Monthly Archives: June 2011

Weekend Project: Find Hidden Treasures in XFCE 4.8

Posted on June 29, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Yet another fine article by me:

“Xfce 4.8 is a major upgrade to the popular lightweight desktop environment. 4.8 was released in January 2011, replacing 4.6. Xfce 4.8 is available in Debian Testing, Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, Fedora 15, and probably other Linux distributions. There is more to Xfce than meets the eye; let’s dig under the hood and uncover some of its hidden goodies.

“Xfce is broken up into several dozen packages, so you have a lot of control over which components you install. In Debian and Natty you can install the Xfce4 meta-package to get a complete desktop environment with niceties like Network Manager, themes, a top panel, a dock, system menu, and a nice logout dialog with a complete set of actions: log out, shut down, restart, suspend, hibernate, and save session. Figure 1 shows how it looks in Natty.

Xubuntu, Ubuntu’s official Xfce spin, ships with more th”emes, multimedia apps, more apps in the dock, and much Gnome integration. Ubuntu users don’t need to download and install Xubuntu, but can get it by installing xubuntu-desktop with all of its Recommends on any *buntu. You can install any number of desktops and window managers on any Linux, and select the one you want to use at login. There is a trick to it on Ubuntu, in case you hadn’t noticed– the Ubuntu login screen won’t show your options until you enter which user is logging in. Then a teeny-tiny menu with various options appears at the bottom of the screen. (Apparently Ubuntu is “humanity towards others with perfect vision and sharp, high resolution computer monitors.”)

“Fedora has its own Xfce customizations that I’ve only skimmed…” Read the rest here

Posted in software, Sysadmin

Things You Can’t Do With a GUI: Finding Stuff on Linux

Posted on June 28, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Things You Can’t Do With a GUI: Finding Stuff on Linux , by me, is full of great stuff like:

“How much space is left on my hard drive or drives? This particular incantation is one of my favorites because it uses egrep to exclude temporary directories, and shows the filesystem types:

$ df -hT | egrep -i "file|^/"
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext4 51G 3.6G 32G 11% /
/dev/sda3 ext4 136G 2.3G 127G 2% /home
/dev/sda1 ext3 244G 114G 70G 63% /home/carla/photoshare
/dev/sdb2 ext3 54G 5.8G 45G 12% /home/carla/music

What files were changed on this day, in the current directory?

$ ls -lrt | awk '{print $6" "$7" "$9 }' | grep 'May 22'

May 22 file_a.txt
May 22 file_b.txt”

Read the rest on Linux.com!

Posted in software, Sysadmin

Assembling and Testing a Complex Ogg Theora Video with Command Line Tools and VideoLAN Client

Posted on June 28, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Assembling and Testing a Complex Ogg Theora Video with Command Line Tools and VideoLAN Client (VLC) is a great howto by Terry Hancock at Free Software Magazine:

“Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you probably know about the free multimedia codecs with the fishy-sounding names from Xiph.org: Ogg Vorbis (for sound) and Ogg Theora (for video). You might be less familiar with other family and friends, including FLAC (lossless audio), Skeleton (metadata stream), and Kate (subtitles). However, together this collection of codecs can be used with the Ogg container format to provide all of the functionality of a DVD video file — multiple soundtracks, full surround sound, high definition, and selectable subtitles. Having created the various streams for a prototype release of “Sintel” in my last few columns, I’m now going to integrate them into a single video file and test it with some players.
Making Movies with Free Software

“This article is part of an on-going series on the challenges I’ve faced in producing two free-licensed movies, Marya Morevna, through the Morevna Project and Lunatics, which we are working on as Anansi Spaceworks.

“In this series of articles, I’ve been assembling a prototype for Lib-Ray — a format I’m inventing in order to have a free, non-DRM way to distribute high definition video. In previous columns, I covered how to create a Theora video stream from PNG images, how to create Ogg FLAC and Vorbis soundtracks, and how to create OggKate subtitle tracks from SRT files. Now, I’m going to put all these together into a single multiplexed stream..”

Enjoy the rest here!

Posted in Developer, Linux Audio, Multimedia, software

Screw You. Pay Me.

