ctrl-a and ctrl-b not working in tmux on RHEL 5.5

Rather than moving to the beginning of a line and the end of a line, ctrl-a and ctrl-b were just print ^A and ^B to the screen. Not sure why, I don't really have time to investigate, but this seems to fix the issue when run within the tmux session.

set -o emacs

MySQL Grants grant and revoke

I'm not really a fan of MySQL but here is a simple problem I always forget the syntax for which is really a SQL issue.

An installation of MediaWiki has an update script which requires the DROP privilege on the database, so I wanted to add the DROP privilege, run the update script and revoke the DROP privilege again.

Here's how:

mysql> show grants for 'username'@'host';
mysql> grant drop on adatabase.* to 'username'@'host';
mysql> revoke drop on adatabase.* from 'username'@'host';

Job's a good-un!

Simple SSH Tunneling

Today I had a problem where the office firewall would not let out traffic to the fibs.com server on port 4321 (Shame on them!)

Luckerly a remote machine comes in handy. I then just tell my Fibs client to connect on localhost port 4444

ssh -f -L 4444:fibs.com:4321 aremotemachine -N

In-place file editing with sed

This took me a while to work out why this would not work. When using the -i option with sed you need to specify a backup extension to be used (at least on my 10.5 mac you do!)

e.g.

sed -i '' -e 's/something/something else/g' -e 's/again/again again/g' *.py

Nested List Comprehension

I never really feel like i'm any good at using Python unless I am doing cool things with List Comprehension.

Here's a quick example of nested list comprehension I used today to create a new list from a list containing lists of three items

Visually:-

[['mostly cloudy (day)', 'cloudy3.png', 'cloudy3.png'],
['partly cloudy (night)', 'cloudy2_night.png', 'cloudy2_night.png'],
['partly cloudy (day)', 'cloudy2.png', 'cloudy2.png'],
....................................
['Sunny', 'sunny.png', 'sunny.png']]

To this:-

[['mostly cloudy (night)', 'cloudy3_night.png'],
['mostly cloudy (day)', 'cloudy3.png'],
['partly cloudy (night)', 'cloudy2_night.png'],
....................................
['Sunny', 'sunny.png']]

The code then:-

[[a[0],a[1]] for a in theList]

Sharing media for Xbox360 on Linux/Mac

Ok, so you can't use samba with Xbox360 and there is no-way I am gonna use Windows. Luckerly, after some dedicated google-ing I came across 2 solutions, both of which did work, but at present the uShare seems to be the tidiest.

http://netou.co.uk/?p=28 Tested on SuSE Linux 11.1
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=848144

http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/ Tested on Mac 10.5.8 PPC and SuSE Linux 11.1

Xbox Live firewall Rules

A google for xbox live firewall ports never gave me specific ports requirements so here they are as I have discovered them.

Inbound. (A Nat based router/firewall these will need direct port forwarding. On my Juniper I set up a VIP.)

88 UDP

3074 UDP

3074 TCP

Outbound (I locked the DNS lookups to my DNS servers only)

53 UDP (DNS)

53 TCP (DNS)

88 UDP

3074 UPD

80 TCP

443 TCP - This was not mentioned on the net but traffic was trying to get through this port.