A Curmudgeon Technologist » programming

Transactional Memory – OSCON 2007

lolindrath — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:31:46 +0000

Transactional Memory – OSCON 2007

Companies and open source

lolindrath — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:38:10 +0000

The company I work for makes is submit for review all FOSS/Open source software we use. As far as I know they don’t actually donate any money to them, its just a software license review.

How does your company handle this? Do you donate money or time if you use putty or Firefox? Do you think they should?

How to turn off Smilies in WordPress

lolindrath — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:48:33 +0000

Smilies aren’t always a good thing, depending on the professional level of your blog, you might want to turn them off, here’s how.
In your wp-config.php file, below the database stuff, add this line:

$wpsmiliestrans = array();

[tags]wordpress, php[/tags]

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]