found that that this is very like connected to TV4Africa, a p2p TV player that IIRC, I installed to watch snooker via the net (It didn't work).

Hope this helps somebody out there :)