How to quickly merge a separate git repo into a larger project if you only need to retain history of the master branch of the “secondary” repo.

Enabling VirtualBox host-only networking causes public Windows Firewall profile activation. A registry tweak followed by virtual network adapter disable/enable cycle is known to cure the problem, but only until the next VirtualBox upgrade, so some automation is desirable. I have taken a third-party PowerShell script fixing the same issue for VMware installs on Windows hosts and adapted it to VirtualBox.

How to create a “central” Git repo from an existing local one, so as to continue working on the project from multiple workplaces in a more disciplined way.

It looked as if it could not propagate an environment variable pointing to the location of the file with my VMs settings to the VirtualBox command-line interface, so the latter kept looking for it in the system profile directory. Worked around by copying the file there; now have a small Ubuntu server running quietly in the background.

The Date email header often contacts incorrect timestamps, so Outlook and popular Web mail clients typically sort messages by the time they were received. However, Thunderbird does not retrieve the Received header by default when accessing IMAP folders. Here is how to fix this.

In some circumstances, you may need to find out why certain messages are not being marked as spam by SpamAssassin (or, for that matter, any other junk mail filtering solution). I had such a need today and it turned out to be less trivial that I had expected.

Now that there is a Windows build of node.js, you may run UglifyJS using its main development platform.

This is just a quick notice that the instructions for backporting PHP 5.3.3 from Ubuntu 10.10 to 10.04 LTS also seem to be working for PHP 5.3.5, found in just released Ubuntu 11.04.

Learn how to set up a local repository for .deb packages you’ve built or downloaded, and deploy it to production servers with minimal interference. PHP 5.3.3 packages backported to Ubuntu 10.04 are used as an example.

Inspired by my desire to run PHP-FPM on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, this post describes the available options and provides step-by-step backporting instructions for PHP 5.3.3 included in Ubuntu 10.10.