Computer Stuff

I hate to admit it, but I'm a geek. I hope I'm still a cool singing/dancing geek, but I guess you should decide for yourself. I have since switched from Linux/Unix to OSX; the transition has been very smooth (and I'm of course still using terminal and X11 apps).

Unix/Linux Documentation

Although you can find almost anything on the web nowadays, I plan to leave a few of my thoughts and discoveries here. It will serve more as an archive for my limited memory, but I hope you will find it useful too.

renaming all files to lowercase: Use a combination of perl and find find . -type f -exec perl -e 'rename($_, lc) || warn "$_: $!\n" for @ARGV' {} \;

removing ^M from the end of each line: Do the following: perl -i.bak -npe 's/\r\n/\n/g' filename where filename is the name of the file you want to clean, and the original file is copied to filename.bak

convert: Need to create an animated gif? ImageMagick's convert command is the simplest tool to use. Get your frames ready from your favourite program, e.g. to create animated gif's from matlab figures, use

for k = 1:N
plot(...)
filename = ['frame',num2str(k+1000)];
print('-dpng',filename,'-r0')
end

Then use the convert command to change all the files to an animated gif
convert -adjoin -delay 4 frame* movie.gif where -delay sets the delay between frames to be 4/100 seconds.

psresize: If you've downloaded a postscript file which has the wrong paper size, here's a useful utility to convert it to something manageable (e.g. from A4 to letter)
psresize -PA4 -pletter infile.ps outfile.ps

tail: Need to watch a text file while it's being updated?
tail -f filename

.htaccess file: If you have a web host which doesn't lists index directories automatically, you can overwrite their default setting by creatting a .htaccess file in your root directory. Your .htaccess files should have the lines: Options All Indexes
IndexOptions FancyIndexing

ldconfig: If you every run into a problem where there appears to be missing library links (e.g. when you upgrade versions of GCC), running ldconfig will save your life!

/etc/mailcap: This is where one links mime types so that programs will automatically know which helper program to use for files. For example, in you're using Prosper and which to hyperlink your mpeg file, I have the following line in my mailcap file: video/mpeg; mpeg_play '%s'; description="MPEG video files"; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" -a -n "whence mpeg_play"

Web Stuff

cssZen Garden: Want to see the power of casscading style sheets? check out the above link. It's amazing.

Mozilla Firefox: A fully functional web-browser that stops annoying popup windows, gives you tabbed browsing, and just plain doesn't have the crap that Explorer, Netscape or Mozilla comes with nowadays.

NedStat: A free reliable web counter that gives you statistics on where, when and what people are using to visit your web site.

W3C MarkUp Validation Service: Are your html codes up to snuff? Here's a free checker to make sure that you are either HTML 4.0 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant. It's a nice feeling knowing that your web page will display on any web browser.

Cool Open-Source Projects / Free Software

Most people are conditioned to believe that there is no such thing as "free" programs anymore. In the windows environment, one is often given a crippled version of the program, or is flooded with advertisements. Open Source (GPL) projects however are completely free with no strings attached. They will of course gladly take donations if you appreciate the work they do.

Audacity: An audio editor that allows for recording, playing, editing importing and exporting WAV, AIFF and MP3 files. You can layer different tracks, mix tracks together, apply effects to the recordings. There is also a built in "amplitude envelope" editor and a frequency analysis windows.

bBlog: A php/mysql based journalling tool, which offers a decent amount of features and easy installation. Check here for an active implementation of bBlog.

Gallery: A php based photo gallery that allows you to easily manage photos on your web site. It features automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and lots more. Albums can also have read, write, caption permissions for authenticated users with the appropriate security level.

Gimp: An image manipulation program that allows for photo retouching, as well as creating and editing images.

Jsettlers: A java applet for Settlers of Catan

Lame: An MP3 encoder.

phpWebSite: A php web site content management system. Web based administration allows for easy maintenance of interactive, community driven web sites.

Ultimate Boot Cd: A downloadable iso file with lots of useful utilities to resize partitions, check memory, file systems, etc...

Last updated: Wednesday, 29-Aug-2007 21:35:59 PDT