WD My Passport Doesnt Work in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

(OK this is my first post after a looong time so the reading is going to be bumpy ride for you)

I bought a WD My Passport external hard drive (750 GB, WD Smartware) recently and connected it to my Windows laptop and set it up. But when I connected it to my other laptop with Ubuntu, I was not able to see a drive so that I can add my files to My Passport.

I searched about this problem on Google and hit few articles which asked to look up the drive manually using a command and mount it manually. I tried it but the command didn't return me a drive, I found few more articles to debug the issue but none of them worked for me.

After some thought, I found that there is a WD Smartware installed in the My Passport which locks and secures the data with a password. Somehow this is not working with Ubuntu and therefore the drive is not showing up.

Fortunately, I saw that there is an option where we can unlock this feature in the WD Smartware when you connect to a windows laptop.

So here is what I did and what I would suggest people to do if they find the similar problem:
1. Connect the My Passport to a windows laptop
2. Open WD Smartware
3. You should be able to find a "setup" button and an option to disable the "lock feature"
4. You might have to update the firmware in order to see the option above.
5. Disable the lock feature
6. Disconnect the My Passport and connect it to windows laptop again to make sure its not asking for a password and also to make sure disable lock feature is enabled.
7. Now connect the My passport to the Ubuntu 9.10 laptop
8. Now you should be able to see the drive in Ubuntu.

More useful Solaris commands

Here is a list of Solaris 10 commands that I found helpful, to monitor and optimize the performance of the system:

1. To find the top 10 largest files on the file system:
du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

2. Sort the ls command to show the largest files first:
ls -l | sort -nk5

3. Find out the top processes taking up the CPU:
prstat -s cpu

4. Find out the top processes taking up the memory:
prstat -s size

5. Find out the number of mails in the mail queue:
mailq |wc -l

6. Get the information about a specific mail in mail queue
cat /var/spool/mqueue/qf

Are your skills upto date?

I came across this website which rates the Programming languages, Interesting read!. Also helps in finding out if your skills are upto date:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Abstract:

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity
of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are
based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party
vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to
calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best
programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been
written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are
still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language
should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition
of the TIOBE index can be found here.

How to dynamically edit a website content on your browser

I was scrolling through a blog and found this cool tip, it lets you edit a webpage online in browser (I tested on Internet Explorer but I think this works with Firefox and Opera as well). Its very useful when you
want to comment/note a webpage and store it for future. You can also edit the website and take a screenshot of it. Here are the steps:

1. Open any website (eg., www.google.com)
2. Enter this line in the URL of the browser:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';
document.designMode='on'; void 0
3. Go ahead and edit the website!

See this blog to know more about this idea and various comments on it.

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/cut-and-paste-one-line-of-code-to-make-any-website-editable

How to move the thunderbird mails to Outlook

I have written a post earlier to do this, I found a new way to do it. This way is better if you have few emails to be transferred from Thunderbird to Outlook. Again, this is not a direct way and is not straightforward. Here are the steps:

1. Open Thunderbird
2. Select all the mails to be transferred
3. Right-click and select "Forward all mails" (or something like that)
4. A new mail window opens with all the selected mails as attachment
5. Send this mail to your own account (Thats why this method is not good to transfer heavy mails!)
6. Open outlook and check mail, dran-and-drop the attached mails to your desktop
7. Drag-and-drop the attached mails from your desktop to Outlook folder.

Done! Take care while moving the mails, better to take a backup.

C++ coding standards at Google

I was going through an interesting blog ( http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008/06/back-to-microsoft.html) by an ex-Google employee and found this link to google C++ coding standards.

Its good to use it as a reference for good programming tips, or just an interesting go-through. Here is the link to Google coding standards (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml )

Solaris 10 commands: How to see Documentum Server logs

Checking documentum server logs while a workflow is running is very useful, also while debugging the content server methods. Here are the steps:

1. Login to Solaris 10 (From windows, I use putty or SSH client, both are good)
2. Type bash to change the shell (I find bash is very convenient shell than ksh)
3. Change to documentum folder: type cd $DOCUMENTUM/dba/log
4. Open the log: type tail -100f <<docbase_name>>.log

The above tail command lists out last 100 lines from the log file. As and when the log file is updated by the server, the refresh happens automatically enabling to see last 100 lines always. This is very useful when the server is throwing lot of log messages.