Learn to speak like a pirate

September 19th is a talk like a pirate day. Do you want to talk like a pirate? Head over to http://funtranslations.com/pirate and start typing. This is an English to Pirate Translator which works well on your browser from desktop or mobile. This has an API for pirate translation too. Check it out. I had few minutes of fun.

Tamil Dictionary

This week I was doing some research on Tamil language and came across this Tamil dictionary website. It is refreshing to see this. Most of the Tamil language sites are poorly designed and has more ads than the content. This one looks pleasing and haven't overdone the ads. Above all it yields quality results.

Agarathi also have another unique thing Tamil Dictionary API which one can use to leverage agarathi's database in their apps.

Overall I'm really pleased with the design and the quality of the website and we need more and more such websites to cater to one of the oldest languages in the world.

Great quotes to live by

Today I came across this quotes collection Great quotes to live by. I have never seen quotes presented in such a beautiful way. The quotes get the respect due, no other distractions. Usually the quotes site are full of ads and looks like crap. Not in this case. I'm impressed. I'm curious about the quotes api. I'll play with it and see if it is worth using it in some of my projects. 

everythingfonts.com - iTunes of the font world?

When it comes to fonts & typography, it is often relegated to a niche, only popular with designers and handful of font sites. The font sites themselves are just a store front to sell fonts, often charging more than the true value of the fonts.

Last week I stumbled upon everthingfonts.com and I think finally some one decided to create a level field in typography. Sure it does the usual with its fonts directory.  But it also has many useful font utilities that can be used right from the browser. Pick any format to format conversion and you can do it there. They even managed to bring ttfdump back from the dead, along with pdffonts & ttfcoverage. Looking at some of the dates I think it is a very new site and must have been recently launched, but it packs impressive functionality.

The individual font display page provides more useful information than any other font site I have seen.   The glyphs display seem to leverage html5 canvas drawing capability to provide very accurate rendition of the glyph as opposed to the usual contact sheet you see on most of the sites. While the glyph coverage table states the facts the unicode map provides a visual view of the glyph coverage.

But IMHO the biggest surprise is their just launched Fonts Market Place. I think it has the potential to level the playing field a little enabling smaller foundries and individual designers to sell their fonts here. The success of this market place depends on attracting buyers and sellers and convincing them that this is the place to do their font related business. 

Elara Font Manager is also a nice tool that promises to keep your fonts in the cloud. I played with it for a while with the public fonts. If I have lot of personal fonts collection this is probably where I will keep and access them.

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the functionality of this site. I think it is a complete approach to font management and has lot of potential.

Converting ttf font to eot

I started thinking about typography for some of my web pages and found that it makes your webpages more professional looking. The only problem is I ran into internet explorer! (surprise!).

Both Firefox and Safari handled my ttf & woff font-face css declarations, but on IE my page still looked like crap. I had to do some digging and google came to help. Apparently IE only supports a font format called .eot (Embedded Open Type) and .eot is not supported by other browsers.


I didn't have a .eot file for my ttf file. Fortunately http://ttf2eot.com offered a simple way to convert my existing ttf to eot font file. And I adjusted my css declaration as shown in ttf2eot website.

Now I have my pages looking the same across all browsers...even IE!

Save Webpage as image or PDF

Do you want a full snapshot of a webpage you are visiting as an image or as a PDF file? Here is a firefox addon which helps you with that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7528

Here are the options it supports.



I tried it on one of my websites and I'm impressed with the results. Good tool if you ever want to print your website on paper for promotional purposes!

Renaming mysql database

Mysql version 5.1.7 to 5.1.23 had "RENAME TO ". It was later removed because of a finding that it can lead to data loss. The easiest way to achieve this now is to dump the contents of the existing database to another newly created one.

echo "create database new_database;" | mysql -u <username> -p <enter password>

mysqldump --user=<name> --password=<password> <old_database> | mysql -D new_database -p <enter password>

Now you can drop the old database ( after making sure you have all the contents on the new database). Ofcourse you need to recreate the user permissions for the new database.

Joomla v1.5 and Google Adsense

If you have a website built using joomla (version 1.5) and want to place google adsense ads there, there are modules available. But I wanted an easier native joomla solution. So I hacked up one myself. The main problem with joomla and placing the adsense code is, joomla filters out the script or treats them as html text.

To work around this issue you need to think outside of joomla. Here is what I did.

1) Created a new module using mod_html
2) Noted down the id of the module.
3) Logged in to the backend mysql database and put the adsense code in the module I just created. This way I bypassed all the filtering.

use <joomla_database> ;

update jos_modules set content = '<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 180;
google_ad_height = 150;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>' where id = <module_id> ;

Just remember not to edit this module again from Joomla!

