Unencrypting home directory in Ubuntu

In an Ubuntu install, I once requested home folder encryption. Bad idea.

To revert to regular file management I followed these instructions, which involved commenting out a line in each of the /etc/pam.d/common* files.

During a subsequent aptitude safe-upgrade, those lines were restored, not sure why.

I have again commented them out.

UTF-8-related warning from rack

After a recent bundle update (early June 2011), the following warning shows up while running specs:

GEM_PATH/rack-1.2.3/lib/rack/utils.rb:16: warning: regexp match /.../n against to UTF-8 string

This post addresses the problem, although it's strange that the problem in my case appeared just now.

Restoring proper TextMate bindings for RoR and RSpec

If you cannot get TextMate to use the correct bundles for Ruby on Rails and RSpec code, then you may have manually modified the bindings in a way that confuses TM.

These instructions will fix the problem.

Ubuntu server: mounting a USB drive

Follow these directions!

In a nutshell, for an NTFS drive:

$ sudo fdisk -l
$ sudo mkdir /media/myusb
$ sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/myusb
$ sudo umount /media/myusb

dot-underscore files when macos copies to other file systems

In certain situations, copying files from the Mac file system to a different fs (e.g. to NTFS via NTFS-3g) results in the creation of extra 4KB-long files with names that begin with ._

Not sure how to prevent this. Look at the comments in this post.

To erase all those files from a directory tree:

$ rm */._* -R -v

(careful...)

Also see this for a terminal command that merges ._s with the original file