Tip

The new Google Analytics interface is quite nice if often annoying. One of the many issues I have been having with it is linking the Adsense account for one particular domain to its equivalent Analytics account. Most of the help documentation is for the previous version of the Analytics interface and the newer docs are not terribly helpful at all. The latter simply keeps asking me to go to the Admin tab and linking the Adsense account by clicking on it or something trivial like that.

Since it wasn't working well enough in Eclipse, I had to muddle around for a solution for the command-line. I found the one below and it's nifty:

Deleting a branch:
git push origin :mybranch

Deleting a tag:
git push origin :mytag

IOW, the syntax is identical for both tags and branches.

Cheers!

If you're trying to get your site to post tweets to Twitter using the Twitter module and if, in the process of authorising the application, you end up with a message asking you to go back to your site and enter a provided PIN number, then you are a bloody idiot.

Just as I was.

After my upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04/Precise Pangolin, I found that while KTorrent worked, it was buggy as right-clicking on torrents did nothing. I blamed this on a configurational mishap during the upgrade and lived with it as I could do perform most operations using the main menu or the toolbar buttons. However, with most sites moving away from .torrent files and toward magnet links, I found that KTorrent wasn't playing nice with the magnet URIs.

I needed to upload the contents of a lengthy log file to a site earlier today. There was no option to simply attach the file. I was instead asked to just paste its contents. I suppose that I could have opened the file in an editor like Kate and copied its contents to the clipboard. But I became curious as to the possibility of accomplishing this from within the terminal. A little googling revealed the existence of a utility named xsel for this very purpose.

So I tried updating one of my boxen running the Lucid Kubuntu LTS to the new Precise Pangolin beta. During the upgrade, I received an error message stating that adobe-flashplugin could not be upgraded. I ignored it and continued with the upgrade and all went swimmingly. Once the upgrade was completed and I had rebooted, when I tried to run an apt-get update, I ran into an error with respect to the adobe-flashplugin package. When I tried to remove it, it did not work. As a stop-gap measure, I removed a number of packages that depended on it including Firefox and sun-java6.

Rather than use images with transparencies, it is often preferable to replace transparent pixels with a suitable background colour.

In ACDSee 4, the background colour of transparent PNG files (or any other image file that supports transparency) is by default set to black. There is no immediately apparent option whereby you can change this colour and then save the file as a JPG or similar. After some asking around, I was told that while it is possible to customise this colour, it's a bit of a pain. Here's how:

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

A note to myself on how to force-sync my really outdated master branch with an active branch. This is taken from this excellent post:

git checkout -b tmp origin/upstream
git merge -s ours downstream
git checkout downstream
git merge tmp
git branch -D tmp

where upstream is the branch whose commits we want and downstream is the branch we want to merge into.

If you've been working with Linux terminals for a while, you've invariably found that viewing a binary file tends to output a lot of hieroglyphic nonsense (when all you want to do is check its header) and for some petty collateral damage, rapes your screen by changing your command prompt and window title to more of the same gibberish. While a lot of people (*raises hand*) simply accept such rowdy behaviour as one of the vagaries of life and simple open a new terminal window or similar, this - as I found out a few minutes ago - can be fixed.