I am happy to announce the release of updates to 2 CPAN Perl modules: DBD::LDAP v. 0.10 (bugfix release) and Net::xFTP v0.3b1 (rewritten to be modular making addition of new protocols easier). I've also added 3 new protocols to Net::xFTP: Net::SFTP::Foreign, Net::OpenSSH, and Net::FSP. There's also a corresponding update to ptkftp (Perl/Tk gui wrapper for Net::xFTP) for compatability and minor bugfixes.
For some reason, Firefox keeps trying to become more like IE, which is causing it to suck more like IE! Example, after upgrading to 3.5.x, there's now a new "Open New Tab" button just right of your last tab - yucksters! This is useless if you don't show tabs unless there are more than 1 tab open (browser.tabs.autoHide)! Anyway, googling led to this solution, c/o: http://www.freelists.org/post/hllug/Remove-New-Tab-ButtonFrom-Firefox-35:
Add following line to ~/.mozilla/firefox/<your-profile>/chrome/userChrome.css:
.tabs-newtab-button {display: none}
Now in other hackory news - I found this to speed up Adobe Flash in FF:
The Flash plugin does support hardware acceleration on cards with accelerated drivers, but looks for a string in the GL support that Intel (and possibly other) cards do not support. This can be overridden by adding
OverrideGPUValidation = 1
to the /etc/adobe/mms.cfg file.
I had to create both the /etc/adobe folder and mms.cfg file on my system, but it does seem to help a lot. Adobe warns that it may crash your browser (even more than Flash does already!).
Just upgraded my main computer to a shiny new custom Mepis Linux kernel (2.6.27-31). This allows me to keep my existing, working one (if there's a pbm). Here's how:
I wrote this script in order to allow my TkWeather program to find the "local weather" wherever my laptop is connected to the internet via geolocation of the ISP providing me service. It first looks up the user's true IP-address, then tries to determine his zip-code or city-state location. The best-guess zip-code is then returned.
Sometimes you just see something and immediately assume that it works a certain way and when you later find out that it doesn't and at the same time realize that it may lay within your power to change, then if you're like me, your inner "hacker" child takes over! I actually did this a while back, but just now decided to post it here.
I really liked the old, now defunct "xmms" music player software. A fork of it seems to have replaced it called "Audacious". I gave it a try, and it seems to really work and sound well, much better than "vlc". Anyway, a couple of annoyances have crept into it as of the latest version 1.5.1:
1) The "File Open" window pops up when specifying the cdrom (cdda://) as the play target on the command-line.
2) Starting Audacious without a play target (music files, playlist file, url, or cdd*:// device) causes the last played playlist to start up automatically. That's well and good, but I wanted a way to start up Audacious with an empty playlist.
3) For some strange reason, you can stream audio, at least mp3 from a url, but NOT from STDIN?!
I found a patch here that partially addresses (1) here: http://atheme.org/attachments/15/1.5.1-commandline-options.patch Thanks Tony Vroon! I applied this, but it did not fix 1 completly, so I developed another patch based from this one to fix (1) and add a "-c/--clear" command-line option to address (2). I also patched the plugin file (stdio.c) to address 3. Whilst I was at it, I decided to also add the ability to pipe in a playlist (list of files/urls to play) into STDIN as well! For piping a song, one needs to append the extension to the STDIN filename ("-) in indicate to Audacious what type of file it's processing. I ended up having to hack several of the plugins, so that it now works (tested) for ogg, wav, and mp3-ish files.
I ended up having to also include the "file://" prefix since otherwise Audacious thinks "-.mp3" is an option. Anyway, these patches are against Audacious v. 1.5.1 (audacious_1.5.1.orig.tar.gz) and Plugins, v. 1.5.1 (audacious-plugins_1.5.1.orig.tar.gz).
Now I can do cool things like stream radio that is in a format that Audacious can't play, like "asf" through Audacious without filling up my hard disk, ie.:
UPDATED 2009/9/8: Swiftfox is now available at v. 3.5.2 (incl. PGO build for Prescott) and is again being actively updated, but I still think my custom build is FASTER (non-PGO build specifically for Intel Core Duo Prescott) + I'm a control freak who would prefer not to use a binary blob as a browser, for security reasons, if nothing else! ;)
I have long been a fan of Swiftfox, a prebuilt binary version of Firefox optimized for specific processor platforms. I seems though that Swiftfox is no longer being updated (v3.0.4pre1 is latest). I then tried "swiftweasel", a similar program for "iceweasel" that is more current, but, even though faster than Firefox, gives me some scrolling problems (page sometimes keeps scrolling after releasing mouse-wheel and sometimes scrolls up and down, which is very annoying). So, I took the plunge and downloaded the source for Firefox and built with similar options to Swiftfox (see "about:buildconfig"). This seems to work well for me so far! Here's what I did: ( View Details )
For anyone else starved to hear a true conservative stand up and articulate truth in this era of lies, give this a listen! Milton Friedman vs. Phil Donahue; Milton Friedman > Phil Donanue!
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be ... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
I wrote this script to auto-compress the huge images that my daughter downloads from our digital camera and uploads to Facebook. It automatically reduces any new image added to ~/images/Facebook/ by about 85%. I include it in a shell-script that first invokes gthumb (the program she uses to download and view photos) so that when gthumb exits, this script is invoked.
This will uncompress just about any file type (add to ~/.bashrc):
function extract() { if [ -f "$1" ] ; then case "$1" in *.tar.bz2) tar xjf "$1" ;; *.tar.gz) tar xzf "$1" ;; *.tar.Z) tar xzf "$1" ;; *.bz2) bunzip2 "$1" ;; *.rar) unrar x "$1" ;; *.gz) gunzip "$1" ;; *.jar) unzip "$1" ;; *.tar) tar xf "$1" ;; *.tbz2) tar xjf "$1" ;; *.tgz) tar xzf "$1" ;; *.zip) unzip "$1" ;; *.Z) uncompress "$1" ;; *) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted." ;; esac else echo "'$1' is not a file." fi }
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jimpossible84's journal
nostalgic.