Posted on June 9, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Why do publishers think it is OK to not pay authors? I don’t know, and I don’t care. It is enough to know that there are publishers who think it OK to play games with us; to stall, ignore, lie, and trot out the same worn excuses as though we’re dumb enough to believe them. They pay themselves, which apparently means all is well with the world.

But it’s OK to stiff freelance authors. I cannot fathom the asshole mentality that thinks this is acceptable, and I don’t want to. It’s gross enough doing the monthly inspection of my sewer system.

Suppose that it’s not assholery in a particular circumstance, but the publisher is having a cash flow squeeze. What’s the right thing to do? Don’t pay the writers! No, that is the wrong answer. The right answer is the publisher takes a pay cut, even a symbolic one, and honors his obligations whatever it takes. Get a line of credit, press debtors for payment. Negotiate with the writers– maybe they will take a delayed or reduced payment in exchange for a later payment with a bonus to compensate.

Quit laughing, I can dream. Quick poll: have any of you fine freelance authors ever received compensation, like a cash bonus or accumulated interest, and a sincere apology for a late payment from the person actually responsible? Probably your beleaguered editor was all kinds of remorseful, but that doesn’t count if they have no control over payables.

Bottlenecks and Worms

The worst of all worlds is having an editor who won’t help you. I had one for years who was a world-class bottleneck and a wormy apologist. Author invoices landed on his desk to die. When he finally approved them they landed in an accounts payable system designed for delay. Did he help? Pshaw of course not, after all his paycheck arrived on time every month, and the A/P clerks were scary.

This is problem that has plagued freelance authors (and musicians and all creative artists) from the dawn of corporate-asshole time. It doesn’t smell any better with age. It does increase my appreciation of my good publishers who pay on time without making me nag and threaten. It fuels my determination to self-publish, because if I fail it’s on me, and if I succeed I reap the rewards. And it will cure the nausea I feel when dipshit publishers who play funny money games profit from my work.

You might enjoy this video Fuck You. Pay Me.

Posted in Business, Work

4 money-saving, open source business intelligence suites

Posted on June 2, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Business intelligence (BI) is one of those buzzphrases that sound super-cool, but are often misunderstood. What is business intelligence and should you care? Do you need to drop a giant bucket of money on BI?
Smart, bold decisions

There is little that is magical about making wise decisions for your business. The fabled steely-eyed rock-ribbed American businessman or businesswoman who stuns allies and competitors alike with daring and boldness doesn’t pull those daring decisions out of the air — the smart ones rely on data and analysis. Lots and lots of data and analysis. There are two general categories of business intelligence: competitive intelligence, and internal intelligence. Business intelligence doesn’t have a strict definition and could encompass both, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll limit it to internal intelligence, because it is most important to have a thorough understanding of what’s happening in your own shop…read the rest at ITWorld.com

Posted in Business, Developer, software

Making money in open source: Drupal future looks bright

Posted on June 2, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Who says there’s no money in open source? Demand for Drupal talent is growing, and opportunities abound for developers, designers and artists, and related disciplines such as database and system administration. Let’s take a look at what some Drupal consulting firms are doing, and get an inside view from a Drupal core maintainer.

Posted in Business, Developer

8 strange places to find USB ports

Posted on June 2, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

USB ports have become the universal computer interface. Why do we care? Because microcontrollers control the world, making the question of who controls the microcontrollers very important. Your car has dozens of microcontrollers — possibly more than a hundred. Farm machinery, appliances, toys, weapons, home theater equipment, cameras, model trains, industrial robots, dog collars, surveillance gear — they’re everywhere.

There has to be a way to interface with microcontrollers. Sometimes this is the realm of programmers and engineers with specialized equipment. Sometimes they are user-accessible, and an easy and common interface is the good old USB port. For this I am happy, because I remember the painful bad old days of device connectivity. You young’uns won’t believe me, but we couldn’t just plug external hard drives or USB sticks into computers. We couldn’t plug cameras and smartphones into computers, or turntables, speakers, headsets, multi-channel recording interfaces — not even keyboards and mice. No, this was a strange and difficult task, and involved hassling with PS/2 ports, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE ports, and other primitive technologies.

Now there are USB ports everywhere, and here are eight of the strangest places I have seen them.

Posted in Hardware