Unicode utf-8 in Mysql,perl DBI,MIME::Lite

I have a database which stores unicode text. Periodically I need to get the stored text and mail to a mailing list. Initially the text received through the mail was unreadable. After several tries and spending sometime multiple documentation pages, I found all the right settings.

For the mysql DBI you have specifically enable utf8 processing of the strings. There are other ways to achieve this like converting each string. But it will quickly become tedious. This is the easiest.

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:${database}:${hostname}", $username, $password)
or die "DB Connection not made: $DBI::errstr";
$dbh->{'mysql_enable_utf8'} = 1;
$dbh->do('SET NAMES utf8');

For sending the mail, you tell MIME::Lite the charset(utf8) and encoding(8bit).

my $msg = MIME::Lite->build(
From => 'user@sample.com',
To => $recipient_emailid,
Subject => "=?UTF-8?B?" .
encode("utf-8", $subject) ."?=",
Type => 'TEXT',
Encoding=> '8bit',
Charset => 'utf-8',
Data => $body
);
$msg->attr("content-type.charset" => "utf-8");

$msg->send;

Specifying your own keytab file for MIT kerberos Library

Use this environment variable to specify a different keytab file for your application. By default it looks for /etc/krb5.keytab.

KRB5_KTNAME=[path to keytab file]

Writing Audio CDs in Linux

I used to reboot my dual boot machine to login to Windows just because I wanted to write some audio CDs to play in my car. But off late I'm putting extra effort not to leave Linux and go to Windows. So I set out to write my own Nero replacement for audio CDs. This is what I came up with. I have been using it for a while and it works flawlessly for me. You might need to make few modifications to suite your needs.

#! /bin/sh

#
# Make an audio CD out of the given mp3 files.
# Author :
# Fri Jul 13 13:15:19 CDT 2007
#

MODE="TAO"
DEVICE="ATA:0,0,0"
TMPDIR=/tmp/audio

if [ ! -d ${TMPDIR} ]; then
mkdir ${TMPDIR}
fi

# don't do rm * at /
cd ${TMPDIR}
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
rm -rf ${TMPDIR}/*
fi

while getopts m:d: opt
do
case "$opt" in
m) MODE="$OPTARG";;
d) DEVICE="$OPTARG";;
\?) echo "Usage: $0 [-m T/D] [-d ] <input files>\n"
echo -e "\t -m : CD write Mode : D - DAO/T - TAO ( Default is TAO )"
echo -e "\t -d : CD device to use"
exit 2;;
esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND-1))

if [ $# -eq "0" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [-m tao/dao] [-d ] <audio files>\n"
echo -e "\t -m : CD write Mode : D - DAO/T - TAO ( Default is TAO )"
echo -e "\t -d : CD device to use"
exit
fi

echo "Copying files to work area and Removing spaces from file names..."
for i in $*
do
if [ ! -f "$i" ]; then
echo "Couldn't find the file [${i}]. Perhaps the file has spaces and you didn't quote t
hem? "
exit
fi
FILE_N=`echo "$i" | tr ' ' '_'`
TARGET_FILE=`basename ${FILE_N}`
cp "$i" ${TARGET_FILE}
done

echo "Converting mp3 files to wav files..."
for i in *;
do
echo "$i"
mpg321 --rate 44100 --stereo --buffer 3072 --resync -w `basename $i`.wav $i;
done

echo "Normalizing Audio.i.e. Adjusting the volumes..."
#normalize-audio -m *.wav
normalize -m *.wav


if [ ${MODE} == "DAO" ]; then
# if DAO mode, create the TOC and then
# write to CD
echo "Generating TOC for DAO mode"
DAOTOC_FILE="/tmp/toc_cd.toc"
echo CD_DA > ${DAOTOC_FILE}
echo >> ${DAOTOC_FILE}
for fff in *.wav
do
echo -e "TRACK AUDIO\nAUDIOFILE \"${fff}\" 0\n" >> ${DAOTOC_FILE}
done
echo "--------------------------------"
cat ${DAOTOC_FILE}
echo "--------------------------------"
echo "Writing to CD...DAO mode"
cdrao write --device ${DEVICE} ${DAOTOC_FILE}
else
# if TAO we can now write to cd
echo "Writing to CD...TAO mode"
cdrecord -v dev=${DEVICE} -audio -pad *.wav
fi

I would be happy if you drop a note if you find it useful.

