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.

K3B Disappointment

I need a fast way of writing an ISO image to CD today. My cdrecord script was malfunctioning since the last upgrade (complained about the wrong usage of device), so I decided to try something new. Quickly did ‘apt-get install k3b‘ from a local server and started it. It correctly detected by CD writer. I was also presented with a clean and polished interface for the choice of files and writing mode (audio/data/mixed). I have selected the ISO 9660 image I wanted to write and clicked ‘Burn’. Progress bar went running the usual path from left to right and in a short time I got an ‘OK. Well done.’ message. I was impressed about how fast and easy all that was… until I mounted the disk. K3B did what it was asked to do – wrote a file on disk. I, though, hoped that it would recognize my needs a little better. Who ever wanted an ISO file on the disk? From what I’ve heard, people usually want a filesystem from ISO image to be there. Bad, bad behaviour.

Since I was in a time pressure, I didn’t have time to go over all the documentation and stuff. I quickly checked through available options, but didn’t find anything related to ISO 9660. Maybe I missed it somewhere.

Anyway, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the correct options for cdrecord. Back to console.

Update (29 Sep 2004, 4:31am): It turned out I just missed a menu option: Tools::CD::Burn CD Image.

Problems with scanner in Fedora Linux Core 2

If you had a scanner which was working fine in Fedora Linux Core 1, but stopped after upgrading to Core2, then you might be interested in this bug. It did help some people. But it didn’t help me.

I also found this link, which makes it possible to use iscan. Xsane still doesn’t work, although sane-find-scanner reports the device correctly. This document didn’t help any.

PHP IN CONTRAST TO PERL

There are plenty of holy wars on the web that argue about superiority of PHP over Perl and vice versa. There are many people who prefer PHP, and there are many others who prefer Perl. I am, of course, in the Perl camp. I have programmed both Perl and PHP over some time, and there is no doubt in my head that Perl is way better than PHP as a language. The only point that I like about PHP is the how mod_php works. mod_php is a PHP module for Apache web server, for those who don’t know.

Anyway, back to the subject. I came across an excellent document titled “PHP IN CONTRAST TO PERL“. It summarizes the benefits of Perl compared to PHP nicely and clearly. It also links to a number of other resources on the subject, as well as provides the summary of those resources. Really neat paper and a must read for anyone who has or will have to deal with Perl and/or PHP.

User Interface Design For Programmers

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame once wrote a book on User Interface design. Target audience: programmers. People with analytical mind, rather than “all-dressed-in-black people with interesting piercings”. The book is short, up to the point, with lots of good examples. You can read it online here.

relay_from_hosts in exim-4.40

Just in case you will bump into the same problem or if I will forget how to solve it…

If you want to use a file with a list of IP addresses that are allowed to relay mail through your server, you need to use net-iplsearch instead of plain lsearch. Plain lsearch will not work and you’ll get all those ‘relay denied’ errors.

hostlist relay_from_hosts = net-iplsearch;/etc/exim/relay_from_hosts

Specify IP addresses (and network masks if you wish) one per line (or with other separators that Exim understands).