w | awk ‘{a[$1]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head

stumbled on this issue with a HP-UX server we run where the maxusers kernel paramater is set to 600 (512 by default). To change this setting, requires a reboot of the server (something not easily achievable at midday with 600 users logged in). You can change kernel parameters via SAM in HP-UX

This is a slight modification of the 1 liner that sorts your bash history by commands used:

history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head

Here’s some examples of my own from 2 machines:

235 ll
163 cd
149 grep
37 vi
32 for
31 du
26 rm
23 tail
21 htop
20 /etc/init.d/httpd

Here’s my home machine (I use pkill when I login to the same user desktop remotely via NX to kill evolution in the console session) :

109 ll
42 sudo
35 locate
35 cd
24 pkill
17 more
15 vi
15 unison
15 ssh
14 echo

Technorati Tags: bash, hp-ux, linux, one-liner, awk, maxusers

Anyway, my sister-in-law purchased a Mini-DVD Sony camera. It just so happens that Linux doesn’t support this format at the moment (though Windows 2003 doesn’t natively either), so be warned. Anyway, we managed to use Sony’s software to dump it to a Windows 2003 server and pulled it across to my Ubuntu machine. All I wanted to do was to grab these 5 movies and put them into standard DVD format. I wanted to do both PAL and NTSC because these DVD’s are going to South America and although they use NTSC there, it’s nothing to burn both just in case there’s some issue with one or the other.

So.. how hard could it be to do this? It turned out to be quite difficult using the Linux tools I could find..

First, I came across a post that uses DVDStyler, it’s not in Ubuntu repo’s but they have some deb packages so I download and install them. They are only in i386 architecture, so I –force-architecture and they install. Go to load it and I get this:

dvdstyler: error while loading shared libraries: libswscale.so.ld: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I run ldconfig and still the same error message.. It’s 9:30pm, I want to have a playable DVD by 10:30-11pm. Let’s try something else.

So, I then come across any2dvd - usage: any2dvd [ options ] [ -i ] [ input_file1 input_file2 ... ]

It’s claim to fame? A script to transform PC multimedia file(s) in any format, into a DVD complete with menus & suitable for playback on a standalone DVD player.

Sounds good.. let’s try it -

/usr/bin/any2dvd: 337 : let: not found
/usr/bin/any2dvd: 369 : Syntax Error : “(” unexpected

Again, I have no desire to go debugging this or reporting a bug and waiting for an answer. I just want something that works, tonight and gives me what I want.

Next!

I read a bit about dvdauthor and it seems like it’s a bit more mature (and has 1000 options like most video editing apps) and see there’s a gui for it also called Qdvdauthor AND it’s in Hardy’s repositories, so I apt-get install dvdauthor qdvdauthor.

Kick off qdvdauthor. Ok, this loads and looks fine. I go to add the video files as suggested.. All the thumbnails read “Error” . So I hit the website, find the forums and lo and behold.. I find this post describing my issue.

I really don’t feel like compiling both from source, so it’s about 10:15pm now. I decide that I have been defeated due to lack of time and my trusty Linux desktop just can’t achieve such a task easily, so I decide to look for a Windows application that can do what I need. If you have never seen it, the website “The Free Country” is generally a trusty website to find good, free tools. So I thought.. why not try and run one of these under wine. So, I download two of them. Video DVD Maker, which installed but didn’t run and then I installed DVD Flick, which is actually an open source project host at Sourceforge. DVD Flick installed and ran perfectly on my Ubuntu 64bit Hardy Heron. I selected it to create an ISO file which I then burned using Brasero. DVD Flick is as simple as you can get, load it, select your video files, add a few titles if you like and away you go. by 11:15pm I had my DVD playing on the DVD player.

An ironic sidenote is that DVD Flick installs ffmpeg.exe and uses the cygwin.dll to call it. Using wine to call cygwin to emulate linux - crazy.. but it works.

Here’s the traditional screenshot to see it’s simplicity.

Whilst they have served me well in the past and I may feel tempted to use Virtuemart for a customer who:

a) Will never ever need any customisations done to it
b) Already has a Joomla installation and is very comfortable using Joomla

What’s the issue with Zencart, OSC or Virtuemart you may ask?

