Month: August 2011

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64-bit Firefox 6 on CentOS 6 x86_64 (or Fedora) with Flash 11

So I’ve gone back to Linux from Mac, due to the SSD issues I had with my Macbook Pro basically making VMware unusable. A Win7 VM would grind the guest and host to a halt on the 7200 RPM SATA OEM drive, and the SSD wouldn’t work, so I put the SSD back in my HP and installed CentOS 6 x86_64. Not really ideal, but at least it works.

CentOS 6 ships with Firefox 3.6.9, which is really old by now. Fine for a server, but I wanted FF6. I grabbed the Firefox 6.0.1 bz2 from VoxCast, unzipped it and copied it to /usr/lib64/firefox-6. Then I ran yum remove firefox to remove 3.6.9 and avoid any issues. I tried the instructions from my older post on this subject but for whatever reason it didn’t work – I’m guessing because I’m not using the distro’s Firefox RPM.

I followed these instructions to get the Flash 11 64-bit plugin installed. It still wasn’t working though.

I ended up creating a symlink:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /home/evan/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

When I started up Firefox after creating the symlink, Flash worked.

Additionally, to set Firefox 6 as the default browser, run gnome-default-applications-properties, select Custom, and paste /usr/lib64/firefox-6/firefox %s in the Command: field.

Update: I upgraded my home desktop PC from FC12 to FC14 last night and used the above procedure to install Firefox 6.0.2 on it with Flash 11. So, in case anyone was wondering, the above works for Fedora as well.

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Hurricane Transistor Radio

With hurricane Irene passing through this past weekend I quickly shopped for an AM/FM radio. I found this one: Sony ICF-S10MK2 Pocket AM/FM Radio. Cheap, runs on 2 AA batteries, and worked great. A++, would buy again. I actually bought 2, one for my mom. I ordered them on Friday and paid the $8 to bump each one up to overnight with Prime, and they were both delivered Saturday morning. Unfortunately I wasn’t home to receive it, and the package weathered the storm on my front step.

Times like these you learn the real value of low-tech. iPhone, useless. The only way of getting information was this wonderful $10 AM/FM radio. Thanks Sony and WLNG!

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Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.

A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all.
Continue reading “Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.”

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FCC Report shows Verizon much faster than Cablevision

The FCC recently conducted a study of some of the top broadband ISPs in the country and measured customers’ actual bandwidth as compared to what the ISPs advertised. FiOS really came out on top.

The report is available on the FCC site. The bottom line, though, is that Verizon FiOS averaged nearly 120% of advertised speed (i.e., more than was advertised) and Cablevision was between 50% and 75% of advertised speeds. Latency (ping) was also heavily in FiOS’s favor.

FCC - Fios vs Cablevision
FCC - Fios vs Cablevision

Continue reading “FCC Report shows Verizon much faster than Cablevision”

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Logging RT username in Apache access_log

RT has its own internal accounting & tracking system for logging activity, but I was interested in even more granular stuff, like seeing who looked at which tickets. I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to log this in Apache. Well, I was kind of right, in that it wasn’t “hard,” but it took me a long time to find the right place to do it. I did finally get it though.
Continue reading “Logging RT username in Apache access_log”

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Amazon SES: “illegal headers” with ses-send-email.pl (followup)

A few people have emailed me asking me to integrate the perl code snippet into I wrote to strip illegal headers when sending email via Amazon SES into something actually usable. I’ve done so! I haven’t really tested this beyond sending some test emails, but here it is. Use this at your own risk, I make no warranty, blah blah blah.
Continue reading “Amazon SES: “illegal headers” with ses-send-email.pl (followup)”