Cubicle Generation

Disable SSH Known Host Checking

Nuri Hodges — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:49:29 +0000

We’ve all ran into this annoying message when using ssh to connect to more than one computer behind the same IP address.

Offending key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts

And we all know that deleting the offending line in that file will solve our problems, but doing it every time is such a hassle, and if you need to do this on a constant basis, you really can’t be doing this every time. Well, a quick change to your SSH’s configuration file will do the trick!

Open the file /etc/ssh/ssh_config in your favorite text editor, and add the following two lines below Host * in the configuration file.

StrictHostKeyChecking no
UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null

This will disable strict host checking, and automatically write the known hosts to a black hole. You will never be disturbed by that prompt again!

NOTE: If your network security isn’t extrapolated from this process somehow, you probably don’t want to disable this check.

Windows 7 Super User Guide

Nuri Hodges — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:22:33 +0000

We’ve all seen the countless top 10 articles, shortcut guides, etc out for Windows 7, but what really separates this new release from the rest of the Windows herd? Listed here are several features I believe sets Windows 7 above and beyond all previous releases.

Display Projection Management
Along with the standard Presentation Mode that was already available in Windows Vista, you can now control the output settings of your secondary display with a few keystrokes! Just hit WINDOWS KEY + P to bring up the Display Projection dialog and choose whether you would like to duplicate or extend your display, or only show output on your main or secondary display. AWESOME!

Better Font Management
No longer is it a complete pain in the ass and total waste of time to preview and install fonts. Microsoft has integrated an Install button right into the preview interface, so now you can add fonts to your library with one click if you like them, instead of navigating every time to your fonts directory and dragging and dropping the files over. Microsoft also grouped different weight classes for the same fonts into the same preview window for faster comparison, as well as adding support for more than the four standard weights in the “Font Style” dialogs.

Better Standards Support
Windows 7 includes bigger, better, and beefier versions of our age old favorites, Paint and Wordpad. What most articles fail to mention is that Wordpad is capable of reading and saving documents in both the new Word 2007 Office Open XML and the OpenDocument Specification that IBM and Sun have been touting about.

Better Media Support
Windows 7 plays nice with most video codecs right out of the box. Yeah, you can just double click a movie file and it will open in WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER. I’m not joking! Certain videos still require downloading the appropriate codecs, but you can install Shark007’s Windows 7 Codec Pack and never think twice. Not only that, but you can also burn ISO files right in Windows Explorer, just double click your ISO file, insert a blank disc, and click Burn!

Power User Hot Keys

WINDOWS KEY + HOME
Minimize all other windows behind active window.
WINDOWS KEY + SHIFT + (LEFT OR RIGHT)
Shift active window to the desktop to the left or right of active desktop.

How to Install FFMPEG On Centos (Yum)

Nuri Hodges — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:09:35 +0000

Installing ffmpeg is really easy with the YUM package manager, so don’t fret!

Shell in, or open up your terminal, and execute the following command:

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If you see an error stating package not found, then you probably need to add a repository. We can do that with vi in the same terminal window:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo

Once vi is open, press i to go into INSERT mode, and paste the following text in:

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Press ESC to exit out of INSERT mode and then hold SHIFT and press Z Z to save. (Or, of course, :wq to write and quit.) You can now add the GPG key for the repository:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Once that is complete, run the yum install command again. After installation is complete, you can run this command to test if FFMPEG is installed and working correctly:

ffmpeg -i Input.file Output.file

How Can I Test My SMTP Server

Nuri Hodges — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:03:41 +0000

Are you unsure if you setup Postfix correctly, or you seem to be able to connect, but mail isn’t going through? You can telnet into your SMTP server and run a direct mail test from the console.

If you’re on Windows, open a command prompt. If you’re on Mac or Linux, open up a Terminal window. Once you’re ready, you can follow along.

telnet [server ip] 25

When you’re successfully connected, enter these commands line by line, hitting return after each line.

EHLO
MAIL FROM: test@testemail.com
RCPT TO: [your email here]
DATA
[your message here]
.

When you enter a period on a line by itself, the SMTP server will attempt to send the mail out. Once it’s sent, you can type quit and hit return to exit the SMTP console, and verify the mail actually got to you!

Can’t Open Network and Sharing Center

Nuri Hodges — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:58:41 +0000

I’ve never ran into this issue on Windows Vista or Windows 7 on my own computer, but my roommate had a problem with their new laptop where trying to access the Network Adapters or Network Connections dialogs would just result in a hang and you would have to close the window. When trying to automatically connect to a wireless network, the loading icon didn’t even spin, it just sat there. Really quirky, right?

