the empty quarter

Changing the port number of SSH daemon is a quick way of reducing the number of SSH brute force attacks your server might face (check the file /var/log/auth.log to see if there are many failed SSH login attempts). Just to be on the safe side, create a backup copy of the SSH daemon config file. [...]

Here’s how to disable the annoying Update Manager pop-up (technically a “pop-under”) and instead have the update icon displayed in the notification area. Hit Alt-F2 to open the “Run Application” dialog. Type in gconf-editor to run the GNOME Configuration Editor. Navigate to Apps > Update Notifier. Untick the auto_launch checkbox.

This post is an update on integrating Thunderbird with Ubuntu’s notification system. For Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx it supersedes my earlier post on the topic which was applicable previous versions of Ubuntu (Jaunty and Karmic). The big difference in Lucid Lynx is the Indicator Applet and the “Me Menu”, both of these incorporating features related [...]

The ability to add custom scripts to report elements is a very powerful feature of BIRT. It allows the report developer to modify or override the default behaviour of the element; this blog features many examples of when this might be useful. However, as the number of scripts in a report increases, the report becomes [...]

The technique for alternate row styling described in a previous post is applicable for tables with detail rows (a detail row in a table corresponds to a row in the bound data set). However, it is often the case that the table does not contain any detail rows at all and instead displays only aggregated [...]

Password proliferation is a serious problem on the web today. Most websites require users to register and create a username/password combination for future authentication. Unfortunately not many websites support reusable logins such as OpenID. The main problem is that of human memory. It is of course not reasonable to expect the user to remember 100+ [...]

As always after a kernel update, VMware Player 2.5.xx asks to be recompiled after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). However during the compilation I got errors about virtual network device, even after trying to recompile several times including from command line. After struggling for some time, I thought I would check on the VMware website [...]

Recently I discovered that by default Thunderbird accepts cookies from web content (version 3.0.4 in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid). I am a bit baffled by what would be a valid use case for storing cookies in an email client, and so here are steps for disabling this option. Edit > Preferences. Select Security icon and “Web [...]

In order to show dates as yyyy-mm-dd instead of the default (for US locale) mm/dd/yyyy I use the following script to launch Thunderbird in Ubuntu (tested with Thunderbird 3.0.4 on Lucid): #!/bin/sh export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8 [ "$LC_ALL" != "$LC_TIME" ] && unset LC_ALL exec thunderbird “$@” This handy tip comes from mozillaZine.

UPDATE: The issue has been fixed in a subsequent Ubuntu system update, so there should be no reason to go through the steps below if your system is up-to-date. After a recent system update in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) I started getting an error message in Thunderbird starting with “Could not initialize the browser’s security component”. [...]