Tech@Sakana – A sysadmin’s blog

Firefox will load whatever URL is in the copy-paste buffer in the page if you middle click somewhere on a page. My mouse’s wheel also serves as the middle button, and I found it really annoying that when occasionally middle-clicking while scrolling the page, Firefox would try to load another page …

You can control this behaviour with this about:config property middlemouse.contentLoadURL. Set to true, the middle-click on the page will load the URL (if it is one) in the page, set to false it won’t.

Thanks Ayman !

If you use Gentoo and tried to install Cacti with Lighttpd instead of Apache, chances are that you ran into this error message :

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/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/WebappConfig/content.py:27: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import md5, re, os, os.path
* Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache"
* Fatal error: but the corresponding package does not seem to be installed!
* Fatal error: Please "emerge >=www-servers/apache-1.3" or correct your settings.
* Fatal error(s) - aborting

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There is currently a little bug in Xfce4 which prevents you to bind the key combinations involving SPACE and ESCAPE. For example you can’t bind <WINDOWS>-<SPACE>, but you can bind <WINDOWS>-C . This behaviour affects only the xfce-keyboard-settings GUI, which is annoying but leaves us with a workaround using the following command line :
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Conky is a lightweight system monitoring tool. It has many built-in probes (processor load, memory usage, temperature sensors, etc), but it is still pretty easy to extend it if you don’t find the feature you need.

In this post I’ll describe my Conky setup and explain how to extend it to monitor your rTorrent downloads.

rTorrent is a great BitTorrent client which offers an XML-RPC interface to its core functions, making it easy to get the downloads status through scripting. You can read more about that in this previous post.
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rTorrent is a very efficient BitTorrent client for linux. It has a very small memory footprint, a very customizable configuration file, and exposes it’s internals through XML-RPC. This is convenient to implement 3rd party GUI or web interfaces.
Let’s see how to setup and use XML-RPC to probe rTorrent downloads.
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