Converting video files into PSP format

I have lot of video files(songs/home videos) in my computer. I was trying to convert them into a format playable in PSP. After lot of failed attempts the following settings worked for me. Note the -sameq option makes the output file large. But I like the fact that the output has almost the same quality as the source. Here is the script I use now to convert the file to PSP format after that you can copy the *.MP4 and *.THM files to the video folder of PSP.

#! /bin/sh


#
# Convert the input video file into a format suitable
# for playing in sony PSP
# Author :
# Date : Wed Jun 20 12:13:28 CDT 2007
#


# Restrictions
# BIT_RATE <= 768 kbps
# Up to 320×240 or up to 368×208
# Up to 30 fps
# H.264 Main Profile up to Level 2.1
# Up to 2 reference frames
# LC AAC audio up to 48kHz (Media Manager uses 128kbps)


CROP=0
OUTPUT_FILE=M4V00001


while getopts i:c:o: opt
do
case "$opt" in
i) INPUT_FILE="$OPTARG";;
c) CROP="$OPTARG";;
o) OUTPUT_FILE="$OPTARG";;
\?) echo "Usage: $0 -i [-c ] [-o put file>]\n"
exit 2;;
esac
done

if [ ! ${INPUT_FILE} ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 -i [-c ] [-o

le>]\n"
exit
fi

ffmpeg -i "$INPUT_FILE" -f psp -r 29 -croptop ${CROP} -cropbottom ${CROP} -sameq -b 768 -ar
24000 -ab 64 -s 368x208 ${OUTPUT_FILE}.MP4

ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -f image2 -ss 5 -vframes 1 -s 160x120 -an ${OUTPUT_FILE}.THM

Upgrading from Fedora 5 to Fedora 6 over the net

So far whenever I try to update my linux systems I always do a fresh install. I have my home and data partitions seperate from the root partition. So except for few configuration files which I backup I don't have anything to preserve and a fresh install is the least troublesome way to upgrade.

But I'm deeply bothered about writing few CD's and throw them away once the installation is complete. Hence this time I tried to the upgrade without reintall and without any CD's.

First I made the system clean and up to date.

yum update
yum clean all

Then I forced the update of fedora release packages.

rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm

Since I modified the repo files the rpm installation deposited the repo files as .rpmnew. So I backed up the old files and moved the rpmnew files to the appropriate names. I had livna repo also. So next I moved that repo from release 5 to 6.

yum remove livna-release-5
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

At this point I crossed my finger and ran yum update.

yum update

It found tons of packages to upgrade and a few to uninstall and few more to fresh install. But it also found few dependency issues mostly with gtls package depency tree. So I had to uninstall tons of packages including kde and gnome ( yeah I have both on my machine ;) ). I created a text file of those uninstalled packages with entries like this(cut and paste from yum output).

file /tmp/uninstalled.yum.lst :

GraphicsMagick x86_64 1.1.7-7.fc5 installed 8.2 M
ImageMagick x86_64 6.2.5.4-4.2.1.fc5.7 installed 11 M
ImageMagick-c++ x86_64 6.2.5.4-4.2.1.fc5.7 installed 470 k
NetworkManager-gnome x86_64 0.6.4-1.fc5 installed 403 k
control-center x86_64 1:2.14.2-1 installed 7.7 M
cups x86_64 1:1.2.8-1.fc5 installed 8.7 M
cups-libs x86_64 1:1.2.8-1.fc5 installed 311 k
dvdauthor x86_64 0.6.11-4.lvn5 installed 309 k
eel2 x86_64 2.14.3-1.fc5 installed 1.2 M
eel2-devel x86_64 2.14.3-1.fc5 installed 225 k
ekiga x86_64 2.0.1-5 installed 11 M
eog x86_64 2.14.3-1.fc5 installed 2.2 M
evince x86_64 0.5.1-4 installed 2.2 M
evolution-data-server x86_64 1.6.3-2.fc5 installed 11 M
........

Now "yum update" went fine with out any complains. Unfortunately for some strange reason it also installed i386 packages. Mine is AMD64 and I prefer only x86_64 packages. Again I created a list like the one above and gave it to yum to uninstall.

yum list | grep i386 | grep installed | awk '{print $1}' | xargs > /tmp/i386.lst
yum erase `/tmp/i386.lst`

Now I'm back to the list of packages I unistalled. Again I piped the list to yum this time I asked it to do the installation instead.

cat /tmp/uninstalled.yum.lst | awk '{print $1}' > /tmp/install.txt
yum `cat /tmp/install.txt`

Now I should have the functional system. Wait the infamous nvidia driver. I installed that too...and then rebooted the machine. Everything came up without any problem. I had to fix few inode issues so rebooted again this time logged in a single user mode ( 1 or softlevel=single in grub kernel config line) and ran fsck -y.

