[Sun Apr 30 09:23:13 CDT 2017]

If you try to access the GNOME Shell extensions website to install new extensions or configure the existing ones and see a "ReferenceError: chrome is not defined" message, follow the directions from this Stack Exchange thread to fix the problem:

$ wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/chrome-gnome-shell/chrome-gnome-shell_8-4_all.deb
$ sudo gdebi chrome-gnome-shell_8-4_all.deb
It worked fine for me. {link to this entry}

[Tue Apr 25 11:51:45 CDT 2017]

Are you a fan of the vim text editor but are annoyed by the fact that you cannot copy and paste from (and into) the clipboard? Then, these directions should help. Be aware, though, that you may need to install the vim-gtk package from your default repositories in order to get things to work. You can find whether you need this extra package by running the following from within vim in command mode:

:echo has('clipboard')
If the above returns "0", then it will not work, and you need to install the extra package.

Once you get things properly set up, you can use either the "* or the "+ registers to access the clipboard. For example, the following will cut the current line into the clipboard:

"+dd
At that point, you should be able to paste from the clipboard into any other regular application. Also, the following will paste from the clipboard into your vim session:
"+p
{link to this entry}

[Tue Apr 25 11:48:36 CDT 2017]

If you ever have a Live CD that you would like to open within VirtualBox using directly the ISO image, simply use these directions. It works just fine. {link to this entry}

[Wed Apr 19 08:51:01 CDT 2017]

I recently had to merge a specific commit from a branch into a different branch using git. As it turned out, this article explains it pretty well. You just use the following command:

$ git cherry-pick <commit_ID>
{link to this entry}

[Tue Apr 11 14:33:46 CDT 2017]

Here is an interesting (although hardly surprising) read: Data centers decline as users turn to rented servers. As the author himself states:

The cloud is not necessarily less expensive than an on-premise operation, said Davies. But it does provide speed, flexibility and an operating expense, or OPEX, model.

In terms of revenue, the data center system market, which includes software and hardware, is barely growing, according to research firm Gartner.

"Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft," John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. "This has created a reduction in spending on servers, which is impacting the overall data center system segment."

Also, although completely unrelated, here is a great link to read on the C10K problem. {link to this entry}

[Sat Apr 8 11:46:06 CDT 2017]

Not sure how this happened, but I recently noticed that I was unable to play certain songs via Spotify. The app showed an error explaining that the song was not available, even though I was pretty sure it must have been available on their servers. After a while, I noticed a pattern: the songs I was experiencing a problem with were all present on my local drive. At some point, I must have added them to my local list on Spotify and, perhaps, they later were deleted or moved to another directory or something. I could confirm this simply by taking a look at the songs on my local list, which matched the ones I was having a problem with and, indeed, I was unable to play from within the local list. So, the next step was to figure out how to remove these, because right-clicking on them didn't appear to help. In the end, after searching around for a while, I found out that, in the case of Linux, you need to close the app and remove (or move out of the way) the following file:

~/.config/spotify/Users/-user/local-files.bnk
I did try renaming the file to *.bak, but that didn't seem to do the trick. It only worked when I moved it out of the way. {link to this entry}