A Curmudgeon Technologist » linux

Command Line Beauty

lolindrath — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:51:56 +0000

This is so geek beautiful (originally from this Lifehacker article)

Folding @ Home

lolindrath — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:39:57 +0000

Remember SETI@Home? Are you still running that?

Folding@Home studies how proteins fold and more importantly, why they fold improperly and cause cancer. Don’t you think this is a better use of your computer?

It uses your spare CPU so you’ll see your CPU at 100% all the time but it yields to all other applications so you will never notice that its running. Think of it as using your whole computer all the time instead of just sucking power while running the Flying Windows screensaver.

You can find the windows installer on the Folding@Home installer, If you’d like you can join our team using the team number 50606.

[tags]folding, home, folding@home, cancer, research[/tags]

Naming Your Computers

lolindrath — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:14:10 +0000

I like to give all my computers original, easy to remember names. I think people cop-out if their computer name is XP-PRO or LAPTOP or LINUX. Here’s a few ideas I’ve gathered for naming schemes. Make sure you leave yours in the comments.

The Seven Deadly Sins (My current naming scheme)

lust
gluttony
greed
sloth
wrath
envy
pride (hubris)

Mythical Creatures

gryphon
dragon
hydra
unicorn
pegasus
gargoyle
chimera
sphinx
phoenix
cerberus
kraken
leviathan
wyvern

Happy Words (thanks Carey)

abandonment
isolation
hate
despair
revenge

Trees

juniper
maple
oak
cedar
pine

Update: I thought of one other one:

alpha
bravo
charlie
delta
etc…

Debian says Fork you, Firefox

lolindrath — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:54:51 +0000

Firefox has some very weird licensing going on with their artwork so you can’t patch Firefox and release it yourself with the original artwork. Debian’s solution was to create their own GPL’ed artwork and rename Firefox to IceWeasel. I really can’t blame Debian for forking it plus IceWeasel is a cool name. Some of the best software in the Open Source community has been created when one programmer saw a different direction to take a piece of software.

Here are 5 Reasons to Support IceWeasel.

And then 5 Reasons to Kill it.
[tags]firefox, iceweasel, gpl, debian, artwork[/tags]

Unprotected m4a to mp3

lolindrath — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:41:47 +0000

Here’s a quick script that can convert m4a (AAC encoded music files) to mp3. This is a nice example of how powerful the command line can be.

It uses mplayer to write out the raw wave file, then uses lame to encode the mp3′s. After that it cleans up the file endings using sed. This script requires mplayer and lame to be installed.

It should work well on Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.

#!/bin/bash

for i in *.m4a
do
mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader “${i}”
mv audiodump.wav “${i}.wav”
done

for i in *.wav
do
lame –preset fast standard “$i” “$i.mp3″
rm -rf “$i”
done

for i in *.mp3
do
x=`echo “$i”|sed -e ‘s/m4a.wav.mp3/mp3/’`
mv “$i” “$x”
done

[tags]programming, bash, linux, fedora, ubuntu, lame, mplayer, command line[/tags]