So there you go I made a diskless over the internet upgrade of fedora 5 to fedora 6 and I'm still alive to tell the story. My system is working fine so far with out any problems.

Power Saving - turnoff hard disks after an idle time

I have 1 IDE and 4 SATA disks on my server. Each SATA drive mostly serve one function. One drive for photos, another one for music etc. Though this is a file server, the disks are not used when we are away from home which is a good portion of the day. So I searched ways to reduce power and general hard disk usage. "hdparm" came to rescue in the form of -S option. Here is what man page has to say about -S option.

-S
Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

So I executed the following commands.

hdparm -S60 /dev/hda
hdparm -S60 /dev/sda
hdparm -S60 /dev/sdb
hdparm -S60 /dev/sdc
hdparm -S60 /dev/sdd

And had to make few configuration changes to smartd ( to make it perform the checks less frequently )

/dev/sda -d ata -H -m root -s (S/../.././02|L/../../7/04)
/dev/sdb -d ata -H -m root -s (S/../.././02|L/../../7/04)
/dev/sdc -d ata -H -m root -s (S/../.././02|L/../../7/04)
/dev/sdd -d ata -H -m root -s (S/../.././02|L/../../7/04)

Yes there is a small delay when first navigate to any of the disks. But I'm willing to pay the penalty for the power saving and far quieter machine.

boost::tokenizer and streams

I had to parse a huge file and build some lookup tables based on that. Each line had a comma seperated fields with white spaces. Initially some "performance" minded person wrote aperl script which writes out c++ function which statically populate the lookup tables. The compiler took literally an hour to compile that file (whose size was ~ 1MB). So I set out to write a small parser and populate the lookup fields. So I read each line and used boost tokenizer to split the comma seperated value. It looked something like this...

while( f.getline(str) )
{
typedef boost::tokenizer<boost::char_separator<char>>
tokenizer;
boost::char_separator<char> sep("\t, ", "\n");
tokenizer tokens(str, sep);
for (tokenizer::iterator tok_iter = tokens.begin();
tok_iter != tokens.end(); ++tok_iter)
std::cout << "<" << *tok_iter << "> ";
}

The initial version worked. But seeing the constructor for boost::tokenizer I got curious and thought what if I passed the the stream iterator to tokenizer? That would make my code much prettier and it is obviously a better way of doing it. So I did this.

{
std::ifstream ifile(filename.c_str());
std::istream_iterator<char> file_iter(ifile);
std::istream_iterator<char> end_of_stream;

typedef boost::tokenizer<boost::char_separator<char>,
std::istream_iterator<char> >
tokenizer;
boost::char_separator<char> sep("\t, ", "\n");

tokenizer tokens(file_iter,end_of_stream, sep);

for (tokenizer::iterator tok_iter = tokens.begin();
tok_iter != tokens.end(); ++tok_iter)
std::cout << "<" << *tok_iter << "> ";
}

Soon I hit a snag. For some reason I'm not seeing the "newline" characters which are supposed to be printed since I specifically instruct the tokenizer to keep the "newline" delimeters. That could mean only one thing...The stream iterator is eating up the "\n"s. Ofcourse it is..duh..! Forgot the locales? So I changed to istreambuf_iterator which won't do any parental controls over the stream and show me everything...

{
std::ifstream ifile(filename.c_str());
std::istreambuf_iterator<char> file_iter(ifile);
std::istreambuf_iterator<char> end_of_stream;

typedef boost::tokenizer<boost::char_separator<char>,
std::istreambuf_iterator<char> >
tokenizer;

boost::char_separator<char> sep("\t, ", "\n");

tokenizer tokens(file_iter,end_of_stream, sep);

for (tokenizer::iterator tok_iter = tokens.begin();
tok_iter != tokens.end(); ++tok_iter)
std::cout << "<" << *tok_iter << "> ";
}

I got what I wanted. A token parser which could parse a stream. Now the stream could be any stream and it will work. And yeah...it takes only few seconds to compile this program and building the lookup table is actually faster than the statically populated version ( because of all the temporary storage the compiler has to allocate and deallocate in the static version ) .

Firefox speedup

I have a cable modem with the screaming download rate. My machine is also have 2Gig of RAM for the firefox to hog. Still I found the pages taking their own time to load. With some help from google I changed some of the configuration in firefox. Type about:config in the address bar. I change the following setting and the changed values are shown.

network.http.pipelining true
network.http.proxy.pipelining true
network.http.max-connections 64
network.http.max-connections-per-server 32
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 12
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 6

After this most of the pages load in a flash. Ofcourse these settings are not for everybody. I have the CPU and memory to live with this setting. It may or may not work for you. So use it with caution.

