Author: rchapin

At least under the FC 18 distro, there was no fancy GUI controls in the Advanced Settings for setting up an HTTP proxy over SSH for Chrome.

To get it all set up:

• Establish and ssh connection to the server to which you want to proxy:
  • $ ssh -D localhost:1234 username@remote.server,  where 1234 is the port number you want to use for the proxy
• Run google-chrome from the command line passing it the proxy setting:
  • $ google-chrome –proxy-server=socks5://localhost:1234

I have recently be introduced to the *nix screen command.  Incredibly powerful tool for managing windows which mulitplexes a physical terminal between one or many processes.  One of the uses it to maintain interactive shells on a remote server between remote connections to the machine.

It is enormously helpful when executing long running commands on remote servers.  Especially those that timeout your ssh connection and or from machines that you are going to either disconnect from the net or shutdown.→ Continue reading “Screen Cheat Sheet”

If you need to stand up a quick HTTP Server to enable someone on your LAN to transfer some files use the following command in the directory that you want to ‘share’:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

The default port is 8000, but you can run it as follows to specify a port

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080→ Continue reading “Quick and Dirty HTTP Server to Transfer Files”

A few years back I had an office mate who used a standing desk.  He said that he had been using a standing desk for many years and that once he got used to it he liked it much better.  Since then, I have noticed a number of studies that indicate sitting for extended periods of time is just plain bad for you.

For a while I have been wanting to make the switch, and today I took the plunge.→ Continue reading “Making the Switch to a Standing Desk”

1. Open the Preference dialog and go to General/Editors/File Association.  Add a new file type with the *.launch suffix.  In the ‘Associated Editors’ box below, click on Add and assign the XML editor to the file type.
2. In the Preferences dialog go to General/Appearance/Content Types.  Click on the + next to Text.  Click on ‘XML’ in the tree so that it is highlighted.  Click ‘Add’ in the box below and add the *.launch suffix

A very handy text editor.→ Continue reading “Sublime Text Editor”

Changing the color of the block that get’s displayed in the right-hand side-bar when an occurance of a variable, field, or method is selected:
Eclipse > Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations > Occurrences > Color

Alias package names in the Package Explorer: Window > Preferences > Java > Appearance > [] Abbreviate package names→ Continue reading “Some Handy Eclipse Preferences”

A couple of months ago I stopped being able to purchase anything through the Google Play Store on my Nexus 7 Android device.  There were a number of different errors that were displayed:

General error messages:

• Couldn’t sign in. There was a problem communicating with google servers.  Try again later.

From the Google Play app:

• “Authentication is required.  You need to sign into your Google Account.” 

I tried everything:

• Re-installing Play
• Dumping the cache and disabling and re-enabling Play
• Doing

Instead of having to write a test app, here is a handy online tool for regular expression testing in multiple languages.→ Continue reading “Regular Expression Testing”