Firefox and Mouse

Well, I'll be! I can be so dense sometimes. I've just discovered some enlightening stuff about my mouse. I've been using a Microsoft mouse for more than a year now and only today(!) I've noticed that the scroll wheel can actually be depressed and it can act as a middle mouse button! (My current mouse setting is '3 Button Emulate' or something like that.) No wonder sometimes other webpages load when I'm scrolling through a page. That was reeeeeeeally annoying! The discoveries that I've made:

1. Scroll wheel can act as 3rd button. If it is pressed, firefox will search for the term currently in the clipboard and display a page based on that. To prevent that from happening, go to 'about:config' and change the value for 'middlemouse.loadContentURL' to false. I'm so glad I've finally solved this mystery!

2. Recently, ever since I've installed Firefox 1.5.0.4, I've been having trouble with copy and paste. Everytime I try to paste some text using the 'middle button' (pressing left and right buttons together), this little weird sphere would appear with little arrows and the whole page would move up and down when I move the mouse, and I couldn't paste the text!! It was so annoying and I was cursing away at Firefox. The poor thing didn't deserve all that. Hehe. It was actually my own ignorance. Autoscrolling was enabled by default in the new version. Du-uh... yes I know! As I've never used autoscrolling before, I didn't know what was going on until today. So, I disabled it and can now cut and paste in peace with another new bit of information tucked safely away.

Nimbus Roman No 9 L

OpenOffice Writer: The characters of this font will be displayed overlapping each other when the text is in bold. Weird. The printed text is normal though. Anyway, I installed 'urw-fonts' and the problem was rectified.

Great song!

I first heard this song while listening to the podcast 'Filme und So'. The song is called 'Tom Cruise scares me' by David Ippolito. I'm not sure if I will be offending anyone / breaking some rules / doing something wrong by posting the direct link here, (These things are soooo sensitive nowadays - sheesh!) so I'll just post the link to the main website. It's a great song and I love it!

http://www.thatguitarman.com/

EDIT: Just as well, that I didn't post the direct link. I read through the 'Legal, Terms of Service and Usage' part of the website, and apparently they don't allow direct link to 'images, sounds or executable applications'.

Users and Groups

I hate searching for this every time I have to add a user to a group. I keep forgetting the commands!

1. To view the list of groups and their users: $ cat /etc/group

2. Create new user: $ useradd

3. Create new group: $ groupadd.

4. To list all groups to which the user is a member: $ groups <user id> ## This is the one I keep forgetting!!!!

5. Add user to group z.B. cdrom: $ usermod -G <comma separated group list> <user id>
### Be sure to list all groups as this is an absolute list and not an addition. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Use the 'groups' command and then enter all the groups in addition to the new one under usermod.

EDIT: No need to list all the groups. I just found out that you can append the user to a supplementary group by using the -a option. Meaning:

usermod -a -G wireshark user

This will add 'wireshark' to the user's groups in addition to the other groups that the user already belongs to.

or

gpasswd -a username group


This is a usefule website.

/etc/conf.d/net

My network connection = Modem --> Router --> Computers

At first, I set my Gentoo system to automatically use DHCP and obtain the IP address. However this resulted in a very slow startup for the computer if the router is switched off. Hence I edited the file /etc/conf.d/net and added this:

###
config_eth0=( "my-ip-address-allocated-by-router netmask 255.255.255.0" )
routes_eth0=( "default gw router's-ip-address" )
###

SCIM

The commands to start scim:

$ export XMODIFIER="@im=SCIM"
$ export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"
$ scim -d

I used to put these 3 commands in bash_profile but that did something to my keyboard, whose layout is set to us international, and I couldn't type umlauts and eszett, or something like that. I can't really remember. Maybe I'll try again. Anyway, because of whatever that went wrong, I just type these commands in a terminal everytime I need to use scim, which is not very often. But it is still troublesome to enter all those words. I wonder if it will work if I create an alias for them. Will try later

EDIT: The alias works: alias chinese='export XMODIFIER=@im=SCIM && export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim && scim -d'

Hmmm... the Trebuchet '&' (&) looks ugly.

To use scim with eg. openoffice:
$ LC_ALL=zh_CN.utf8 oowriter2

bashrc vs bash_profile

I was looking for a place to put my aliases and some suggested ~/.bashrc, others suggested ~/.bash_profile. By the way, my aliases are in ~/.bashrc and they are as follows:

# My Personal Alias
alias ipin='mount /mnt/ipod'
alias ipout='umount /mnt/ipod'
alias ipej='eject /mnt/ipod'

Anyway, 'man bash' turned up a mouthful of words which have been nicely summarised by someone from linuxquestions.org:

In other words, /etc/profile is run when a user logs in. ~/.bashrc is run for other shells (Ie opening an xterm)

/etc/profile contains environment variables and startup programs. Environ. var. are persistent - only need to read once. Startup programs are launched once - no need to start them again.

/etc/bashrc is included by ~/.bashrc, and read every time a shell starts up, people use it to include shell aliases and functions. Aliases and functions do not behave like environment variables; they are not passed to other processes.

There - that's why I put my aliases into bashrc ... I think ...

cdda2wav

When I was using SuSE, I used this command to rip CDs

$ cdda2wav -D 0,0,0 andwhateverotheroptioniwant

In order to find out the numerical figures after -D, I ran "cdda2wav -scanbus"

However, on a Gentoo machine, "cdda2wav -scanbus" gives this output:

###
cdda2wav: No such file or directory. Cannot open '/dev/pg*'. Cannot open SCSI driver.
cdda2wav: For possible targets try 'cdda2wav -scanbus'.
Use the script scan_scsi.linux to find out more.
Probably you did not define your SCSI device.
Set the CDDA_DEVICE environment variable or use the -D option.
You can also define the default device in the Makefile.
For possible transport specifiers try 'cdda2wav dev=help'.
###

What in the world does that mean? Anyway, now I use the command "cdda2wav -D /dev/hdb andtherestoftheoptions"

Problems I still have with cdda2wav:
1. I don't know why the -scanbus doesn't work on Gentoo. Not a serious problem, since I can replace the device with /dev/hdb. But why??? And that question is bugging the hell out of me! But I'm too lazy to look it up now.

2. I can't run cdda2wav as a normal user. I get this error:

cdda2wav: Operation not permitted. cannot set posix realtime scheduling policy
percent_done:
0%cdda2wav: Operation not permitted. Cannot send SCSI cmd via ioctl

And it just hangs there until I press CTRL-C. I read this in the linuxquestion.org:

cdrecord and cdda2wav require their controlling user to have access privileges to the scsi bus which are not granted to normal users by default within any sane setup.

3. I still haven't figured out how to rip multiple but not consecutive tracks from a CD.

Die WM

Haha. Es ist unglaublich. Bei jeder WM hat England immer ein Idiot, der etwas Dummes tun muss. Und wie gewöhnlich können ihre Spieler gar keinen Elfmeter verwandeln. Es ist wirklich lächerlich.