Well, I found a couple suggestions on the world wide webs, and here’s what worked for me, a simple one liner in the command prompt, a quick registration of a DLL file, and BAM, they were back online!

Open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

regsvr32 netcenter.dll

Once you hit the ENTER key and it returns with a success message, give your computer a restart and you should be back online.

If this didn’t work for you, you can try to reboot into safe mode (reboot and hit f8 while your computer is booting up, and select safe mode from the menu) and once you are in, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

net localgroup “Administrators” “local Service” /add

Once you’ve entered it in and you see a success message, reboot your computer and cross your fingers!

json_encode Does Not Exist

Nuri Hodges — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:15:39 +0000

It’s broken because the JSON module for php isn’t installed and/or loaded! So, install it!

Install the PHP Developer Package
yum install php-devel
Compile the JSON PHP Module with PEAR or PECL (PEAR Recommended)
PEAR » pear install pecl/json
PECL » pecl install json
Configure PHP to Load JSON PHP Module
Create a file json.ini in the directory /etc/php.d/ with this line:
extension=json.so

See, that wasn’t that hard, was it?

Giving Away A Google Wave Invite

Nuri Hodges — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:09:31 +0000

I was recently invited to the Google Wave sandbox, and even more recently doubled up on the amount of invites I have available.

So, I would like to extend an invitation to a reader of Cubicle Generation. What’s the catch, you say?

I want to know what you guys would like me to write about next, what interests you?

Let me know what you would like to see in upcoming blog posts, and I will pick my favorite out of all the submissions this upcoming Monday (November 9th) and announce the winner of the Google Wave invitation!

iPhone Cover Flow Meets Palm Pre’s Cards

Nuri Hodges — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:41:33 +0000

Why can’t multitasking really be that beautiful? Hopefully, the user experience engineers at Apple will take a page out of the Ocean Observations book.

Reasons to Hack Your Android Phone

Nuri Hodges — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:26:24 +0000

Just like the initial iPhone jailbreaks, rooting, or hacking your Google Android phone was a scary process at first. If you screwed up, you’d have to do a hard reset at best, if you really blew it, you had a broken piece of hardware.

However, several posts over at Lifehacker have shown us that the rooting process has been vastly improved upon, and is now relatively safe to perform. (By the way, this article is pretty much a rewrite/reiteration/combination of these L H posts, but I agree whole heartedly with every point, and had to share my paraphrased version.)

Still not convinced you should take the leap? Here are some pretty darn good reasons to have a cracked Android phone.

A noticeable performance boost. Most of the complaints from Android users is the lag experienced when navigating through the phone’s interface. Having to wait any noticeable amount of time after hitting a button for the action to perform gets to be a drag real fast. It’s reported that using the CyanogenMOD ROM makes things really snap into place.

Extremely easy cell tethering via WiFi or Bluetooth. android-wifi-tether is a free application that allows one click tethering of your cell connection for use on your computer. Run the app on your phone and you will be able to connect to your phone and access the internet. (WiFi SSID/Bluetooth Device: G1Tether)

Improved on screen keyboard. Cracking your Android phone allows the use of the on screen keyboard designed for the HTC Hero, instead of the standard, sometimes problematic, Android keyboard. You can enable it by navigating to Settings, Locale & Text, then turning on the “Touch Input” feature. You can also adjust its spell, suggest, and feedback settings.

Multi-touch web browsing, baby! It might not feel as suave as the iPhone experience, but it still improves the flow of browsing just as much. You might never see this on a regular Android phone, unless the Big Apple wants to share.

Specifically, all the build specific Android apps! If you choose to root your Android phone, you will have access to all the different applications available from any Android build, including applications not available in the United States, such as the apps on the HTC Hero, and the apps from the Android Donut build, which isn’t even distributed by wireless carriers yet!

So, there you have it. Several pretty solid reasons to nudge you over the edge and persuade you to hack your Google Phone!

Amazing GDM Login Screens

Nuri Hodges — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:24:23 +0000

If you’re looking to customize your Gnome Display Manager’s login screen, look no further! Let me point you in the direction of some of the most amazing GDM Themes publicly available.

ArchDark Don’t let the Russian text scare you, this login screen uses your language, so don’t worry.

Somatic GDM If a brightly colored off-color illustration is your thing, this is your thing. Several different illustrations available.

Humanoid

Woobuntu 2 If you like to stay classy and rep Ubuntu at the same time, this is the login screen for you.

Underground Ubuntu

Once you’ve downloaded your theme’s tarball, go to System > Administration > Login Window, then select the Local tab. Click on the [ADD] button, and open your tarball, and voila!