Firefox: This address is restricted

By slopjong on January 25, 2012

This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other than Web browsing. Firefox has canceled the request for your protection.

This message appears if you want to access a website on a non-standard port, e.g. http://example.com:42 .

Being a developer you might run in your non-productive environment a web server listening on such a port. As a workaround you can tweak your firefox by adding the configuration network.security.ports.banned.override to your preferences.

To do so go to about:config, klick on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button and right-click any preference. In the appearing context menu click New > String and add the new preference 

network.security.ports.banned.override

with a value “1-65000″ or whatever ports you want to access. They don’t describe blocked ports but ports that are considered to be not banned.

I recommend to create a new firefox profile for development and testing purpose and that you only open ports that you really need.

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Linux: My friend X11 …

By slopjong on January 8, 2012

I’ve been really very happy with my linux …


… until I had to fiddle with X11 again. I really dislike to configure X11, this brings me down to zero every time.

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Arch Linux: install Redmine 1.3 with SQLite

By slopjong on January 7, 2012

Note: Redmine 1.4.0 has been released. This howto might be incompatible with the new version.

Redmine is an open-source web-based project management and bug-tracking tool.

This article explains how to install it on Arch Linux. At the time this article was written the official documentation page lacked of clear installation instructions.

Redmine is written in the ruby programming language and uses Rails as a web application framework which can be compared to the Zend framework for the php language. To get Redmine run on a webserver, Rack is required which provides a minimal interface between a webserver and the ruby web app.

Redmine is shipped with a script which launches a webserver called Webrick. More precisely Webrick is a Ruby standard library providing simple HTTP web server services.

With this background one understands what the Redmine’s requirements are for. According to Redmine’s website these are

Redmine 1.3.x    Ruby 1.8.6 or 1.8.7    Rails 2.3.14    Rack 1.1.x    Rake 0.8.7    i18n 0.4.2

Rake is required to generate a session store and to create/initialize the database. It’s a build tool similar to make but for ruby. i18n is for localization.

In the following it’s shown how to install Redmine automatically or how to do things manually.

Continue reading »

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Unmute the sound card using the ALSA utils

By slopjong on August 20, 2011

On Arch Linux all the channels are mute by default. To unmute your sound card you can do it manually in the ncurses-gui-based alsamixer of the alsa-utils package which looks like shown on the following picture.

MM means that the channel is muted wheras OO marks it to be unmuted. The vertical bars visualize the volume which can be turned up and down with the up and down cursor keys. The Master and PCM channels need to get unmuted to hear some sound from your computer.

The same job can be done with amixer with the sound card number, the channel and the volume controls as arguments.

amixer set -c 0 Master 25 unmute
amixer set -c 0 PCM 25 unmute

Each sound card is enumerated, the first is 0, the second is 1 and so forth. To find out the appropriate number of a card the declaration can be found out by executing aplay -l.

➜  ~  aplay -l                                                              [0]
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: I82801CAICH3 [Intel 82801CA-ICH3], device 0: Intel ICH [Intel 82801CA-ICH3]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The settings are stored in /var/lib/alsa/asound.state, to reload them after a reboot, the alsa daemon can be added in your /etc/rc.conf (on distributions not following the bsd style the system configuration file might differ).

...
DAEMONS=(... @alsa ...)
...

The @ symbol means that the daemon is started in the background which speeds up the boot time.

Other useful commands can be found here:
http://slopjong.de/2009/01/25/useful-mac-commands

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Installing python modules in your home

By slopjong on July 13, 2011

If you are working on a computer where you need python modules that are not installed and you haven’t enough privileges you can install them in your home folder following these instructions:

cd lxml-2.3
python setup.py build
python setup.py install --home=~

In this example I’m compiling the lxml source. In the third line the setup script creates the directory structure ~/lib/python (notice that you just gave it ~ as the home option) and places the lxml module inside.

As a last step you need to add ~/lib/python to the path list set in the PYTHONPATH variable in your ~/.bashrc and if it doesn’t exist, define it.

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