Recently my trusty Microsoft Windows 2000 computers requested to apply Security Update For Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 / 2008. At first I thought how kind of Microsoft to even include Windows 2000.

Boy was I mistaken! Horror of horrors, said updates are not compatible with Windows 2000! If you get bit too, here is how you easily go back:

Some time ago, I was lamenting that Bash did not have something comparable to PARSE found in Rexx / Open Object Rexx. Shortly I received a reply from Dallas Legan that he had built a tool capable of exposing the power of PARSE and allow it to be used within Bash scripts. That concept totally rocks! That tool may be found here:

"A Simple, General Command Line Filter In REXX"
http://www.scoug.com/os24u/2001/scoug010.parsetool.html

Recently I had found that it is far more reliable to connect CUPS on client workstations directly to CUPS on a Linux server rather than getting Samba involved. (Blog post here) With that in mind, I went searching for how to do the same for Windows workstations. Microsoft calls such capabilities "Internet Printing" within Windows, and it is very easy to have the same success with Windows machines.

For some time I had been of the opinion that sending emails from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) simply had to be more complicated than with Windows using Blat. Not so! Over the weekend I learned of sendEmail which offers equivalent functionality.

There is a nasty / annoying bug in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Linux which prevents attaching USB storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDD) and Flash memory stick drives. With the assistance of others in the Ubuntu bug tracker system, I just arrived at a little script which successfully corrects the Plug-n-Play (PnP) detection problem. It is as follows, fixext_backup.sh:

Note: You need to run this script as root (aka sudo the script).

I recently got a bit bored with my usual Clearlooks GNOME theme. I wanted something with non-rounded controls and dark blue active title bars. Here is what I came up with.

1) First I added a couple of Ubuntu GNOME theme related packages. Both are required as Mist comes from one and Gion is in the other.

2) Next customize the Mist theme as follows:

System \ Preferences \ Appearance \ Mist \ Customize...

Some time ago I found documentation lacking for how to successfully configure name-based Apache Virtual Host (Multi-Site) and allow one of the domain names to have mod_ssl (SSL) enabled while having only a SINGLE static IP address. The answer turned out to be... "You must set up your Apache configuration files correctly!" Here is what I discovered.

I recently switched my email client from Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x to Mozilla SeaMonkey (latest) as Mozilla Thunderbird 3.x is so undesirable. Things were working quite well. I found the place to set which component of SeaMonkey it opens to on start up and selected the Mail component.

However there was one annoyance! In Firefox when a web page has a mailto: link, clicking that link would not open a new SeaMonkey email window... I would only see the SeaMonkey program flash in the lower panel within Ubuntu Gnome desktop.

There seems to be a bug in Ubuntu in that when you reboot the system all remote CUPS printer connections are forgotten. This sounded like something needing a bit of scripting magic, so I went searching for how to accomplish that. Turns out it was quite simple actually. The utility lpadmin will be your friend to command line administer printers / print queues. The first lpadmin command attaches to the CUPS shared network printer queue via the IPP protocol, and the second lpadmin command sets the printer as the system default.

I finally tracked down where this illusive pop-up box comes from... at least this time. Searching the Internet for this text brought up many "we do not have any clue" posts.

Periodically affected workstation will pop-up a dialog box with the following text: "In order to use the desktop alert, you need to enter the login data for the following e-mail addresses:" and then list the Description of said email address.