Mar 23, 2009
Ένα ενδιαφέρον blog meme απο εδώ:
Answer the following questions with less than 50 words each (mind, only desktop/gui applications):
- which desktop manager do you use more often ?
- which desktop application you would not like to see implemented again on linux? and why?
- which desktop application you definitely would like to see implemented on linux? describe it briefly or point out to a similar application.
- write the name of the last project (not the very best, the last!) that made you wish to thank their developers so you can thank them now! :-)
- (optional) Link the blogs of 1-3 people you’d like to take part to this meme. (no more than three). you can skip this question if you like.
Οι απαντήσεις μου:
- KDE αποκλειστικά.
- audio players. Έχουμε πολλούς και πολύ καλούς. Ας βελτιώσουμε αυτούς.
- Video editing. πχ Sony Vegas κλπ.
- Django. Thank you people. You’re super awesome.
- Whatever…
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Sep 12, 2008
Πριν λίγο ανέβασα το www.gentoo-user.org.
Είναι ένα google maps mashup όπου οι χρήστες της διανομής Gentoo μπορούν να γραφτούν και προσθέσουν την γεωγραφική θέση τους.
Μπορείτε να δείτε τους πλησιέστερους χρήστες σε εσάς (με χιλιομετρική απόσταση) να δείτε το προφίλ τους και γενικά είναι μια προσπάθεια να δούμε που υπάρχουν κοινότητες (η να δημιουργηθούν!).
Το site δουλέυει με Django με χρήση του contrib.gis (GeoDjango). Τρέχει στο slicehost, σε διανομή … Gentoo :p
Ελπίζω να κάνω και διαθέσιμο μέσω open source άδειας τον κώδικα σύντομα.
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Apr 07, 2008
Πριν μερικές ημέρες χρειάστηκα να τραβήξω μερικές φωτογραφίες με την Canon EOS 400D μου, χρησιμοποιώντας remote capture. Συγκεκριμένα ,ήθελα να φτιάξω ένα script που να τραβάω κάποια αντικείμενα φωτογραφία και να συσχετίζονται αυτόματα με την αντίστοιχη εγγραφή τους στη Database.
Ομως το gphoto2 δεν ήθελε με τίποτα να δουλέψει. Έβρισκε την μηχανή, τράβαγε φωτογραφίες, αλλα όταν ερχόταν η ώρα να την ‘κατεβάσει’ μου έριχνε ένα ωραίο segfault.
Είχα δοκιμάσει τα πάντα (εκτός απο ultrex) και δεν είχα δεί λύση. Είχα απογοητευτεί.
Εντελώς τυχαία , σήμερα έπεσα σε αυτό το blog post. Εκεί διαβάζω α) οτι θέλει να δίνω κάποιες εντολές σε μία γραμμή, και β) στα σχόλια έγραφαν οτι πριν φτιάχτηκε στο trunk πριν μόλις 2 ημέρες.
Αμέσως checkout απο το subversion, configure , compile ,install κλπ. και ως δια μαγείας, δουλεύει!
Για παράδειγμα αυτό δουλέυει:
gphoto2 --set-config capture=on -F 1 -I 1 --capture-image
Σκέφτομαι οτι θα ήταν ωραίο ένα GUI για αλλαγή των ρυθμίσεων και remote capture όπως το software της Canon. Ίσως αν έχω χρόνο αυτές της ημέρες (πράγμα πολύ απίθανο μέχρι μέσα Ιουνίου…)
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Feb 21, 2008
For a friend’s project, i investigated various ways to generate a site thumbnail.
The obvious one is to simply go to the desired website using your favorite browser, take a snapshot using your favorite program. Guaranteed to work :).
For obvious reasons that never became a real option so my googling revealed various services that do this. Some do it for free but in a limited manner , other are pay services but i was not satisfied with their options (or having to pay). The most famous of them is probably Alexa Site Thumbnails (AST) that is an Amazon web service. I didn’t like it either, especially since according to their terms you can’t store the image , but are only allowed to cache it up to 24 hours. Not good enough for me. (It’s dirt cheap though).
After a little more searching i found out about the fantastic khtml2png utility. What this does is use khtml libs (from kde3.x) to render a site into a png (and a lot of other image types).
