I stopped my programming blog and would want to share back some short helpful snippets.

In a form page it would be helpful to auto focus the a field on page load because users will longer have to click on the field.  Here is a one line jQuery code to auto focus fields.

$(document).ready(function(){
      $('input:first').focus();
});

A tweak for users with a Multi-cored machine who wants to utilize the number of core available to speed up boot time process.

• Open msconfig by typing it on run.
• Select The boot TAB
• Select Advanced Options
• modify the number of cores you wanted to be used on boot as shown on the image above.
• Reboot to take effect.

You might be wondering what happened to the applications you opened after pressing the home button of your iPhone. Well, its not closed yet, it’s still running and hidden. If you are not using it, you need to close it because it is using/draining the battery. Here is a simple how to:

• double press the home button consecutively and you will see all the applications you have opened before you read this post as shown on the image above
• long press the application until the remove icon appears.
• start closing the apps you are no longer using by pressing the remove icon.

I had some problems installing ssmtp on centos 6.3 64 bit because most of the posts are giving out the wrong RPM link. So I came across a blog that gave an existing link rpm for fedora where ssmtp exists. So below are the steps I did to install ssmtp over CentOS:

• The Download link for 64 bit CentOS 6:
  http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/fedora/pub/epel/6/x86_64/
• Verify if hxxp://astral.ro is a legit mirror: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/
• Add the rpm using the command:
  $ wget http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/fedora/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
  $ rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
  
• Install ssmtp using the command:
  yum instal ssmtp
• Configure ssmtp to relay unto GMAIL to send messages
• Change CentOS’s MTA.  By default it uses /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix
  Use the command alternatives –config mta
• Select the number assigned to ssmtp as shown below
  

  [tux@icpep.org]# alternatives --config mta
  
  There are 2 programs which provide 'mta'.
  
  Selection Command
  -----------------------------------------------
  *+ 1 /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix
  2 /usr/sbin/sendmail.ssmtp
  
  Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number: 2

• Test it using:
  cat random_file | sendmail -v johnsmith@gmail.com

Steps on how to edit Linux Mint’s Cinnamon Menu:

1. Right click on the menu as show on the image above
2. Select Edit Menu
3. Do your thing

I have some problems in controlling my laptop’s brightness on Linux Mint 13. My laptop’s specification is found on this page. Just a summary I am using NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M 2GB Dedicated VRAM.

Here are the steps I followed to get control on my laptop’s brightness.

1. Open the terminal
2. Edit grub (sudo nano /etc/default/grub),
3. Around the 11th line, there will be something like: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”. Change it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor”
4. Save the file
5. Update your grub (sudo update-grub2)
6. Reboot your machine (sudo init 6)
7. If the steps didn’t help you out, remove the changes made to your grub file (remove acpi_backlight=vendor) and don’t forget to reboot.

Reference: http://askubuntu.com/questions/128463/brightness-controls-dont-work-on-an-acer-4741g

1. Go to Media Menu > Open Network Stream

2.  Enter the url you want to open and click play to start viewing the remote video.

From Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I switched to Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon because of some personal reasons. Now, I have a fully functional Linux mint on my Aspire 4755G with the following specifications.

After installing linux mint on my machine it works out of the box with no problems except that the display used was not NVidia.  It uses the 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller.  I tried installing ubuntu-x-swat but it didn’t work.  Cinnamon was no longer working and so as other GUIs.  It uses Gnome by default and no themes can be applied.

I’m glad that I found an NVidia driver that works perfectly on Optimus enabled netbooks.  An installation guide was provided by Ubuntu’s Wiki.  Here is how it worked for me using the following commands:

Add the repository to your source list:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

If you are running an older version of Linux mint, you can update the NVidia drivers by

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

Update your current repository by using the command

sudo apt-get update

Install the bumblebee driver using the command,

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

Due to new Kernel updates which includes X, you can use the command to test if the driver works for you

optirun glxgears

You can visit Ubuntu’s wiki page for a more detailed explanation on how to install the driver of NVidia Optimus.

Resources:

• http://pleph.appspot.com/init/posts/view/2687901
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

 image from www.liberiangeek.net

To disable GDM on ubuntu and use only the text based login, follow the steps below:

• Edit /etc/default/grub
• Comment out GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
• Add the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”text”
• Save Grub and update grub using sudo update-grub2

Below is a snapshot of grub conf with GDM disabled on start-up

GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Reference:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/76543/how-do-i-disable-gdm-and-graphical-user-selection

If you get an error in phpMyAdmin which is shown as:

Your PHP parameter <a href="./url.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fphp.net%2Fmanual%2Fen%2Fsession.configuration.php%23ini.session.gc-maxlifetime&amp;token=7a154ed32483399408b618fc9415c126">session.gc_maxlifetime</a> is lower that cookie validity configured in phpMyAdmin, because of this, your login will expire sooner than configured in phpMyAdmin.

is caused by your phpmyadmin’s conf.inc.php and your php configuration. In your conf.inc.php check for the line

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity']= 90000;

and on your php.ini, look for the line:

session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

The value on your phpmyadmin’s config file much not exceed your php.ini’s value.