This time when we went to Pondicherry on the year end, we took two cameras - I took my Rebel XTi and my wife the LX3. While uploading our photos to Flickr, we had a problem. We wanted to merge our photo sets, but because of the different photo naming conventions of the two cameras, the photos won’t be sorted according to time taken. The solution, as I found out after a bit of digging and trying out different exif tools, was simple enough.
A quick tip. I couldn’t find this from a quick search when I really needed it.
The problem - command line programs like fetchmail use the system wide openssl CA certificates to verify the authenticity of the server certificates they are provided when they connect to an SSL server like POP3 or IMAP.
Sometimes, you will have providers like Dreamhost, who will get smart and ditch the atrocious certificate issuing set up we have right now, and give you a self-signed certificate to verify their servers.
I normally use jUploader for uploading photos to Flickr from my Ubuntu Jaunty box. However, since I got the amazing Panasonic DMC-LX3 compact camera, I have been uploading HD videos too to Flickr. Now none of the FOSS tools that I know of support video right now. Since I insist on uploading photos in the order that I have taken them, it makes my photo upload workflow really messy - upload a few photos from jUploader, go to flickr.
Akamai footprint awesomeness.
My IP address.
sandipb@pluto:~$ wget -O - -q http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp;echo 122.167.0.79 sandipb@pluto:~$ host 122.167.0.79 79.0.167.122.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ABTS-KK-Dynamic-079.0.167.122.airtelbroadband.in. Akamai CDN for downloading Adobe AIR.
sandipb@pluto:~$ host airdownload.adobe.com airdownload.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.wip3.adobe.com. airdownload.wip3.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net. airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1396.g.akamai.net. a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.10 a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.11 sandipb@pluto:~$ host 203.101.62.10 10.62.101.203.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer dsl-KK-static-010.62.101.203.airtelbroadband.in. I am downloading from a server co-located at my ISP.
Texinfo manuals are used primarily by various GNU projects like Glibc, gcc, gdb, etc. Texinfo is an extremely powerful format for writing high quality professional documentation and can be easily converted to HTML, PDF, Docbook XML and various other formats. The language features tex macros which are quite easy to pick up, and much easier to hand write as compared to the new fangled XML formats.
However, my pet grouse for a long time was that the PDFs, which look excellent on screen don’t seem to print too well on paper.
Many service providers have started encrypting the statements that they send you. While at some level, it does add some amount of security when the path to your inbox is not very secure. However, it is sometimes a major pain when you want to archive your emails. This is because every provider has decided on a different secret to encrypt your PDF. So if one day you wish to access a statement of your phone bill from three months back, you have to look up the bill from your archive and read the mail to find out what they used to encrypt it.
If .news/ is the maildir that you want to convert to the mbox news, this one-liner will do the job for you.
mutt -f .news/ -e 'set confirmcreate=no; set delete=no; push "T.*<enter>;snews<enter><quit>"'
(Gleaned from this mailing list post )
Many FOSS enthusiasts do not realize is that Apple is as, if not more, significant threat than Microsoft in the war for software freedom.
Most of the technical arguments that FOSS evangelists have, fall apart when you are talking about Apple and Mac Os X. Mac Os X has very less, if not none, of the perceived instability of Windows. Default applications bundled with the OS do quite a decent job for many users.
Thanks to Saurabh’s mail on ILUGD, found out about this nice essay by Paul Graham on software patents. Not being much of a lawyer or an expert on these things, but nevertheless having a conviction that software patents are evil, I have dared to comment on parts of this essay. Of course, you are right, whenever possible I have quoted out of context to put him at a disadvantage. :-P
Am trying to catch up with Python where I left off years ago.
What have they done to the language when I was gone? It is no longer the simple language as before. The decorator syntax looks so .. well, Perlish. List comprehensions, in some ways very inappropriately named, took a few moments to sink in. It is great that it is concise, but then .. so was Perl! Look where it got “them” - Concise Perl programs looks not too different from a binary file open in a text editor.