removing Skype from Windows 10

Skype has somehow become annoying bloatware that ships with Win10. It’s also buggy as hell – in my case, it never shows me contact requests, which makes me look like an idiot in front of clients. I’m sticking with using the webapp version at all times – at least it seems to more-or-less work.

More unfortunately, you cannot uninstall it using the normal control panel route, you have to do it with PowerShell.

To uninstall Skype for Windows 10

1. Click the start window icon on your taskbar
2. Type powershell. Watch it will find the link before you get too far into typing.
3. Right-click on the Powershell start menu and select “Run as administrator”
4 enter this command: get-appxpackage *skype* | remove-appxpackage

Prevent Magento 1 admins from sharing credentials with Admin Single Session

Just released a free Magento extension designed to prevent admin users from sharing credentials (which wrecks accountability when things go wrong). It prevents an admin account from having more than one active session at a time. If a second user logs in using the same username and password, the first user gets redirected to the login screen with a nice message explaining they’ve been kicked because another user logged in with the same credentials.

It’s just a beta release, not thoroughly tested across different Mage versions (developed on CE 1.9.2.2), but the extension is simple enough it should work fine in most cases. Obviously, as with everything, test before pushing to production.

https://github.com/siliconrockstar/magento-admin-single-session

Thanks go to Jared (http://molotovbliss.com/) for adding modman support 🙂

UPDATE: awesomely enough, this feature is baked-in to Magento 2 🙂

Using the stress command to generate CPU load

I needed a reliable way to test a script I wrote to monitor server load. Luckily I found it in bash’s stress command.

On most versions of Linux, you can install it with

yum install stress

or

apt-get install stress

depending on your distro.

I was on Centos 7.2, which of course doesn’t have the package in a repo (including EPEL), so I downloaded it from here

ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el7/en/x86_64/dag/RPMS/stress-1.0.2-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm

and did

yum localinstall stress-1.0.2-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm

Usage is straightforward, all I needed to do was generate 90 seconds of greater than 70% CPU usage on a one CPU cloud virt, so I did

stress --cpu 2 --timeout 90