The catch is that it requires an X server, but on their project page they have instructions to run it on a headless machine using Xvfb (an X server running on a virtual frame buffer).
It’s really easy:
On my machine i did:
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1600x1200x24&
export DISPLAY="localhost:1.0"
khtml2png2 --width 1280 --height 1024 http://slashdot.org slashdot.png
And that’s it! I can now turn a headless Pentium III i have running various services (mail etc) to my own private , highly configurable web snapshot service.
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Jul 14, 2007
I was recently given a Sony Handycam HDR-UX3 video camera as a present (yea!). This camera can record at in HD format ( 1080i ) and records straight to DVD. It’s a very new camera and not much info about making it work under linux, so here what i can up with.
First, reading the MemoryStick Duo that contains any images is straightforward. Just plug the USB cable, select the memory stick from the LCD and you get a new device that you can mount as usual.
I have not tested HD video. Just SD video using a DVD-VR disk. Again, plug in the USB cable, choose the dvd icon on your camera’s LCD and you get a new /dev/sr* device. (eg. i got /dev/sr1 sicne i already had a /dev/sr0). This can be mounted as a normal file system (i believe it’s UDF 2.0 so your kernel must support it, which it should).
Now, the tricky part is extracting the video. The only program i could find that does this is here . Just download, untar and compile (typing ‘make’ should be enough.)
Assuming you have mounted the camera at /mnt/mycamera you simply type:
/dvd-vr VR_MANGR.IFO VR_MOVIE.VRO
to extract the .vob files. Eg in my case:
./dvd-vr /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MANGR.IFO /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MOVIE.VRO
And that’s it!
It seems that if you are using 16:9 recording the ratio is not right, but i chose ‘anamorphic’ format under xine which fixed it.
It’s rather simple, and easy to use. You can even eject the disc by typing:
eject /dev/sr1
Enjoy.
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Jun 07, 2007
I am happy owner of a Hauppage WinTV PVR 150 card. On linux, both mplayer and xine support it but xine has special support for it (in the form a special MRL for it nonetheless) so this is why i prefer it.
The problem i had was that the PVR input for xine by default uses the root directory to store its temporary vob files. The partition that my root is located however is rather small and i could only have very small files (and therefore very small recordings if a paused or wanted to go back in a video).
I wanted to change this location but there is nothing on the documentation. A quick Google search turned up nothing. So i looked in the source code and , sure enough, the kind folks had it documented in the comments of src/input/input_pvr.c.
pvr:/<prefix_to_tmp_files>!<prefix_to_saved_files>!<max_page_age>
In other words all you have to do is specify the path in the MRL! Eg:
xine pvr://mnt/xine_pvr_tmp_files/
There are more settings there (like events you can send to tell xine you want teh recording saved instead of being deleted on exit, but i haven’t explored them yet.
Update: I was at #xine on freenode.net and told people about this. 10 minutes later it was fixed in the CVS. Now that’s responsive.
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Jun 07, 2007
I have ssh daemon open on this server and accessible to the internet. I need it since i need to access my computer when i am away. Recently, however, i became the target of brute force attacks against sshd. I would block the offending IP using iptables but this would only last a few hours until the next attacker (from a different IP obviously).
I thought if snort and rules that exist to update iptables automatically but a) that would be a lot of work to setup and b) snort would brock my old computer to its knees (PentiumII with 64Mb ram).
Yesterday i came across denyhosts which is a Python program (yay!) that detects intrusion attemplts and adds them to /etc/hosts.deny. It has a lot of nice features, its easy to setup and quite effective. (well… its Python.. what did you excpect)
Seems quite cool, and it doen’t need snort and plugins and hours and hours of configuration and reading.
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Jun 07, 2007
The people at Magenta.gr have released some fine Greek fonts for free. They are available at: http://www.ellak.gr/fonts/mgopen
For Gentoo users i created an ebuild that will do the installation for you. get it here. This is my first attempt at creating an ebuild but it is the simplest of ebuilds and it should work without problems. It works fine on my computer anyway.
Just put in in your portage overlay, digest it and emerge it. If you don’t know what i am talking about, then google for this (there is plenty of material on using portage overlay out there, i won’t repeat it here. It’s easy though)
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