Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

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Script day – randomly rotate GNOME desktop backgrounds

I kind of collect desktop wallpapers – I have a lot of those, several thousands1. It is a bit ridiculous as I mostly use maximized windows all the time so if not for the fact that in work I live on the console and I have a transparent terminal, I would rarely see my desktop wallpaper.

That being said, with a wallpaper collection, you want a software to manage it and cycle your desktop through the wallpapers. KDE has this function built it – just go to configure your wallpaper and select a directory of wallpapers, choose whether you want to cycle through the images sequentially or randomly, the delay and your done.

Not so in GNOME – simplicity for simplicity’s sake (more…)

  1. mostly anime and video games fan made as well as promotional walls, a lot of hobby photographs – mine and other people’s, and a few more professionally made art [↩]

Posted in Projects, Script Day, Software | 3 Comments »

Firefox 3 download day is upon us at last!

All hands – man those browser download buttons!

Anyway, please head over to Mozilla to download Firefox 3 which was released a scant two hours ago. Also try to refresh the main page a couple of times – its fun 🙂 .

Here should also go a link to Spread Firefox’s world record page, but they seem to have crashed in the ongoing commotion. To cut a long story short, Mozilla are trying to break the world record for the most downloads in 24 hours of a single application (monitored and supervised by Guniess World Records). I did my share, what about you ?

Update

Firefox 3 download day concluded with well over 8 million downloads. The exact figure is still not released as the Guiness World of Records people have to sign on it.

Looking at the local scale – downloads just in the middle east, Israel had tens of thousands of downloads, in the middle east only Iran and Turkey has more downloads. Interestingly enough, Iran has more then twice the amount of downloads as Russia, weird.

Posted in Evangelism, Software | No Comments »

Evolution problem with MS-Outlook invitations

Another post just to get some information out there on Google – there is a known bug in Evolution regarding receiving meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 clients, and several Google searches didn’t come up with the solution, so here is the problem and the workaround:

A default Evolution installation has problems with meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 – when such an invitation is received, it is shown as a plain text message like this:

Evolution shows metting invitation as plain text

And you can’t take any action on the email. (more…)

Posted in Software | 17 Comments »

MS-Outlook thinks it is pretty funny

But it is not – I’ve always been getting emails from people that use Outlook with weird characters strewn here and there for good measure, specifically a lot of people that send me email think its funny to add “J” (capital letter j) at the end of some sentences, for example:

Oulook fails to send smilies

And I never could figure out why, (more…)

Posted in Funny, Software | 5 Comments »

עברית בתגי ID3

בעיה שאני נתקל בה די הרבה, אצלי ואצל אנשים אחרים שעוברים להשתמש בתוכנות ניהול מוזיקה מודרניות (לדוגמה Amarok) היא בקבצים (MP3) של מוזיקה ישראלית שנוצרו על ידי תוכנות ישנות מכילים עברית בתגים מסוג ID3v1. בגלל שהגרסה הראשונה של ID3 לא הכילה תמיכה בזיהוי סט התוים של המשתמש או סתם ביוניקוד, אז תוכנות ישנות פשוט יצרו את התגים בקידוד של מערכת ההפעלה – שזה יכול להיות עברית (אם הוגדרה כך), וכשקידוד ברירת המחדל אינו עברית אז אנחנו מקבלים אוסף של תוים מוזרים במקום עברית.

תוכניות ניהול מוזיקה מודרניות שמכירות ID3v2 והתמיכה שלו ביוניקוד גם נשברות, ואנחנו מקבלים דברים כאלה:
Amarok and ID3v1 files

(more…)

Posted in Software | 2 Comments »

Live upgrade of Fedora 8 to Fedora 9

As noted below, Fedora 9 came out recently, and I think its time my work computer would get a “brain transplant”. I can’t have a lot of downtime on this machine – its the one I do most of my work on, so this upgrade needs to be a “live updated” – I can’t afford the time to shut it down, load an installation of even a live CD (that doesn’t have my environment) and wait until it installs.

(more…)

Posted in Articles, Software | 1 Comment »

Script day – read configuration files

This is not really a script – more of a snippet. I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, so I can justify posting a snippet and calling it “script day” 😉 .

A lot of unix configuration files use the # sign to add comments to configuration files, and a lot of software comes with very well documented files – i.e. has lots of comments. So much that if you just want a quick glimpse at the configuration that is active (not commented out) its very difficult to wade through all the documentation.

Here’s a simple grep that will filter out all the junk and leave you with just the active configuration settings:

egrep -v '^(#|\s*$)' <config file>

and on the standard output you’d get only lines that are not commented out or empty.

Do note that some configuration files can also use ; as a comment character, but modifying the grep to support this is trivial.

Posted in Projects, Script Day, Software | 2 Comments »

Useful Web Development Links

A collection of links that I find useful for web development these days (IE6/7, FF2/3, Safari/KHTML):

(more…)

Posted in Software | No Comments »

The Safari/iTunes update belated controversy

There’s been a lot of gripe, grief and mayhem on the web in the last few days regarding Apple’s bundling of the new Safari 3.1 release with updates to their iTunes software (that is installed on millions of MS-Windows computers thanks to the iPod).

This would have come as more of a surprise for me if I wouldn’t have been using Safari 3 on MS-Windows (although not as my main browser) for the last 6 month approximately.

(more…)

Posted in Evangelism, Software | 1 Comment »

Web site design crap

So I’m writing a web application again, and again I need it to work with Internet Explorer, so of course I can’t anything fancy – or I can try but everything breaks:
(more…)

Posted in Evangelism, Software | 4 Comments »

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