Hybris is a very widely used platform for eCommerce. It is a somewhat complex piece of software, with multiple interacting components.

When trying to obtain optimal performance, there are a few guidelines you’ll need to follow. We’ll review them in this post.

Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package.

Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.

… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.

GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA.
Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk.

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

1. You need to have a US IP address
2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” :D).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

If like me you get tons of telemarketers calls, there’s an easy way to get rid of them with a quick Asterisk hack. The following Asterisk configuration snippet will immediately send any hidden caller ID (99% telemarketers, and I have a general policy of not picking up the phone for hidden caller ID anyway) to a holding music making them waste money and time…

One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.

Asterisk is a free telephony software. I’m posting here sample commented configuration files for reference purposes, hoping they will help you get kickstarted if needed.

This config sets up :

• SIP phones (for softphones or harware phones with SIP capabilities)
• Voice mails
• A few test phone numbers
• Forwarding of calls to a SIP provider for outbound and incoming calls (from/to PSTN)

That should be plenty already for a SOHO environment !

Note to French readers : Si votre FAI est Free, cette configuration fonctionne pour passer / recevoir des appels via le SIP de Free (Freephonie).

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.

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

/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

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 -, but you can bind -C . This behaviour affects only the xfce-keyboard-settings GUI, which is annoying but leaves us with a workaround using the following command line :

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.

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.

The “modeline” is a common way to set (or override) VIM settings on a file by file basis. Let’s see a few of the key concepts of the VIM modeline.

If you access the internet through a proxy, you need to set up Amarok to use it to enjoy some of its amazing features such as automatic downloading of CD covers or fetching of the lyrics of the song you’re listenning to. Amarok is really a great media player. if you don’t know it you should definitely give it a try !

Setting up proxy parameters for Amarok 1.4 could be a little confusing if you don’t use the full KDE environment. In this post, I’ll explain how to manually edit KDE configuration files to fix proxy settings.

I currently manage all my X10 home automation with MisterHouse which is a fantastic tool but is a bit on the heavyweight side. Plus you need to know a bit of Perl to take full advantage of it.

If you are looking for something simpler to use, you might want to consider HEYU.

The script command is a must for any unix sysadmin.

Once invoked, it will faithfully write anything you typed as well as any output generated in your terminal into a file of your choice (defaults to “typescript”).

This is great when you want to document everything you did on a specific server, for example.
spaghetti:~$ script<br /> Script started, file is typescript<br /> spaghetti:~$<br />

When launched, you don’t see anything, but everything displayed goes to a file as well as the terminal.

If you want to replace a text throughout a file in the vi text editor, you can use the following command :
:1,$s/text/replacement/g

Here is the breaking down of this command:

• “:” : places you in “ex mode”
• 1,$ is a range specification, meaning from the first to the last line (this can be shortened as % in some versions of VI (vim does, for instance) — Thanks Brandon !
• s means “substitute”
• /text/replacement/ means to replace the “text” pattern by “replacement”
• g : means globally, which will replace all the occurrences of the pattern instead of the first of each lines

If you want to see how to script a text replacement, check out my previous post about text replacement with sed.

Zsh extends the usual stream redirections with two nice features …

Process substitutions

How often have you done the following :

1. Launch one or many commands and redirect their outputs into temporary files
2. Launch a command which reads and processes those temporary files
3. Delete the temporary files

If you occasionaly write shell scripts then it is likely that the answer is “many times”. If so, then you’ll be glad to know that Zsh can automate this for you.

If you’re looking for a good calculator on Linux / Unix, you can use bc. bc is “an arbitrary precision calculator” supporting bignumbers and many operators … well it will mostly do whatever you want (check the fine documentation).

Anyway, about those 2 little tricks I promised :

1. change the scale variable (eg : scale=10) to set “the total number of digits after the decimal point”. Defaults to 0 -> Not cool.
2. use the last variable to recall the last value you computed -> Cool.

That was it ! This is what I always need and forget, so I decided to blog it once for all…

I previously asked an open question : “which is you favorite Linux picture viewer ?” and got a few answers in the comments, but unfortunately none of them made me happy. I tried quite a few on my own but without much success, till today.

Doing some more googling, I found a great picture viewer : FEH. It’s mostly command line based, it is fast and easy to use.

I’ve just been through hell to get the HEAD revision of GNU Cash to build and run on GNU/Debian … The problem was that GNUCash depends, amongst many other dependencies, on Guile and on the SLIB library for Guile.

If you want to save you some hours, use the following Debian packages (and stick to those versions !)

<br /> guile-1.6;1.6.8-6;The GNU extension language and Scheme interpreter<br /> guile-1.6-dev;1.6.8-6;Development files for Guile 1.6<br /> guile-1.6-libs;1.6.8-6;Main Guile libraries<br /> guile-1.6-slib;1.6.8-6;Guile SLIB support<br /> libguile-ltdl-1;1.6.8-6;Guile's patched version of libtool's libltdl<br /> libqthreads-12;1.6.8-6;QuickThreads library for Guile<br /> slib;3a4-4;Portable Scheme library<br />

Today I write a blog entry to ask a question to the Linux users community. 

In former time, when I had this need, I would have used xv. But I guess this tool is considered history nowadays … nonetheless, I’m looking for something in the same spirit : letting me quickly and efficiently browse my pictures, no fancy editing capabilities wanted.So people, what do you use ? Any hint ?If that can narrow down the choices, I’m using Debian GNU/Linux 4.0.

OK, it’s friday so we can have a little fun 😉

“Addictive Typing Lessons” is a Firefox extension which helps you to practice and improve your keyboard typing skills.

It provides many different sets of exercise with growing difficulty, and collects statistics about your performance, so that you can see how you progress.

If you’re not familiar with keyboard typing, give it a try and you’ll soon type like a professional 🙂

FoxyProxy is a firefox extension which allows advanced proxy configurations.

If you don’t know yet Greasemonkey, this is one of the most valuable Firefox plugins.

Basically, Greasemonkey runs scripts on the web page you’re browsing and modifies it’s appearance or behaviour.

Here is the list of the software I use on my personnal computer. All of them are free for personnal use :

Malware Protection

AVG Free Edition – Antivirus
Adaware – Spyware removal tool
Spybot – Spyware removal tool

Web

Firefox – Web browser
GTalk – Instant messaging
MSN Messenger – Instant Messaging
ICQ – Instant Messaging
PuTTY – Multi-protocole remote terminal

Productivity

OpenOffice – Office suite
PDF Creator – Creating PDF
Sunbird – Calendar

System

DIRMS Defrag Tools
PowerToys – Tweak UI
SysInternals – AutoRuns : displays what runs at startup
SysInternals – PageDefrag : defrag your pagefile at boot
SysInternals – ProcessExplorer : Task Manager on steroids

This is related to one of my geek hobbies : I am playing with home automation.

Here is what I use :

• Technology : x10
• Software : MisterHouse
• Hardware : a CM11, few AM12, LM12 etc

This is really great since it allows you to control anything in your house (lights, washing machine, heaters, …) from your computer, while still being fairly simple.

Using MisterHouse requires to know at least a little bit of Perl to get the most out of it, though.