How to get rid of conduit as a default search engine in Firefox

Reading Time: 2 minutesSo it looks like this conduit thing is stuck in your browser.

First, why would any company want to do that.
A bit of datamining, a lot of google adverts money.

I don’t know for sure but maybe this company which is by the way providing some nice software most of the time, is keeping records of the searches you are entering in google. They probably don’t really build any profile on you but at least they get a good idea of what the people they are connected to are looking for on the web.

Düsseldorf week stay round up.

Reading Time: 2 minutes I have been travelling many times to Düsseldorf for business.

The Nokia Siemens Networks office is located very close to the airport.

Here are some of my tricks when staying there.

My rugby career

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I have started to play rugby in France in 2002 at my engineering school (ECE Paris). My school team was called "XV du Camion". I played only one short season, 2002-2003.

Then I played for 4 years at ESNanterre in the suburb of Paris. I was a 2nd row and a prop.

How to delete empty line with vi

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How to delete empty lines with vi?

Just type this in:

 
<esc>:g/^$/d

NOTE:  This means that all the lines that just have a carriage return on them (NO Spaces), will be removed. 

If you want to remove lines with empty spaces as well:

 
<esc>:g/^ *$/d

rename and shorten many files with bash

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Bash supports a surprising number of string manipulation functions.

For example if you want to get rid of the beginning of the name of a file or a folder on many files at a time you could do the following:

 
bash> ls
mylongfile1
mylongfile2
mylongfile3
mylongfile4
mylongfile5
mylongfile6
mylongfile7
 
bash> for i in *
> do
> mv $i ${i:6}
> done
bash> ls
file1
file2
file3
file4
file5
file6
file7
So to extract the end of a variable after a NUMBER of characters you just need to specify ${variable:NUMBER}
 

How to remove a Compeed from a sock

Reading Time: < 1 minuteCompeeds have saved my life numerous times already. Some people can’t stand them, I am a strong believer and I cannot go running, play rugby, or go for a long hike without having one in my pocket.

 
They are so good that you can actually recover almost instantly from a blister. If there is blister forming under your foot, that’s where Compeed is the best, when the blister is not there yet but you know that if you go on for another 10 minutes it will turn into a blister.
 

National team caps

Reading Time: < 1 minuteFriendly
Estonia – Finland: 22/05/2010 – Win 15-22

European cup division 3C
Finland – Israel: 12/06/2010 – Loss 6-13
https://www.fira-aer-rugby.com/archives-match-563.htm

European cup division 2D
Cyprus – Finland 26/03/2011 – Loss 70-10
https://www.fira-aer-rugby.com/match-348.htm

Running my first half-marathon

Reading Time: 2 minutesI spent Jun-Dec 2010 in Dallas, Texas and for Thanksgiving I decided to enroll to the Turkey trot with my wife and my good buddy Jim.
It was a 5Km small race and it gave me the virus of running.
I completed it in 29min which is not too bad.

 

The atmospher was great, lot’s of people cheering, everyone happy, I loved it.
I thought I should get to a longer distance in order to enjoy the same feeling for a longer period. How about a 10K? Let’s make it 21K… Half Marathon.

Change permanently the ethernet parameters of interface in redhat

Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn the file: 

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Add the following at the end of the file:

ETHTOOL_OPTS="speed 100 duplex full autoneg off"

How to change the default runlevel on Ubuntu

Reading Time: < 1 minute On Redhat you would simply look for the file /etc/inittab and locate the line that says:

# The default runlevel.
id:3:initdefault:

Simply replace the 3 with 2 or 4 or 5 depending what you wanna do in order to change the default runlevel.

On Ubuntu starting from some version around 6sh… whatever, no one is running that anymore anyway and those who do run it don’t need to change that. At the time I am writing this the current LTS is 10.04 and the current testing release is 10.10
So here is how to do it.