I was reading the manual for my HDTV (I know, who the hell does that?) when I noticed a GPL license notice and acknowledgment for among other things, "linux kernel". Wild.

Here's a link to the mandatory software download page.

Since all the iptables documentation out there is super complicated, here's something really simple.

To see all of the ports that are open, run:

       sudo iptables —list
      

To add a new rule (to open a new port, e.g. 8080):

       sudo iptables -A tcp_in -p tcp -d my.hostname.com —destination-port 8080 -j allowed
      

That's assuming you have a chain called "tcp_in" of course...

And to delete a rule, run iptables —list, count the number of the rule (the index #) and then:

       sudo iptables -D tcp_in [index]
      

Simple enough....

So you want to use SVN? Fine, it's easy to move a project from one to the other.

Get cvs2svn

Go to a checked out copy of your cvs project and run cvs admin -kb filename on any binary files.

Commit to CVS.

Assuming that you've got a simple CVS project with no branches that you want to keep, do this:

./cvs2svn-1.5.1/cvs2svn —trunk-only -s project-name /path/to/cvsrepository/project-name mv project-name /path/to/svnrepository/ 

A bunch of links and things.

Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.

mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800' 

My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.

How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.

Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .

Enough for now...

This thrillingly exciting unix tool also has a great page about it, Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial . It starts with "The Awful Truth about sed" which is simple ... "the documentation is terrible".

In 2003, on the W3C www-rdf-interest mailing list, Dan Brickley wrote :

I just stumbled across this after an #rdfig discussion about adding RSS support to Mailman, the popular list management and HTML archiving package. Turns out the patch exists already (but wasn't intergrated yet). It took me less than 10 minutes to patch my Mailman installation and rebuild the archives for rdfweb-dev. I now have http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/rss.xml generated automatically. See http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2003/02/09/2003-02-09.html#1044813421.381747 for the (trivial to apply) patch and related info. Just cd into the Mailman/Archiver/ directory and do 'patch < ~danbri/rss.patch' or whatever, then re-run bin/arch on your archives. The markup exported is fairly basic, but sets things up nicely for future extensions—you could add in richer descriptions of the mailing lists fairly easily, though I'm not sure how best one would hook such information up to Mailman's www-based frontend.

Well, I can attest that it really is (still) that easy. Get the latest patch from the bug tracker - right now it's here . OK, the patch isn't perfect - you have to remove the mail headers at the top, and the file Defaults.py.in should be actually applied to Defaults.py . But aside from that it works really, really well.

The other thing I wanted to note is this article on ONLamp.com: Simplify Your Life with Apache Virtual Hosts because it explains how to set up virtual hosts on your home/development box. The trick is to edit /etc/hosts I guess.

It seems that AWStats is without a doubt the best stats package out there these days. And you can get it easily enough on debian with apt-get. But it still requires a bit of configuration. Here's what I've done so far.

First I have a number of virtual hosts so that I made a copy of /etc/awstats/awstats.conf to /etc/awstats/awstats.semacode.org.conf which is the blessed name for each virtual host. In that new conf file you need to have:

• LogFile="/var/log/apache/access.log"
• LogFormat = 1 - this is important because Sarge comes with apache configured to the combined setting at least in my recently-made fresh install.
• SiteDomain="semacode.org"

Now, apt-get will already have installed a cron job for you, but you need to make sure it's working because it won't complain if it's broke. So do this: sudo /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=semacode.org and it will complain if there's anything wrong.

Finally you will need to add the following line to your httpd.conf file: Alias /awstats-icon "/usr/share/awstats/icon/" .

I also am going to add password protection to my awstats page so that the general public can't access it. Partly because it could be a security concern, but mainly because it's slooooow.

How to properly use the kick-ass ffmpegX (for OS X, a wrapper for all kinds of open source tools) to encode your iMovie movies.

It is very important, that you do NOT choose the "Full Quality DV" Setting when exporting from iMovie. This just makes iMovie glueing the 2GB chunks together in which it records movies. Mencoder can't handle that. Here's what to do: Choose "Expert settings". Click "Export". Choose "Movie to Quicktime Movie". Click "Options". In "Video Settings" choose "DV PAL" (or NTSC, if you are on that TV System). In the Audio settings, choose uncompressed 48khz Stereo. Uncheck "Prepare for Internet streaming". Make sure the output file has .mov as extender. Now the recording is reencoded as a single movie which Mencoder will encode completely as AVI.

So let's say you are reading along and you want to read MIT's Technology Review article: A Remote Control For Your Life . And then they want you to pay and you don't want to pay. OK, fine but how is it that the content of the article got indexed into google in the first place? Well as it turns out, they just check the User-Agent string on the HTTP requests. So if you were clever you would just do this:

curl -O -A 'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)'  'http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/mann0704.asp?p=0' 

and then you can read the article. There are other sites that play similar tricks.

I finished writing up my HOWTO on using Linux to develop for Symbian. Specifically, it covers Series 60 but the tools can be used for other variantions of Symbian as well.

If like me you are forced to use Virtual PC, well maybe you still remember the good old days of Connectix. Back in those days VPC was like a badge of honour for Mac users, that a Mac company could be so clever to make it work. And you could install Linux on VPC and stick it to the man. Well, now you have to pay M$ cash to get the software but you don't have to put up with having their beige boxes and logo sitting in your dock any more. Introducing Tux'n'tosh , the perfect icon set for VPC. Personally, I chose this icon and now my screen is free of beige boxes once again.

You can download the Tux'n'tosh icons from XIcons for your personal use :-)

After a week of messing around with windoze and linux toolkits, I finally did a successful build and run of an example app on my nokia 3650 using Symbian C++. Was it any of the toolkits I've already mentioned that I used? No, it was sdk2unix , a seemingly wonderful (hey it works!) distro by Rudolf Koenig and distributed at the Knowledge-Intelligence AG site (some kind of german company). They've got howto's for a bunch of symbian platforms, but note in particular the Series60 (SymbianOS 6.1) SDK on Linux/Unix HOWTO which is what I followed.

In addition to what they say there I would add the following notes:

• It worked for me with the 1.2 nokia SDK (it's not clear that when the howto was written 0.9 was the latest)
• when you run bin/install_gcc539 you must give absolute paths
• target-directory is the same directory for both bin/install_gcc539 and bin/install_series60_sdk
• you will have some minor troubles with case-sensitive names ... I just renamed directories that were expecting something different.

I had to do some hacking a little bit to make it all work .... I can't remember everything I did right now. I used Chris Davies'unpack-s60cppsdk to unpack the nokia SDK under linux. I found that when I went to 'make'in the series60ex/form example I had to fix the case of the include files in a bunch of .cpp files. (i.e., make them lowercase).

Overall I am VERY happy right now because this makefile system actually makes some sense. The bldmake and makmake and abld crap from symbian is just crap. So, hopefully this success with the example will be followed by me successfully writing my own little hello world program soon! :-)

To log Mail.app's activity on a specific port, launch it from the Terminal. Use the option: -LogActivityOnPort ## where ## is the port number you want to watch. 25 is for smtp, 110 is for POP.

Find out how KDE is doing at translating their system and documentation into 40 different languages, look at the pretty picture .