The issue is this. First OSCommerce is a mess. Every single module you ever add to it is a hack, making upgrades a pain in the ass. Zencart, being closely related to OSC is not much better. It’s modularity is a bit better laid out and so you can actually create / install modules with very little hacking, if any BUT it’s template system still suffers from it’s OSC origins. It’s an effort to try and template for them..yes, it’s possible but does it really have to be that hard? Joomla’s concept is 1000 times better in regards to templating and Virtuemart excels in this area due to it’s Joomla foundations.

The big problem with them is when you need to make modifications to the core cart to implement a particular feature a customer wants. We have had situations where a small feature for the client required 144 changes in the files of Virtuemart. As soon as a XSS or other security issue comes to light, we have two options

1. Let it be, cross fingers and hope nothing happens (this really is not an option)
2. Inform customer, explain risks and give them compelling reasons to update (at their cost)
3. Our current solution is when we sign contracts with customers, we include a compulsory security updates fee, which means we update their site when new security releases come out. This has worked out best so far but still requires us to explain why we are giving a solution that isn’t inherently secure to begin with. Microsoft has made this easier to explain (daily updates anyone?) and for the most part, we can kill most XSS / SQL Injection attacks using Apache modsec rules but we really want to get beyond NEEDING to upgrade and therefore NEEDING to patch our mods into new releases of Virtuemart etc.

So, without further ado, there looks to be two better alternatives that have come to the rescue recently that look very, very promising though we haven’t done any work with them yet, so I will report on that later.

In PHP land, we have Magento. A very sexy, professional looking Open Source Ecommerce application that’s built upon the Zend MVC framework and claims to be able to develop extensions without touching core code. This, hopefully will fix our templating, modification and upgrade woes in a PHP solution. It has SEF URL’s built-in, google analytics built-in and a mini-CMS of sorts.

In Python land, we have Satchmo an open source ecommerce application built on top of the Django framework, with a reasonable feature set.

As part of my toolbox, my thinking at this point is if we have a customer that needs a standard shop with little to no development work, Magento will be our tool. If the customer has very unique needs, integration with other systems and customisations, we will work with Django.

This is because PHP deployment is so easy, that our only need should be to produce templates in Magento. If development work is needed, deployment and templating becoming a trivial matter in Satchmo in comparison to the ability to develop in Django & Python.

Would love to hear other’s experiences with any of the above… and of course any horror stories (or otherwise with OSC based development)

Dreamweaver was a slightly different story, especially as layouts became more complex and the html grew in size, it had a tendency to crash under wine in these circumstances. I run a horizontal split window of the design view and code view. Sometimes, it’s easier to achieve what you want in one or the other.

Until recently, I was unable to find something that a) Performed the job as good (or close to) both Dreamweaver and Fireworks and b) Felt natural to use and learn.

For imaging / design: “The Gimp”
Web ‘development’: Screem or Bluefish

For numerous reasons, these never cut it for me. I am not a fan of Photoshop / The Gimp interface and while I was able to get around and do things I needed to do, it felt slow and awkward. Both screem and bluefish had no way to quickly view your changes in the IDE or to make changes visually.

That said, all three programs are very capable it’s just that they don’t suit my way of doing things.

I now am slowly migrating to two new tools for web development.

Replacing Fireworks - Inkscape has come to the rescue.
Replacing Dreamweaver - Kompozer is here to help.

Inkscape

Just the last 2 weeks I have really begun getting into Inkscape, an amazingly capable and well designed vector graphics editor that (apart from the odd crash - though it manages to save your work) is proving to me to be even better than Fireworks. It’s like Freehand and Fireworks all in one beautifully wrapped package - that can even be scripted in Python.

I am certainly no graphics guru but I’m definitely above average compared to most non-professional graphics users.

Apart from the user interface being well thought out, the other great things about Inkscape are:

1. Excellent Tutorials and Resources
2. Keyboard Shortcuts for almost anything.
3. In-built access to Open Clipart (0.46 Linux only)

Here’s a quicklist of places to find great inkscape tutorials:

• Inkscape Tutorials
• Heathenex Screencasters
• Inkscape Docs (in 12 languages)
• Nicu Bunu
• Inkscape Book

a feature I would love to see is the ability to automatically download any open source fonts found in your Inkscape document, so that sharing files could be easier.

