GMail Tips: Manage Replied-to and Forwarded Message Workflow

Problem

Frequently, people want there to be some mechanism to know whether they have replied to messages in a conversation thread. Unfortunately, GMail does not have any mechanism for this by default.

Solution

However, using Labels and Filters a little creatively solves the issue mostly. Here are the filters I use for myself.

Replied
Matches: from:me subject:(Re:)
Do this: Apply label "↵", Never send it to Spam

Forwarded
Matches: from:me subject:(Fwd:)
Do this: Apply label "→", Never send it to Spam

Simple Steps to add filters to your GMail account:

1. You can download my XML file with the filters here:
1. Click here to get to it.
2. Click on the "Download" button.

Overriding Shell for Users through SSSD

What is SSSD in a nutshell?

SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) is a collection of daemons used by Linux to manage the authentication and authorization to a system. In particular, it can interface with remote directories such as those that use LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and internally interfaces with NSS (Network Security Services) and PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module). Essentially, it can be configured to control the behaviour of these other services. You can learn more about it here:

https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/

The problem?

I was getting the authentication information from a central LDAP directory however, they only provided /bin/csh and the environment variable for the users while I needed it to be
/bin/bash in my environment.

Ideally, SSSD would have provided a way to override the shell in its configuration files, unfortunately, at the time of this writing that is only available in version 1.9 of SSSD which is currently in beta with the Fedora project. Further, my systems were Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) which typically runs a few versions behind in most things though security patches and bug-fixes are backported.

Matlab and OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

A little background

The current latest version of Matlab is 2012a. It was released for Mac OS X Lion (10.7) so requires X11 to provide the GUI. However, with the release of Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), X11 is no longer provided by default from Apple. This poses a bit of a problem for Matlab 2012a.

What to do with Matlab 2012a on Mountain Lion?

While Mountain Lion doesn't have X11 and Apple isn't providing their version of X11, they are providing development support to the Open Source project that the Apple X11 was based off of: XQuartz.

What is "this" in Java?

So in learning Java I found the "this" keyword to be a bit of an odd item to work with. It is pretty obvious now but initially it was confusing and some google-fu helped clear things up. The one thing that was a bit subtle was the construct:

InnerClass innerClassObject = this.new innerClassConstructor();

So here is the answer. When you have an Inner Class, it can't be handled directly at all and needs to be referenced via an instanced object of its encapsulating Outer Class. In other words, you need an object created for the Outer Class before you can create an object of the Inner Class. The code would normally look as follows:

OuterClass.InnerClass innerClassObject = new outerClassConstructor().new innerClassConstructor();

Issue with 32-bit Applications on 64-bit Linux

When running 32-bit applications on 64-bit Linux you may find that your application does not run and gives the following error (or similar):

GLib-WARNING : getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown user id

This error was noticed when running 32-bit SPSS on 64-bit RHEL 6 with LDAP authentication. The reason for the issue was the lack of 32-bit versions of sssd;  32-bit applications cannot use the 64-bit versions of the libraries and hence SPSS could not lookup the appropriate user information.

The correct resolution for this is to install the 32-bit version of sssd (in addition to the 64-bit versions) so that the 32-bit versions of pam_sss and nss_sss are available for use by 32-bit applications.