Introduction to bash scripts

adminLinux, QNAP0 Comment
17 min. reading

While playing with some extra features on my newly purchased QNAP TS-210 at some point I was forced to finally write some bash script to be able to control things, that are uncontrollable via administration panel. For this reason I had to learn myself at least basics of bash, that is installed on my QNAP. I used floppix page and linuxconfig.org Wiki as a base for my learning process (and source for this article), however I had to write down my own memo-list to be able to quickly find, what I’m looking for.

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No Samba access after password change

adminLinux, QNAP0 Comment
3 min. reading

Let us understand it. Windows is stupid and idiotic system. Suppose, you store (remember) your NAS’s Samba username and password, so you don’t have to provide it, each time you access your local network share. If you thenchange your user password, Windows either won’t detect the fact that password has changed or, even if it detect it, it won’t show you login/password dialog box to provide new one. Instead, it continue to provide NAS with wrong (outdated) password.

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Incorrectly formatted external disk on QNAP TS-210

adminLinux, QNAP0 Comment
5 min. reading

After using QNAP’s web-panel to format external disk, it suddenly turned out that formatting to any partition type ends with extremely small free disk size. For example, completely empty (as should be after format) 1,5 TB disk, formatted to any Windows type (FAT32 / NTFS) has only 1,9 GB free space. Formatting it to any Linux type (Ext3, Ext4) ends with 1,84 GB free space and formatting to HPS+ with 1,89 GB. In all attempts disk has less then 0,2% free space right after format. Here is the solution, that I came up with after a lot of digging.

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Patching some security problems in Samba

adminLinux, QNAP0 Comment
4 min. reading

QNAP is built upon Debian, created and designed by a bunch of wise guys, constantly being improved and used around the world, sometimes in very important solutions. Thus, it is generally a safe and secured solution. On the other hand, there isn’t (there never was and there never will be) any thing, done by a human, that another human wouldn’t be able to breke, change, alter or destroy. So, there is always a good idea to improve security, whenever you’re possible to do so. This article discusses some smaller or bigger security holes in Samba on board QNAP with a possible solution or workaround.

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Favicon

adminHTML0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

Favicon (from “favorite icon“) is an icon displayed in certain places in web browser, when browsing any webpage supporting favicons. It can be displayed before address in URL bar, on browser tab, in favorites list, etc. This is mostly an icon (.ico file) in 16×16 or 32×32 dimensions.

The easiest way for your website to support it, is to put proper file in root folder of your domain or webpage, i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico.

If you need more fine-grained control over this, then this article should help.

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Handling Apple’s .dmg files in Windows

adminApple, media0 Comment
3 min. reading

If you just want to look into (or extract) contents of .dmg file, a good, old and free 7-Zip will take care of this. This should also work for Apple .sparseimage files. But, beware that (just like in case of .iso files for Windows) these formats can contain bootable information and or whole disk images (Apple .hps files), rather useless under Windows. So, for example, if someone tell you that he has Windows XP image ready to be used in VirtualPC for Macintosh, keep in mind that you rather won’t be able to use in in Windows version of VirtualPC. Or you’ll have a lot, lot of work with extraction, conversion, tune-up etc.

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Changing keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint… costs (40) 150 USD! [updated]

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

When you go to Options for changing Ribbon settings, in your Word 2007 or Word 2010, you can see a small button at the bottom of button list letting you to change keyboard shortcuts for most areas of you text editor. When you go to exactly the same place in your PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 you my (surprisingly?) notice, that there is no such thing. Googling around the web let’s you discover that this is… normal situation!

2023 Update: It is still a normal situation for Microsoft. Only this time you have to pay 150 USD per year (!) to gain the ability of changing keyboard shortcuts (that is: the most basic feature of every software)!

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Using PHP and Oracle database

adminPHP, SQL, Yii0 Comment
5 min. reading

I was working on bigger project using PHP (Yii) and Oracle database (through PDO and Yii). This isn’t a very common combination and many developers thinks, that writing PHP application to use Oracle database is a pure madness, mostly due to many strange behaviors and nasty bugs, that are present in PDO driver for Oracle. I can actually confirm this. Following article contains links to my Yii forum discussions on various aspects of using Oracle with Yii and PHP. You may find it useful, if you’re struggling with any problem.

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Lorem ipsum is gone

adminHTML0 Comment
5 min. reading

If you already don’t know, what Lorem ipsum is, then let me tell you, that it is a non-sense text, incorrectly said to be based on Latin or Greek, used by web developers to fill-up some textual parts of webpage. Mainly to show end-user a placeholder, where a real text finally appear. Instead of for example writing some real article to fill-up example article body, they eager to use this text.

If you don’t like Lorem ipsum of would like to have some replacements for it, then this article may help.

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addClass, removeClass and hasClass without jQuery

adminJavaScript, jQuery0 Comment
2 min. reading

Class manipulation methods in jQuery are really handy, but when you need just them and nothing else out of jQuery, then using entire library seems like a little bit mistake. Using own versions of addClass, removeClass and hasClass sounds like a better idea and for this reason I have wrote following article, where you’ll find an example implementation of these methods.

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Incorrect music or audiobook order in MP3 player

adminmedia, Microsoft0 Comment
9 min. reading

You may notice, that many MP3 players (both Windows programs — not tested on other OSs — as good as external hardwares) are making their file lists in some strange order. This may not be a big deal, when talking about music (though, when listening to a particular album, you may get yourself pissed-off as well), but became a really pain in the ass, if we’re talking about audiobooks.

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Get rid of ID3v2 tag from many files at once using Winamp

adminmedia0 Comment
6 min. reading

If you’re an “old-school” MP3 user, and ID3 Tag version 1 data is all you need to get happy, you may find a shit stick to version 2 of ID3 Tag a little bit annoying. If it is so, then the big question is, how to quickly get rid of ID3v2 data for many files? Many programs are allowing to do a massive ID3 tags (both versions) change/edit, but there aren’t many of them that allows to delete particular tag version out of many files massively. And here comes my little trick.

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Disable refreshing of removable drive contents in Total Commander

adminsoftware0 Comment
2 min. reading

When CD or DVD is ejected from drive, Total Commander “resets” contents of the pane to nearest available drive (usually C:). It is normal and obvious because contents of CD or DVD are no longer available. But, the same thing happens even if Total Commander is in background. This might be seen as an annoying feature, because each time you change CD or DVD in drive, you have to manually again select that drive in Total Commander. Fortunately, there is an easy solution for this.

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