Inkscape is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and can be downloaded here

It is available via apt-get and yum repositories in their respective Linux distributions.

Kompozer

Kompozer is an unofficial bug-fix release of ‘Nvu’, which was born out of Mozilla’s Composer. The advantage of this is that Kompozer uses the gecko engine to render Kompozer’s layouts within itself much like you can with Dreamweaver (ie: without opening an external browser to view your layout). Additionally, it has very good support for CSS, XML and Javascript editing and a built-in W3C HTML Validator.

I have had Kompozer crash on me, usually when pasting in a large HTML page from elsewhere but other than that, it is an extremely user friendly and capable HTML/CSS/JS editor.

It is not an ASP / PHP / Python IDE and doesn’t make any attempts to be one. From that perspective I feel it encourages clean separation of code and layout.

Once again, Kompozer is also cross-platform and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

It is often difficult to find a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant and free information for designing themes and templates; specifically one that covers a wide range of applications. This is where ThemesWiki.org intends to step in. Launched initially with tutorials covering over 20 Content Management Systems, ThemesWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive resource for the theming community, with users generating most of the content.

“ThemesWiki.org promises to fill a much needed gap in the theming and templating community” said Ric Shreves, author of the Packt book, Drupal 5 Themes. “It is a source of information that cuts across systems and provides designers and developers a place to share ideas and approaches outside of the walled gardens of individual project sites.” Shreves, a partner in Water & Stone, an open source web development company, went on to say that “Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Modx — whatever — none of the clients really care and frankly it matters less and less as time goes by What we should be concerned with is the end result, and that is where this site comes in.”

ThemesWiki.org is part of an ongoing process at Packt to develop unique methods of contributing to the Open Source community. Notable other initiatives include the website on free installation tutorials, www.InstallationWiki.org, and the annual Open Source CMS Award that has a total prize package of $20,000 to be divided among several winning projects.

ThemesWiki.org has been developed using the open source MediaWiki software package and has initially been populated using chapters from Packt books. ThemesWiki.org is free to use and open for everyone to contribute to. It is expected to grow and expand over the coming months with more tutorials added by users.

For more information, please visit www.ThemesWiki.org

We are going to use three command line tools for this: aumix, which and cron. We are also only going to set things up so the commands are run under the user account, rather than as root as cron used incorrectly can open up some security issues.

so, to get started try and run:

:~$ aumix

and if it’s not there, try

:~$ sudo apt-get install aumix

for Debian / Ubuntu or

:~$ yum install aumix

for Redhat / Centos / Fedora

Now that we have aumix installed, we want to find out the path to the executable as Cron doesn’t always use our environmental variables to find executables on our path. So type:

:~$ which aumix
/usr/bin/aumix

We can see it’s in /usr/bin/aumix

So, kick-off your music player and try playing some music or other audio then run the following commands:

:~$ aumix -v 0

then

:~$ aumix -v 100

The first command should have dropped your volume down to 0% and the second command should have taken it back to 100%. Now that we have that working, let’s add it to cron. For myself, I don’t want to be disturbed between 11pm and 7am, so following cron’s options, we have

minute-hour-day-month-weekday-command - and we use 24 hour format. An asterisk means run at every instance of that time period, so:
* * * * * would mean every minute of every day, every month and
0 0 * * * would mean at midnight every day.

For myself, I want the 23rd hour of every day, every month for the volume to be set down and I want the 7th hour of every day for the volume to be returned to 90%. So we add this to our crontab:

0 23 * * * /usr/bin/aumix -v 0
00 07 * * * /usr/bin/aumix -v 90

To do so as a user, we use:

:~$ crontab -e

Now if your default editor is vim / vi and you have never used it before, you will need to learn a little vi before we get started. When the editor opens, type to enter insert mode allowing you to copy and paste the above code and modify for your needs, when you are finished editing, press esc then VV to save the file and exit.

:~$ EDITOR=/usr/bin/nano

and then run

:~$ crontab -e

:~$ sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

for raising and lowering the volume.

Technorati Tags: volume, linux, crontab, automation

My list of different time tracking / logging applications:

Preferably looking for a desktop application (multi-platform) like Rescuetime that reports application usage to our own centralised server. Desktop client would have prompting and automated features like CaptureWorks and Allnetic to minimise discrepancies and increase workflow.

