All about .htaccess

If you have been involved with maintaining a web site, you must have for sure heard or used .htaccess. The most common use of .htaccess would be to set up access restrictions to the directories under your www root and setup up redirects. But there a multitude of other things that you could using .htaccess like setting up re-write using the apache's mod_rewrite. To find out more and learn all about .htaccess:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

Almost a comprehensive guide on .htaccess. There are other very interesting apache user guides on the last page of the guide.

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Differences between 'div' and 'span' HTML elements explained

Both 'div' and 'span' elements let you apply css styles to elements in your HTML page. But they are not inter-changable. Here is a very good post that outlines the differences between the two and points out when to use which tag:

http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/difference-span-div-tags/

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Confgiruing wireless on Dell XPS m1330 for Ubuntu Hardy

I happened to lay my hands on some hot property at work , its got an amazing finish, stunning looks and for the rest of the non-technical review you watch this:



Now, after getting a feel of Vista that came in along with the laptop, I decided to install Ubuntu Hardy on it. The installation of Linux is no longer intimidating as it was when I first installed it (~8 years back), the process is simple next,next,next,...

After the install, here are a few quick things that I did:
1. Update the repositories : sudo apt-get update
2. Upgrade all the utils: sudo apt-get upgrade

Wireless didn't work by default on this and after some searching and research I got to page which helped me with this:

http://linuxtechie.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/making-intel-wireless-3945abg-work-better-on-ubuntu-hardy/

The initial symptoms of the problem were: ifconfig -> wouldn't detect wlan0
wireless LED - wouldn't glow

Fix: sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic

and reboot, if you find the wireless LED glowing and wireless applet unable to detect wireless -> restart gdm -> ctrl+alt+backspace

P.S. Please ensure that the wireless switch is turned on through the process.

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Virus Problems - Unwanted IE popups

I had a typical virus problem to troubleshoot the other day at work. We had a Windows XP laptop running Sophos Anti-virus and Spybot Search and Destroy opening up IE pop-ups at random. After running a complete system scan with both Sophos and Spybot, I choose to fix the problems through console (both the applications had found a few). However, this doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

That is when I launched process explorer and noticed that these processes of iexplore.exe were being launched by svchost.exe - strange wasn't it. Upon further investigation I noticed that the location of this particular svchost.exe was different from root folder. Bingo! Deleting this svchost.exe resolved the unwanted IE popup problem.

This also explained why the virus went undetected by both Sophos and Spybot, the reason being svchost.exe was being treated as a system process, hence wasn't malicious. But what would have been worth noting would have been the location that it was running from. I leave that for the Anti-virus makers to think about.

Happy Ending :D

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Comprehensive Guide On Troubleshooting Sound Problems in Ubuntu

Just moved to linux and your sound isn't working? Here is a step by step guide to troubleshoot audio problems in Ubuntu. This would prove to be very helpful for those who are novice to the world of Linux and need help in fixing problems with sound card and enjoy good music:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

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Reading from a file in bash

Here is quick and easy way to read from a file in bash and perform and operation on each line in the file:

echo __filename__ | while read line; do echo $line; done #this can be substituted by any operation that you want to do on each line in the file; done

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