diff -u --to-file=

This is dumb, but I am a dumb guy, so I find it useful.

I am always getting 'diff -u file1 file2' out of order... as in, sometimes I execute:

diff -u file1 file2, but what I really needed was: diff -u file2 file1

...

A way to make sure that you always get the result you want, independent of the order fed to diff is by using the '--to-file=' option.

diff -u --to-file=file1 file2

Gives me the results I want.

Like I said, dumb, but handy.

blog.the-silvas.com

Anyone that came to this blog from AmorisLove.com, I just want to let you know I have a new 'personal' blog (aka non-technical) at: http://blog.the-silvas.com (It runs on Google App Engine).

Using Sysctl To Change Kernel Tunables On Linux

Read Article

Fedora 10 will be called 'Cambridge'

Check out the results. This is the first time I've participating on voting for a release name. I had voted for Water, Nile and Cambridge (I think)... which ended up being on the top 5 picks.

Fedora 9 keeps erasing my iPod Classic

My iPod Classic gets mounted perfectly under Fedora, I can go through my playlist on Rhythmbox, and even play my music while mounted (Yeah, I have gstreamer-plugins-{bad,ugly} installed).

Yet, every time I unmount my iPod, and look back at the contents within it, everything is wiped out. I am not even able to remount it on itunes without restoring the whole device.

A bit annoying to say the least.

Photography: Noah Kalina's 'Labs at Night'

I found this gallery on my friend's Jeff Parmer's Blog. Fantastic work.

Fix for Picasa 2.7 on Fedora Linux 9

Thanks Andrew Sullivan for your comment on my post about the Picasa 2.7 problem on Fedora 9.

The solution is listed at: http://wiki.winehq.org/PreloaderPageZeroProblem

One caveat though, I had to:

rm -rf ~/.picasa 

after doing the fix above for it to work.

Michael Hughes' Souvenirs Photos

This is just cool: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michael_hughes/sets/346406/

Anatomy of Linux loadable kernel modules

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Use Your Browser to Edit Any Live Web Page Using a Single Line of JavaScript

Paste the line below into the address bar of your browser with whatever site you want to play with loaded:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Source: http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/07/20/browser-edit-web-page-single-line-javascript/

Cleaning up photos on Mac OS X

1. A shell scripts to copy just my JPEGs from my $BACKUP_LOCATION to a single unified $FINAL_DESTINATION:

#! /usr/bin/ksh

cd $FINAL_DESTINATION
find  $BACKUP_LOCATION -name "*.jpg" | while read line
do
  p=$(dirname "$line" )
  p1=$(echo $p | sed 's/\///')
  echo "$p1"
  mkdir -p "$p1"
  cd "$p1"
  tocopy=$(pwd)
  echo $tocopy
  cp "$line" "$tocopy"
  cd -
done

Source: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/65013-find-copy-files-absolute-path.html - I added the extra double quotes (") to make sure it works with paths that contains spaces.

2. Imported all my photos from $FINAL_DESTINATION into iPhoto (under 1 single Library).

3. Currently using: Duplicate Annihilator to eliminate my duplicates -- Yup, I know, I could have written something myself, but then again I have better things to do with my life :-)

Doesn't BoA like x86_64 Linux clients?

When I try to login to Bank of America's online banking on my Macbook Pro using Fedora x86_64, I get the following error:



It happens on Opera 9.51 and Firefox 3. It doesn't happen on Fedora i386, nor on Mac OS X.

A 'piece of flair' for Linux lovers...

I grabbed this from the 'pieces of flair' application from facebook. I found it to be kinda funny. Good job to the artist. :-)

I finally found a Photo Editor on Fedora that I like...

* The combination of DigiKam + showFoto is great! I had tried DigiKam before, but never really tried to edit a photo with it. Very cool.



Here's a photo treated with showFoto:



* f-spot (as of yesterday) was crashing, and it's too slow IMHO.

* Picasa isn't Open Source, uses WINE, and even though I do like it, it stopped working on Fedora 9 as of recent.

Introduction to awk

Read the Article.

Picasa 2.7 stopped working on Fedora

Sometime within the past 2 weeks, Picasa 2.7 for Linux stopped working on Fedora 9. I've uninstalled the RPM, I've removed ~/.picasa, and no luck.

Here is my error:

[ansilva@f9-mbp ~]$ picasa
/usr/bin/picasa: line 139: 17614 Segmentation fault "$PIC_BINDIR"/wrapper check_dir.exe.so
/usr/bin/picasa: line 175: 17722 Segmentation fault "$PIC_BINDIR/wrapper" regedit /E $registry_export HKEY_USERS\\S-1-5-4\\Software\\Google\\Picasa\\Picasa2\\Preferences\\


Any suggestions on a fix would be appreciated.

AS

Giving Lulu.com a shot

A couple of years ago I put together a little booklet with some photos and poems of mine. I called it 'Photography & Poetry' and used iPhoto to publish it. I made a few copies for some family members, and made a PDF of it available online.

This morning I took some time off to put together a new book, although this time I was a bit more ambitious about it. Instead of using iPhoto-for-family-only, I went with lulu.com for publishing and selling the work.

It's nothing that special, just personal thoughts in verses, and some of my favorite photos I've taken in the past 2 years. Check it out.

What I like most about this little book is that all my photography is done with a Samsung NV10 (or NV11) point 'n shoot camera. Some people don't believe me.

Google's Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Macs stopped working

Sometime during the past week or so, my Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Macs stopped working. When I try to upload photos to my Picasa Album from iPhoto, it dies complaining about an incorrect MIME-Type.

I didn't see anything on their blog about it either. I hope it's not just me, I've ever re-installed the application.

I was able to upload the pictures via Picasa2 for Windows (yuk!)

AS

Update: As of July 13th, my iPhoto is exporting to Picasa Web Albums again.

Sales Guy vs Web Dude (Youtube)

I can't get enough of this video.

I like 'Cheese'

Since I've gotten Fedora 9 running on my MBP, I wanted some little application to use my iSight camera with. I knew it worked with Skype, but I wanted something like Apple's Photobooth. Well, I found Cheese... it's actually pretty awesome, I like it better than Photobooth.



Open up your terminal and run:

yum install cheese