Any comments, please leave them below. Would love to hear of others.

A rather complete list of all different type of label types, including CD stomper and Avery cross references

If you want the whole lot, make sure you scroll to the bottom to collect the zip file

WorldLabels

Technorati Tags: openoffice, templates, open source

Powered by ScribeFire.

So this critique led me to the same authors notes on infoliberalism which led me to his notes on a monetary system which led me to the link to Ripplepay & Ripple Project.

So back to being ‘on the outside’ - The issue of homeless people has really been sticking in my mind lately. Once you are on the streets, and you have no phone, no address, no clean clothes etc and worst of all, once you have it in your mind “this is what I am” and you begin to look invisible to the thousands of people who walk past you each day without a thought (or maybe we do??), how do you get out of it? How do you change your mind about who and what you are, first of all because that is the biggest challenge of them all.

I had an experience on Friday night where I did ‘a bit more’ than usual for a homeless guy and I saw the look in the guys eyes and he reached out to shake my hand. He wasn’t an alcoholic, a drug user or visibly mentally ill. It was raining in Sydney, it was about 10pm and he had no shoes and was probably mid to late 30’s. All I have thought since then is that I didn’t do enough, that I could have done more. I have told myself, it’s a start. I’m sure Mother Theresa even questioned her own efforts at times.

If this kind of thing interests you, be sure to check out these links:

Street Kids in India run their own Bank
54 Ways you can help the homeless
Homeless.org.au and forums.homeless.org.au - A Sydney based home for the homeless run by a 31yo guy from Brisbane, which seems to have been originally self-funded. Some great stuff there.
The Homeless Guy Blog
GrandCentral - Project Care program - A phone number for everyone - I can think of a mini way of doing this in Australia using Oztell’s WebPABX or using Asterisk and using extension numbers with mailboxes where people can give out their phone number and their extension. They can collect their voicemail via a phone or have the messages emailed to them. You would just need one DID.

Obviously, a man living on the street in Australia has an experience far different to a child living on the street of South America, India or Africa. Here’s an NGO organisation in Peru started by a husband and wife in 2001 called BrucePeru - youtube video below. You can volunteer there starting at $395 US per month, including all your meals and accommodation. Prices decline depending on your length of stay.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Technorati Tags: django, python, ripplepay, ripple project, microfinance, monetary system, lets, homelessness

Today, I happened to come across this link and the guy in the picture just happens to be John McCarthy, the man who designed Lisp, which I discovered only after reading up on a few of the lesser known, yet interesting languages: OCaml, Haskell, Smalltalk, Lua, Lisp et. al. later in the day on reddit.com

Of those languages, the only ones that really interests me after reading a bit about each are Smalltalk and Lisp - that’s just me. I’ve also previously read a bit about Smalltalk, especially it’s IDE, the ‘doit’ concept and Seaside, a Smalltalk web framework which I discovered from this post onsmalltalk.com which is an interesting read. Seaside itself is quite interesting. Anyway, to get a bit of a feel for smalltalk I downloaded bottomfeeder an RSS/Atom reader. It was a bit ugly and consume 80mb of memory on startup, not good impressions there, but that’s only important if you want to do GUI desktop stuff, so Smalltalk and seaside will get a look-in one day.

So back to Lisp, it is known as ‘the programmable programming language’ and reading the introduction of Paul Graham’s “On Lisp” book and throughout his articles, he really puts this as THE killer reason why to use Lisp. Frankly, I have only enough of an idea that it sounds cool and I don’t pretend to know anything else but being able to write macros as a foundation as a base around how you write your application is, well cool. So, this post really mostly serves as a note to future self - learn lisp and when you do, check out the status of the weblocks framework and probably has little meaning for anyone with half a clue. The cool title just helps me remember what to look for when I grow up.

Hopefully, by that stage I would have migrated my wordpress blog to Django and be proficient enough in a language to claim an ubergeek title and go to nerd parties and have some woman buy a Unix for Dummies book to get to know me better.

Technorati Tags: lisp, weblocks, common lisp, paul graham, smalltalk, seaside

Powered by ScribeFire.