Mysql Unknown Variable character-set-server

If you've recently upgraded to MySQL 5.1.45, you might experience a problem running mysql client. The error message says:

/usr/bin/mysql: unknown variable 'character-set-server=utf8'

The reason is that mysql client no longer supports character-set-server parameter. Actually I don't know why, the official ChangeLog doesn't
include any explanations. The solution is to disable character-set-server option
inside /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[mysql]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
#character-set-server=utf8

Vim Terminal Commands

There is a possibility to run terminal commands inside Vim. Just type:

:! command [Hit Enter]

Also you can invoke a shell inside Vim:

:! bash [Hit Enter]

Also Vim has third party addons (vim-shell) that allow to use shell in more natural manner. But I would not recommend you to use Vim this way. There is much better way to achieve the same things - just use screen. It allows you to split your terminal vertically by pressing Ctrl-A S. Then you can use Ctrl-A Tab or Ctrl-A Ctrl-I to switch between them.

Xorg events repeated twice

I've recently upgraded to xorg-x11 1.6 (it is shipped with several up-to-date Linux distributions like OpenSuSe 11.2) and encountered a problem with my keyboard. All keypresses repeated twice, which made impossible to use xorg-server. After looking through /var/log/Xorg.0.log I found that somehow Xserver decided to add my keyboard twice. So all events from the keyboard were processed two times. I fixed this problem by adding this line to xorg.conf into Section "ServerFlags" block
Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"

Alsa Audio Meter

If you need to watch the realtime sound output level on some graphical meter, you might consider difficult to find the program for these needs. After some searching I found nice software called ameter especially for these functions. This program can be used with the most of ALSA and OSS apps.
After program installation you should create .asoundrc in your home directory with the following contents:

pcm_scope.ameter {

type ameter

}

pcm_scope_type.ameter {

lib /usr/local/lib/libameter.so

}

pcm.ameter {

type meter

slave.pcm 'hw:0,0' #can be hw or hw:0,1 etc...

scopes.0 ameter

}

pcm.dsp0 ameter

The program source can be downloaded from here

Also I have created an ebuild for easy installation on Gentoo Linux. Simply add it to your local overlay

# Copyright 1999-2009 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

EAPI="2"

DESCRIPTION="Alsa meter plugin for audio software with GUI"
HOMEPAGE="http://laugeo.free.fr/ameter.html"
SRC_URI="http://laugeo.free.fr/ameter-0.44.tar.gz"

LICENSE=""
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~amd64"
IUSE=""

DEPEND="media-libs/alsa-lib
media-libs/libsdl
media-libs/sdl-image
sys-devel/automake:1.7"
RDEPEND="${DEPEND}"

RESTRICT="mirror"

src_install() {
make DESTDIR="${D}" install || die "make install failed"
}

Run hddtemp as user

If you want to get temperature of your hard drive, you can simply run

# hddtemp /dev/sda

This method has one disadvantage - hddtemp must be executed as root, otherwise you will get

/dev/sda: open: Permission denied

But there is a quick solution to run hddtemp as a normal user. Most Linux distributions have hddtemp daemon. After you run it you should be able to use just telnet or netcat as a normal use to get your hard drive temperature:

~ telnet localhost 7634

Google Custom Search Results per Page

If you are using Google Custom Search on your site, you may wonder how to change the count of search results per page. Okay, if you take a look at the custom search form html code, you will find this line

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script>

Now open this script in browser and look into the code itself. This line does the trick

h=(h=b.googleNumSearchResults)?Math.min(h,20):10

It checks if the variable googleNumSearchResults exists and if true, the count of search results per page will be set to minimum value from googleNumSearchResults and 20. If the googleNumSearchResults is not set, the count of search results per page will be set to 10. So you can easily customize the results count by adding this line to your custom search form code (remember you can't get more than 20 results per page)

var googleNumSearchResults = 15;

Mythfrontend for Windows

I've been looking for application simular to mythfrontend that can play Live TV from MythTV server (mythbackend) under Windows for a while. Currently there is a windows port of mythfrontend but it needs to be built from source with MinGW/MSys. So I searched for an easier way and found pretty good application called MythTV Player. It doesn't require any additional software or multimedia codecs and simply works out of the box. It is still in development stage so you may experience some issues during video playback, but after almost week of hard usage there was quite few player hangs and no other noticeable bugs. Here is the screenshot and the download link

MythTv Player latest version