Is it a 'char' or 'unsigned char' or 'signed char'?

I inherited a overly-loaded code something like this...

void func(boost::int8_t p)
{
std::cout << "boost::int8_t" << std::endl;
}
void func(boost::uint8_t p)
{
std::cout << "boost::uint8_t" << std::endl;
}
void f1(boost::int16_t s)
{
std::cout << "boost::int16_t" << std::endl;
}
void f1(boost::uint16_t s)
{
std::cout << "boost::uint16_t" << std::endl;
}
main()
{
short sh;
char c;
f1(sh);
func(c);
}

I tried to compile the above code but the compiler is refusing to proceed balking at "func(c)", while it is completely happy with f1(sh). For the uninitiated boost types are typedef-ed to the appropriate platform types like int8_t -> signed char uint8_t -> unsigned char.

It turned out that the language does not specify whether variables of type char are signed or unsigned quantities. So the compiler complains about the func(c) call because it is ambiguous. Whereas f1(sh) succeeds.

Changind the "char c" to "unsigned char" or "signed char" resolves the ambiguity and calms down the compiler. Curiously even forcing the compiler with -funsigned-char didn't help in this case.

Well my philosophy of solving any problem by an extra level of indirection also didn't work. I tried something like this...

template
void func_char_resolver(T c);

template<>
void func_char_resolver(boost::int8_t c) { /// dealing with singed char....
}

template<>
void func_char_resolver(boost::uint8_t c) { /// dealing with unsinged char....
}
void func(char c)
{
func_char_resolver(c);
}

I don't know may be because `char' is a distinct type (of undefined sign) hence none of the specializations matched. Oh well!

ssh error in locking authority file!

While ssh-ing to one of my remote machines I got this error and X forwarding kept failing because of thsi.

/usr/bin/X11/xauth: error in locking authority file

Who would have guessed the problem? I'm running out of my disk quota! It is a weird way of warning about quota over run! 'quota -v' did confirm the theory and after killing few MB's the problem indeed go away!

Problems with X11 Composite Extension

When I enabled trancelucency in my KDE the composite manager crashed with the
message asking to insert the following lines in xorg.conf.

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

And so I did and forgot about it for a week. Last week when I tried to launch
gnucash it wouldn't . It cried something like this.

-------
Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkwindow.c: line 1406 (gdk_window_get_visual):
assertion `window != NULL' failed.

Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkcolor.c: line 57 (gdk_colormap_new): assertion
`visual != NULL' failed.
SESSION_MANAGER=tcp/pdm1:53739

Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkwindow.c: line 1406 (gdk_window_get_visual):
assertion `window != NULL' failed.

Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkcolor.c: line 57 (gdk_colormap_new): assertion
`visual != NULL' failed.
Gdk-ERROR **: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
serial 47 error_code 9 request_code 132 minor_code 5
Gdk-ERROR **: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
serial 48 error_code 9 request_code 55 minor_code 0
--------

I thought one of yum update screwed it up. So I looked through the recent
update logs and couldn't find anything remotely connected to gnucash , X11,
gdk or my window manager. Frustrated like hell I stopped thinking about this
problem. I couldn't do my accounting for a week!

It wasn't until I tried to launch one more app which failed with the same
exception. I then started digging deep and found that the culprit was the
Composite extension option. So I disabled the following from xorg.conf

#Section "Extensions"
#Option "Composite" "Enable"
#EndSection

and yes I did my accounts immediately!

Kerberos on 64bit Linux with gcc 4.0

I was trying to compile kerberos on a 64 bit linux (CentOS). First I was getting configure errors about res_search(). Then I downloaded the latest and the greatest v5-1.5.1 from mit and tried to compile with gcc version 4.0. First the configure script was using the old compiler. So I need to teach it to use the gcc4. So I did...

export CC=gcc4
export CXX=g++4

After this configure script went fine. But the compilation was producing some errors like the following in the kadmin/test directory.

tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:85: `Tcl_HashEntry' undeclared (first use in this function)
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:85: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:85: for each function it appears in.)
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:85: `entry' undeclared (first use in this function)
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:93: warning: implicit declaration of function `Tcl_InitHashTable'
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:93: `TCL_STRING_KEYS' undeclared (first use in this function)
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:105: warning: implicit declaration of function`Tcl_CreateHashEntry'
tcl_ovsec_kadm.c:109: warning: implicit declaration of function `Tcl_SetHashValue'

Looks like I'm not alone -> http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/kerberos/2004-September/006391.html
So I followed it faitfully like this and everything went fine.

./configure --prefix=/home/test/krb5 --without-tcl