install a lamp server on ubuntu

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Easy!

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

Be careful not to delete the ^ character.

This will install: 

Modify the session timeout in phpmyadmin

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Login and re-login and re-re-login in phpmyadmin is a huge pain.

Here is the way to extend sessions duration.

Open the file config.inc.php in /usr/share/phpmyadmin or in /etc/phpmyadmin

Add the following line:

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity']=86400;

And in php.ini, modify the following line:

session.gc_maxlifetime = 86400

Restart apache.

apache2ctl restart

You now have 24h sessions.

how to speed up social network badge loading

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I have had some problem with my Tripit badge on the left of the screen. For some strange reason it wouldn’t load on my Google Chrome. It would load if I would open this page with Firefox or IE though. The weirdest thing is that after loading it from Firefox or IE, I could then load it with Chrome. 

So I decided I would take a different approach and cache the badge somewhere.

Here is how to do it:

First get the URL of the javascript file of your badge.

Here is the code of my badge:

Reset the default drupal theme with SQL

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSometimes a drupal theme can be broken and it can be needed to reset the default theme so the site can be accessed again in order to fix the problem.

As a rule of thumb I always try to use the theme "Cube" for the administrive part of drupal. that makes things a lot easier and if you breeak the theme you can at least still use the admin part.

Here is anyhow how to reset the theme using SQL:

Simply execute the three following commands:

UPDATE system SET status=1 WHERE name = 'garland';

bypass authentication for a specific URL with squid and webmin

Reading Time: 2 minutesIf you need to setup some webmin rule for bypassing authentication for a specific URL, it’s VERY easy to setup.

This is something that can be needed if you have a windows server behind a proxy and that server needs direct access to the internet in order to be activated:

Activation fails when you try to activate Windows 2008 over the Internet… 

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.