Via this discussion at Perlmonks, I found an interesting module PostScript::MailLabels, which helps a lot when there is a need for generating a mass mailing. Sample image of a label is here. Instead of using MS Word or other heavy-weights one can easily manage everything from a simple Perl script.
Category: Technology
I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
Tweaking Firefox
I came across an excellent article – “Firefox Tweak Guide” – that shows how to make Mozilla Firefox faster and more convenient. It covers everything: from regular stuff like shortcuts and extensions, to speeding up page loading. It also summarizes a somewhat lengthy tweaking thread from MozillaZine forums.
Social bookmarks with del.icio.us
del.icio.us provides a service that you might have been looking for for some time now. Essentially, it is a bookmark manager. You can register (by the way, features one of the simpliest registration forms ever), create yourself an account and use it to manage your bookmarks. Add, delete, edit, categorize, search, and all the usual operations are available. The beauty of it when compared to regular bookmarks is that you will be able to access your bookmarks from anywhere – home, school, work, mobile, etc. No synchronization needed.
Additionally, you will be able to see who else bookmarked sites that you did. You can also share you bookmarks with the world and see what world has to offer. And on top of that, RSS feeds are provided for all the accounts, so you can be notified of changes to other people’s bookmarks immediately.
If that is not enough for you to try the service, here is some more – there are integrations of this service for some browsers. For example, you Firefox can use del.icio.us pretty much as a native bookmark manager via this extensions.
I decided to give this a try too. My profile is tvset.
Oakley – Thump
I am kind of interested in wearable computing. Computing needs grow from year to year, devices get smaller and smaller, but I am yet to see something comfortable and useful. Todays devices have either look and feel bulky or have too many wires. Neat appliances are rare to find.
Today I cam across something that looks neat – Oakley – Thump. It is an mp3 player integrated into sunglasses. It comes with a USB interface and either 128 MB or 256 MB storage option. This is one excellent idea.
I just wish it had longer battery life. Currently it can playback for 6 hours after full charge, according to specs. Bigger storage option would be nice too, but I am sure those will come soon.
Disappearing files
Some known facts can use more reminders…
Fedora Core Linux 2, as well as many other Linux and Unix machines, has a script (/etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch) that is regularly executed by cron, which goes around your temporary directories and removes old files. This is a very useful utilty which helps to keep the machine in a clean and tidy state.
The problem that this maintenance piece of software might cause is that some of the fresh files can disappear.
The script itself does not know which files are new and which are old. To determine this, it uses file’s record, particularly last access and last modification times. Whenever you read the file (say open image in the viewer or mp3 in player), its access time is updated by the operating system to current time. Whenever you write to file (say save changes to a text file), its modification time is updated by the OS to the current time.
With files that you manage yourself everything works fine. But there are some programs that modify access and modification times of the file on their own. One example of such a program is unzip. By default, when you extract a file from zip archive, unzip will creat the file on your disk with the same modification time as the file that went into the archive. Meaning that if you will modify a file on the 1st of January 2004, than zip it, than, after some time (say on the 10th of December 2004) unzip it, you will see that its last modification time is 1st of January 2004. Athough the file itself is freshly created from the zip archive, it is given the attributes of the original file. So if you will leave it in the temporary directory, than it will be deleted upon the next run of the tmpwatch.
There are two solutions to this problem. First, do not leave important files in the temporary directory. Use your home directory or some other place which is not monitored by tmpwatch. Second, you can modify file attributes by hand. For that you can use the touch program. Command like touch somefile will set both access and modification times to current time.