Force vmware Fusion guest to shutdown or restart

problem: VMware Fusion guest is locked up and won't shutdown

You want to force a shutdown/power off OR force a restart/reset

solution: use the alt/option ⎇ key

Open the Virtual Machine menu and press the ⎇ key and you will see the menu options change to their alternatives. Choose one of the options, e.g. Power Off
I believe this works from version 2 onwards.

citation:

Props to: Team Fusion @ VMware Community Blogs

Parsing NCSA combined log format - working with columns

problem: You want to work with columns of an NCSA combined log file

You might have some apache or squid NSCA combined based logs. For example you might want to get the UserAgent column so you can sort and find unique values

solution: Perl Regular Expressions to the rescue!

Check out my Q+A thread on Server Fault

citation:

Props to:
Me
The PHP Cookbook

Great online tool for checking password strength

Password meter

Generating passwords at the command line

I posted this gem over at Stack Overflow for generating random passwords on the Linux command line.

echo $(</dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c8)

Enjoy

Kudos to aigark's share

iTunes is out of sync with ID3 tags

problem: iTunes is out of sync with ID3 tags

• You've used a tool to manage your MP3 ID3 tags and iTunes is out of sync with the changes
• You would like to refresh ID3 tags on selected tracks in iTunes or your entire iTunes Library

impact: grrrrrr

This is rather frustrating, all that hard work to manage your tags and iTunes gives you the middle finger and your ID3 tags are out of date...

solution:

This should work for _ALL_ iTunes versions up to the time of writing, which is 10.1.
In theory it should also work on all platforms too.

1. First off, close iTunes if open, make sure its dead
2. Make sure the tracks you want to work with are not read only
   You can protect iTunes from modifying your tracks by settings files to read only
3. Open iTunes
4. Select the tracks that you want to refresh
   You can select _ALL_ but be warned the more you select, the longer the process will take. I strongly suggest being selective, at least until you've mastered the technique
5. With the tracks selected press CTRL+I
   You can also right click or activate the context menu and click "Get Info"
6. Make sure NO checkboxes are checked
7. Select the sorting tab
8. Enter anything you like into a blank sorting field
   This will check the checkbox for the specific field
9. Double check only the sorting checkbox is selected
10. Click OK
11. iTunes will show a progress bar as it applies changes
12. You should see the tracks now have the latest ID3 tags
13. Repeat to remove the sort tag when your happy

Note a positive side effect of this operation... any missing files that were selected will now have the exclamation mark next to it, might be helpful to some :)

citation:

I've combined methods from these pages
Props to Kishore @ Chinto's blog
and Yoricko @ Harmonic Mixing Community