I recently got a new work PC and was worried that stuck somewhere in the 40G hard drive of the old PC was something I would one day need. The new PC had 300G of space so I figured I would just copy the entire drive over and keep it forever. This isn't the most difficult task in the world and I actually started out using ssh to transfer the image.

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After multiple attempts to find a good free diagraming application I think I have found a decent solution. I'm not creating enough diagrams to justify buying something expensive and I don't feel like finding a graphics designer to make Dia diagrams prettier. If you have a Mac you are probably not in as bad a situation since you can buy OmniGraffle for $79. But for those of us without a Mac or who are just very cheap I think the best solution starts with Inkscape. I've put together a list of 10 tips that will help make better looking diagrams with Inkscape.

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I broke down and wanted to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on my FC6 box to replace xpdf. After installing it from the tar.gz version the acroread startup script bombed out with the error: expr substr 2400000000000 1

After a little searching I didn't find much help so I started looking at the script myself to see if I could track down the problem. It turns out that it wasn't that hard to fix. First off the script file was located at: /usr/bin/acroread

Open the script file and find the function named "check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path". This is the location of the first error you will hit. To fix the error you will need to change:

to

You will find this two places and it needs to be changed in both. If you don't notice the 2nd place it is right after the first in a loop:

The second problem you will have is located in the function "get_gtk_file_ver". Find this function and change the following line:

to

Now you should be able to run acroread without errors.

Tags: acroread, fedora, script

Some time ago Oracle introduced their Instant Client as an alternative to needing a full install of the Oracle client to run your own apps or SQLPlus. I've been putting the Instant Client to good use these days and figured I would give a quick howto on getting it set up.

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I've been playing around with the EC2 service at Amazon and figured I would document a little about how you create your own FC6 AMI. The Amazon documentation goes over everything you need to know about creating your own FC4 AMI and if you don't want to roll your own you can use one of the public AMIs. Amazon just started letting people publish their own AMIs on their site so you should expect to see more as time goes by.

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After reading a post on hacking Akismet to add graphs I decided I liked the idea but I didn't want to store the data in a database. It seemed like it would be better to store it using a RRD and then use the PHP RRD library. So after a little hacking I've created a version that does basically the same thing except uses a RRD.

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Now that you can create a streaming Flash video player with PHP or Ruby and you know add metadata for cuepoints to Flash videos you are ready for something else. The following code will show you how to create a video player with PHP that will watch for metadata events and display annotations contained inside the metadata either over the video itself or in a div on the same page as the movie.
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Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add metadata to your FLV files using flvtool2 and how it is useful for adding cue-points.
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I mentioned in creating Flash videos using FFMpeg that you could use Ming to create your own Flash video player. I've added a patch to the ruby -ming extension for video streaming so now it is possible to create a streaming player with both PHP and Ruby using their Ming extensions. The following examples show you how.
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After playing with the Ruby Ming extension a little more I found that they don't have support for SWFVideoStreams so I made a patch to add it. The patch also fixes the beta issues I described in building the ming ruby extension.
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