talk minus action = zero

I was tired of not having mailto: links work correctly on my Ubuntu machine, so I did a bit of google-ing and found a very useful Perl one-liner here.

perl -MURI::Escape -e '$to= shift; if ($to =~ /^([^\?]+)\?(.*)$/){$to=$1;$args="&".$2;$args=~s/\&subject=/&su=/};$to =~ s/^mailto://i; exec("firefox","https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&cmid=22&to=".URI::Escape::uri_escape($to).$args);' '%s'


Ubuntu (and possibly other Gnome) users, stick this in the Mail Reader custom command field of System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications -> Internet.
Thanks to dcrooke at gmail dot com. It works like a charm.

from http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-612-1

( full notice behind the cut )

What does this mean? You should update Open-SSH if you run a Debian-based Linux distro, like Ubuntu, and recreate and redeploy your SSH keys.

There are a lot of problems with Ubuntu 8.04 that I'm finding since installing it at work. I use a lot of security features, like SSL certificates, GPG, and user authenticated samba shares to name a few.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 (which shipped with Ubuntu 8.04) has some issues with self-signed SSL certs, especially those generated by CUPS servers. As a sys-admin, I use the web interface to CUPS regularly. FF3b5 throws sec_error_inadequate_key_usage errors with CUPS SSL certs and doesn't allow exceptions. Here's the workaround I found from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427081#c18:

1) go to an affected page, get the error.
2) right-click, view page info, security tab, view certificate
3) details tab, export, save as .cer, close, close
4) go to preferences, advanced, encryption tab
5) view certificates, servers tab, import, select the saved .cer file
6) hit ok, close preferences
7) refresh the page with the cert error, now should be a different error
8) click "Or you can add an exception", "Add exception..."
9) get certificate, confirm security exception - now you're in

Tags: computers, cups, firefox, linux, ssl, ubuntu

I use Thunderbird and the Enigmail extension a lot at work. I like to sign all my emails. After installing the latest release of Ubuntu, I had some trouble. Seahorse (the new default key manager) was not recognizing a passphrase caching agent (either gpg-agent or seahorse-agent). Both were running....
when trying to sign an email, I would get an error like
gpg command line and output:
/usr/bin/gpg --charset utf8 --batch --no-tty --status-fd 2 -d --use-agent
gpg: problem with the agent - disabling agent use
gpg: can't query passphrase in batch mode
gpg: Invalid passphrase; please try again ...
gpg: can't query passphrase in batch mode
gpg: Invalid passphrase; please try again ...
gpg: can't query passphrase in batch mode

Turns out the fix is easy, and numerous bugs have been filed.

All you have to do is delete the file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent and restart X (CTRL+ALT+Backspace).

I love the feeling I get after building a command like this. The directory name is made up.

grep -HIr Professional /var/local/foo | grep Adobe | awk 'split($0,fields, "_") {print fields[4]}' | awk 'split($0,fields, "."){print fields[1]}' | sort -u | wc -l

This command tells me how many computers at work have Adobe Acrobat Professional installed, by searching through log files in the directory /var/local/foo for "Professional" and then "Adobe". Then it prints the computer name (which is in the filename) by eliminating parts of the filename. Last, it counts unique hits.

Whew...

*edit: shorter version (less greps)
grep -HIr "Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional" /var/local/foo| awk 'split($0,fields, "_") {print fields[4]}' | awk 'split($0,fields, "."){print fields[1]}' | sort -u | wc -l