Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.    I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

My brother passed by and fixed the damn thing. Now I can Skype with sound. From home. I wonder if I will be able to repeat the magic sequence at work. Probably not. But I’ll try.

Thanks bro.

I am really doing something wrong. Seriously. I can’t get neigther one of headsets to work. Headphones work just fine, both at home and at work. Microphones don’t. At work I can hear myself talking in the headphones, but I can’t record any sound and, obviously, I can’t use the headset in Skype. At home, I don’t even get the sound in the headphones.

I think I’m getting old… Oh, do I sound like my father now?

I came across the best shell alias ever:

alias up="cd .."

This is one of those things that make me go “Why didn’t I thought of it earlier? And myself?”.

In order to add some value to this post, here are my two mostly used aliases:

alias pd="perldoc"
alias pdf="perldoc -f"

As you might know, podcasts are like radio shows recorded and distributed digitally (read: mp3 and RSS). Since pretty much anyone can record a show and distribute it over the Internet – everyone and their brother do that.

The file sizes of some podcasts are huge. There are shows that last for more than an hour and include pieces of music and stereo special effects. I’ve seen this eat up more than 50 MBytes each.

Since I only have a 128 MByte memory card (and about 20 of those MBytes are eaten by software intallations and other data), I was looking at ways to minimize the file sizes of the podcasts that I wanted to listen to.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

I said it before and I will say it again – dvdrip is by far the best graphical user interface for ripping and encoding DVDs on Linux.

dvdrip provides a user with simple, but powerful means of controlling a whole bunch of command line utitilies that have a gadzillion options each. Instead of scrolling through the manuals and Googling for examples, one could just click around with the mouse and use many sensible defaults.

I’ve been using dvdrip for a few years now and I never had a problem. That is until I tried to run it on Fedora Linux 4. I have to say that I installed dvdrip with all the requirements using yum. I guess most of the software came from FreshRPMS.net, but I am not very sure.

Anyway, when I tried dvdrip on Fedora Linux 4 I ran into problem. It was ripping DVDs just fine, but it didn’t want to encode them. I was getting all sorts of errors mentioning absense of codecs that I knew I had and segmentation faults that are always not so easy to explain.

With a few Google queries I found out that the problem wasn’t in the dvdrip itself. It was in the transcode utility. You see, yum installs transcode-1.0.0 for Fedora Linux 4. This version of transocde is not very stable yet. The solution to the problem is to downgrade to transcode-0.6.14, which comes packaged for Fedora Core 3. As soon as the old transcode is in place everything works smoothly as always.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-11-02

• Behind the Scenes with Apache’s .htaccess
  Tagged as: apache article configuration references resources security sysadmin web
• .htaccess tricks and tips.. — part one: tasty food for web serving thoughts.
  Tagged as: apache article configuration howto reference resource sysadmin tutorial web
• .htaccess tricks and tips.. — part two: url rewriting with mod rewrite.
  Tagged as: apache article configuration howto reference resource sysadmin tutorial web

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-10-17

• Yet another Dapper wish list — Excellent wishlist for Gnome developers to consider. Some interesting points for others too.
  Tagged as: desktop forums gnome linux opinion usability

One thing I liked about Linux is it’s hidden simplicity. When in a hurry, I usually go for the first working solution of a given problem. If the same problem appears often, I can get used to the first solution so much that I don’t even think about simplifying it.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-09-25

• Hacking Firefox: Navigation and Tab Browsing
  Tagged as: article browsers configuration firefox howto mozilla reference tips tricks
• NOOFS — Network Object Oriented File System
  Tagged as: databases filesystems linux networking
• ONLamp.com: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay
  Tagged as: concepts gnu gpl interview legal linux oss reading rms software