Blogs

Drupal module: comment mail

Comment mail is a very simple module that just notifies one email address of new comments, or those comments pending approval. It also provides links to approve, decline or delete the comment.

The main difference between this module and one such as notify is that it's instant and not done via a cron job. A cron job is handy for new content subscriptions, while comment notify is good when you're approving comments or just want to be notified of any spam or inappropriate comments.

Opening and editing files remotely in Linux

Using KDE, it is very easy to open and edit a remote file using pretty much any application (any application that uses KDE to open files that is). I use this method using Kate (a sophisticated text editing program), and Quanta .

To open a file using ftp, in the box in the middle at the top that shows the current path you are looking at, type:

ftp://user@site.com:port/

Securing Linux: process limits

This tip was found at http://aymanh.com/tips-to-secure-linux-workstation.

An old school attack on Linux systems is called a fork bomb. There is demonstration code at the fore-mentioned website, but essentially, it is a command that will spawn an unending number of processes, eventually killing the system.

Timezones and Coldfusion / JRE Time

I get into work today and have a help desk ticket stating that the time on our servers is off. Well, not quite.

The issue is the time in ColdFusion does not match the time the servers have. We "sprang forward" on Sunday, March 9th, but any time functions reported the time one hour behind. ColdFusion, it seems, forgot to spring.

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Thin gray line in Drupal output

Sometimes when using empty table cells and images in a Drupal website, a thin gray line can appear above and below the images, or on the top and bottom of the table cells.

I finally figured out what caused this today. In the system file defaults.css, there is the following declaration:

table {
border-collapse: collapse;
}

This tells the browser to create one border for two adjacent table cells that have borders. If you add the same declaration to your theme's style sheet, except using the value 'separate' the gray lines should disappear.

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What makes a professional website?

Admittedly, my job can be very frustrating sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do and am thankful I have the rare opportunity to get paid for something I love to do. But sometimes, only sometimes, people don't want to listen to a professional, or they are listening too much to someone who is not a professional.

Linux tip: Managing users

Managing users is easily done via the command line in Linux. For example, to get a list of users currently logged on, you can use the who or w command.

jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$ w
17:08:34 up 10 min, 1 user, load average: 0.44, 0.63, 0.46
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
jsteel :0 - 16:58 ?xdm? 60.26s 0.04s /bin/sh /usr/bi

jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$ who
jsteel :0 2008-02-24 16:58
jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$

Mount netware share in Linux using ncpmount

I had some problems with the "server not found" error and login doesn't exist error. I finally got this to work by using:

$ ncpmount -S SERVER -A server.fqdn.edu -U user.ou.ou.tree mnt/point

I had to use the -A option which had the fully qualified domain name of the server (an IP address might work) as well as my fully qualified username complete with ous and the tree.