Matthew Steven - Linux Administration, PHP, Web Development, Hardware

Fixing Drupal's Taxonomy Menu Modules's Tooltip / Title Clutter

Matt — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:16:43 +0000

Drupal's Taxonomy Menu is very useful for organizing your site, but its developers have added a real nuisance in the form of the title attribute to the "a" tags it generates when paired with a suckerfish menu in a theme or "nice menus" module.

Here's a patch to dismiss that problem, run it from the "modules" folder in your Drupal installation.

Munin Ping Plugin - Changed to show one ping per graph

Matt — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:01:29 +0000

I started with the very nice ping script from the consttype blog, but I didn't like that the graph was so hard to read with multiple ping hosts that had similar latencies, and it would time out with more than three IP addresses, and that it took the best ping rather than the average. So I have changed it to use a faster ping, report a ping of 1000 when it fails to connect (so you get a spike rather than a gap) and be linkable with ping_ipaddress format.

Copying a Virtual Machine lv or Partition Over SSH

Matt — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:26:36 +0000

Copying a Logical Volume or Partition over SSH

This should only be attempted on either a snapshot lvm volume, or an unmounted hard drive partition!

Using ssh and dd you can copy any LVM or (unmounted) hard drive partition over the internet to a new machine easily. You can do a "push" or "pull" copy. Here's a "push" copy:

dd if=/dev/vg0/partition-snapshot bs=1k |
ssh remotehost dd of=/dev/vg0/partition-destination bs=1k

XFCE4 review: After Over 10 Years with KDE, I'm Moving to XFCE, and Xubuntu!

Matt — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:18:02 +0000

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking. I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day! Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important. This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

jQuery Ajax Requests on IE6 Need Extra Help To Parse

Matt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:29:51 +0000

Using jQuery's .get .post or .ajax features to parse xml results, you may find that only Internet Explorer 6 fails to parse your xml result in the callback function. You can always count on your friend IE6 to crush productivity!

Dual Head Xorg Config for a RadeonHD RV630 aka Radeon HD 2600XT

Matt — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:09:12 +0000

** Note ** I've sold this card since, but I'll repost this in case it is useful to anyone:
Just a reference in case anyone else is trying to figure out how to get dual head working (with screen stretch) on Ubuntu in particular since Ubuntu doesn’t figure it out by itself. Took me awhile to get this figured out.
The magic lines (in “Device") are this

Green Networking - Converting Standard Computers to Thin Clients

Matt — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:05:15 +0000

These days it’s all about saving money, power, the planet. This post is intended to get you excited to try thin client computing on your home network- assuming you have one.

Simplifying Configuring CUPS Printing Clients on a Network

Matt — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:44:45 +0000

If you have a server computer with a printer attached and a client computer across the network there’s a super simple way to configure cups, create a “/etc/cups/client.conf” file and stick a line like this, with the server's IP address in it:
ServerName 12.34.56.78

A PHP Discovery: perltidy, meet phptidy

Matt — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:42:15 +0000

It seems that the many people who have been looking for a php beautifier now have a very nicely done perltidy work-alike in Magnus Rosenbaum’s new phptidy program.

Setting up multi monitor / dual head 1280x1024 with the Intel G31 Integrated Graphics Chipset

Matt — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:18:21 +0000

Just a recipe for dual head on Xorg/Linux with the GMA 3100 included with my G31 chipset in case I forget.

1) Obtain “intel” xorg driver version 2.1.1 or later. Build/install.
2) Configure i915 kernel driver, load
3) Configure xorg with the following unusual parts: Monitor Identifiers should match these options under the video card Device block.

Code: