Connect to wifi at boot

Like all good nerds, I have needs for computers in several places around the house, but I have little desire to run cat5 cables all over the place to provide internet connectivity. That's what wifi is for. In most Linux distributions, though, the wifi connection is dependent on the user login and storing the keys in the users keyring. Consequently, there is no internet access via wifi until after the user logs in. With some simple configuration, though, it is possible to connect to wifi on startup and have that connection available even if the user has not yet logged in.

Deleting an item from bash history

I was pecking away commands on the bash command line and, without paying attention, I typed in my password when I thought it was needed for a command. But looking up I saw that I was not getting a password request, but was on the command line. Aside from being thankful that I do not use a valid command for a password, I was concerned that I was leaving my password in plain text in my bash history. My home directory is encrypted, so there is little chance that someone will get access to it, but I wanted to delete it nonetheless.

Adding a public key to a remote site for SSH

Adding my public key to a server is something I have to do often enough that I want it to be easier, but rarely enough that I can never remember how to do it.

The simple way to do it is to issue this command from your local terminal (note—this is all one line even though it may be broken up into multiple lines in this blog entry)

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@remote.server.com

This assumes you already have a working public/private key pair that you are using, and the id_rsa.pub is the public key you are sharing.

You will be asked for the password on the remote server (and your passphrase for your private key, if you are smart enough to use one of those), and if everything is in order you will be able to ssh into the remote server using your public/private key pair instead of supplying a password.

Frustrating Python Class Objects

Generally I am a big fan of Python, but today it drove me a little nuts. The solution was hard to find, but simple to implement. And the problem was probably caused by my "Java-thinking," which Pythonic folks will tsk-tsk you for.

What's great about Python is that you can easily distill your problem down to simple parts and test them directly in a script or with the interpreter. So I was able to boil down my problem to the following:

Ubuntu without password requests

When I bought a computer for my son a few years ago, it came with XP preloaded. It was a refurbished computer from a local store, and they do a good job of putting together a cheap, basic system. At the time, I contemplated wiping the disk and putting Linux on it instead, but since it was already working and ready to use I decided to leave it as-is. The guys at the store had put Firefox and OpenOffice on it, so why mess with it?

Transcoding MP3 files for Nintendo DSi

My son's Nintendo DSi is a very cool little toy, but could they have made it harder to put music on it? After copying his MP3 files over to an SD card and putting it in, I thought I was done. But clearly Nintendo has other ideas.

Lots of projects

I have been working on a number of projects lately, and have had the chance to play with several new technologies (new to me, in any case).

Updating favicons

I was working on a site and testing in Firefox, and after changing the favicon (the little icon that shows up before the address and with the tab) seemed to be cached. Refreshing the page didn't clear it up.

After some googling, I found this blog entry which contained a comment that answered my question.

To refresh a favicon, do the following:

Am I a Python fanatic now?

I find myself using Python for all kinds of stuff. I have written an app for my N900 in python, I am working on websites using Django, and I have even played with some of the puzzles on Project Euler in Python.

Thumbs up to QT

I am going to give a big thumbs up to QT.  For those not familiar with it, QT is a development framework for C++ that can compile binaries for multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, and the Nokia smartphone platforms.  As a Gnome lover, I never gave QT much attention.  I fiddled with Python on Linux, but I have not really been in the business of making desktop apps lately, and QT is very strongly tied to the KDE desktop and not to Gnome.  (I actually like KDE as well, it being the first Linux desktop I ever used, but lately I have been using gnome).