#!/bin/bash

if [ -f girlproblems.txt ]
then
  FEELINGS="bad"
  PROBLEMS=`cat myproblems.txt | wc -l`
  if [ $PROBLEMS == "99" ]
  then
    BITCHES=`cat myproblems.txt | grep bitch | wc -l`
    if [ $BITCHES == "0" ]
      then
      echo "a bitch ain't one!"
    fi
  fi
fi

Too many glasses of scotch will do that to you.

-i means ignore case
-r means recursive

Simple stuff, but useful nonetheless.

For those of you using slackware and want to check it out, you can download the latest 9.20b release from my Opera Slackware packages page.

Microsoft has argued in the past that Linux infringes on their IP, but when called upon for specifics has failed to name the patents in question.

Ballmer, in an obvious threat towards open source users, has told c|net that “open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual-property rights of others, just as any other competitor will”.

For those that aren’t fluent in the language of Bullshit, that is loosely translated as “play by our rules, or else”.

One interesting quote in the interview, however, is a possible admission that Windows is in fact more expensive than Linux. After a huge campaign against Linux specifically aimed at proving that Windows has a lower total cost of ownership than it’s open source alternative, Ballmer has this little cherry:

“We are higher-priced, but we bring greater value.”

Higher priced you say? What happened to all of that “Linux is more expensive that Windows” rhetoric?

Linux users respoded to Ballmer’s accusations with the following message:

You can keep your higher prices and intellectual property. We are going to play on our own, and you’re not invited.

Notice that Linux is at version 9,0,31,0, while both Windows and OSX are stuck at 9,0,28,0. Sure, I may be splitting hairs here, but after lagging (pun intended – ALSA anyone?) at least 1.5 versions behind for the last few years, it is good to be the front-runner for a change.

Get the latest version of Adobe Flash Player for Linux here

opera-9.20b_20070323.5-i386-1_hno.tgz
opera-9.01_20060629.6-i486-1hno.tgz

Current stable release

opera-9.10_20061214.5-i386-1_hno.tgz
opera-9.0-i486-1hno.tgz

About the above packages

The opera desktop team have been releasing weekly builds of the upcoming recently released version 9.0.

I have been creating opera slackware packages for each one of these releases for my own personal use, and considering the fact that 9.0-final has been released, I thought that might as well share the love and upload my packages for my fellow slackers to use.

The current stable release is available for download, but I will also provide a package of the latest beta/nightly/weekly release. My own personal experience is that the beta builds are more often than not stable enough to use in a production environment, although if in doubt, download the latest stable version.

Note: These packages use shared qt libraries, meaning that you will at the very least require a basic KDE installation. As Slackware comes default with KDE installed, this should not be a problem, and I believe that if you are clever enough to engineer a slackware installation without kdelibs installed, I think you should be smart enough to create your own opera package anyway. If there is enough interest, however, I might provide static-qt opera slackware packages if requested.

This will recursively search your directory tree (starting at dir ‘dot’) and chmod 755 all directories only.

Similarly, the following will chmod all files only (and ignore the directories):

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Does it bug you everytime you use bash on your linux box (via a terminal-emulator, ssh or otherwise), and it echos new mail notifications every five minutes? Well, if you are signed up to some high traffic mailing lists like I am, you will know my pain.

Here is how you ditch those notifications.
In /etc/profile comment out the following (or change the y to an n):

# Notify user of incoming mail.  This can be overridden in the user's
# local startup file (~/.bash.login or whatever, depending on the shell)
if [ -x /usr/bin/biff ]; then
 biff y
fi

Another option is to simply stop your computer from running the biff executable:

chmod -x /usr/sbin/biff

NOTE: This will make system-wide changes for every user. If you want to make the change only for one user, add biff n to their .bash_profile and/or .bashrc. (Bash login shells use .bash_profile; bash non-login shells use .bashrc)

Situation:

1. You have a movie you really like, but for some reason (such as being a dirty movie pirate.. arrrr!) the movie has been split into multiple files of <700MB for burning across multiple CDRs.
2. You infact own a DVD burner, and as such, want to combine these files seamlessly into one, and burn it to a single DVDR.
3. You are an uber-geek (in the eyes of your grandma) and use linux and are not afraid of using the command line

Using 6 simple commands you can successfully burn this movie to DVD without skippy playback or out-of-sync audio. Here’s how:

Tools you will need for the task:

• mencoder
• ffmpeg
• dvdauthor

First we concatenate the two/three/four AVI files:

cat firstfile.avi secondfile.avi > concatenatedfile.avi

Then we use a bit of mencoder wizardry:

mencoder -o finalmovie.avi -noidx -oac copy -ovc copy concatenatedfile.avi

That will leave you with a perfectly synced and concatenated single AVI of the movie in question. Now to make that movie into a DVD. (Just a note: change ntsc-dvd to pal-dvd if you live in a non-NTSC country such as Australia.)

ffmpeg -i finalmovie.avi -y -target ntsc-dvd -sameq -aspect 16:9 finalmovie.mpg

Now we move on to making that MPEG version of the movie into a directory with proper VIDEO.TS and IFO files for your DVD player to read.

dvdauthor --title -o dvd -f finalmovie.mpg

Then run the following:

dvdauthor -o dvd -T

And one final step to make that DVD structure into a burnable image:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd.iso dvd/

After all of that is complete, you can burn the image using your favourite burning application, throw the disc in your DVD player and get watching.

Footnote: If you are a confident, knowledgeable and impatient bugger, you can cut out the mkisofs step above and burn the files straight to disc something like this (change the -speed variable to suit your burner):

growisofs -dvd-compat -dvd-video -speed=4 -Z /dev/dvd ./dvd/*

This concludes today’s lesson. Now where’s my popcorn.

Did you know that upgrading to >7.5.2 disables the ‘Updater’ button in the ‘Server’ section of Plesk?

I didn’t, but after a bit of head-scratching I found the ‘fix’. (NOTE: Not really a ‘fix’ as nothing was really broken – just disabled).

Anyway, enough of the banter, re-enabling the ‘Updater’ button again is as simple as one MySQL command:

mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`
use psa;
UPDATE misc SET val='false' WHERE param='disable_updater';
exit

UPDATE: It should be pointed out that it is a bad idea to enable the updater if your plesk installation is running under Virtuozzo. Plesk running in a virtual environment needs to be updated via templates, not the control panel update feature, and as such is disabled for a pretty good reason. For more information, refer to the following link:

http://kb.swsoft.com/article_117_786_en.html