intellij keyboard freeze on linux

intellij 8.0 keyboard randomly freezes and becomes unresponsive on ubuntu linux. The problem is cause by some strange interaction with scim keyboard input system. Exit scim and the keyboard will work again.

ssh public key authentication and permission

the user home directory must have be chmod g-r ~
otherwise rsa public key authentication would not work

virtualbox command line

turn off vm
VBoxManage controlvm vmname poweroff

clone vm hd
VBoxManage clonevdi source.vdi clone.vdi