Kammo’s Tech Blog

Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want.

I’m excited to be participating in the 2009 Outrun the Sun Race Against Melanoma in Indianapolis on Saturday, June 6. You can share in the excitement by helping support my involvement in this important initiative. All you need to do is log on to my personal fundraising page to learn more about melanoma education and research. It’s easy!

Please forward this email to anyone in your address book that you feel would want to help in such a generous cause!

Did you know:
Melanoma affects people of every age and every ethnicity?
Melanoma is the number one cancer in people ages 25-29?
One American dies of melanoma nearly every hour?

All gifts are important, welcome and appreciated! Thanks very much for your help.

Protect your skin. Protect yourself. Protect your life.

Follow This Link to visit my personal web page and help me in my efforts to support Outrun the Sun, Inc.

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Some email systems do not support the use of links and therefore this link may not appear to work. If so, copy and paste the following into your browser:
http://raceagainstmelanoma.kintera.org/faf/r.asp?t=4&i=310059&u=310059-252960692
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Hope you enjoy these humorous commands. Go ahead and try them, they really do work.

% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% "How would you rate Quayle's incompetence?
Unmatched ".

% Unmatched ".
Unmatched ".

% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].

% ^How did the sex change operation go?^
Modifier failed.

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.

% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.

% sleep with me
bad character

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

% %blow
%blow: No such job.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink matter
matter: cannot create

If you are having issues mounting your ntfs partition you will need to add a couple of rpms to make it happen.

You will need these rpm’s installed to make it happen:

fuse, fuse-ntfs-3g, dkms, dkms-fuse

Before installing these you need to install dag’s rpm repo.  You can download the rpm for CentOS 5.* and RHEL 5.* here

Tip: Use wget from the directory you want to put the file in to download it so you don’t have to download locally then upload to your server.

install the rpm by issuing:

# rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Once rpmforge has been added to yum, install the ntfs rpm’s by issuing:

# yum install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g dkms dkms-fuse

That will install all the needed software to mount your NTFS volume in rw mode.

next find where the NTFS partition is:

# fdisk -l | grep -i ntfs
/dev/sdd1   *           1       60800   488375968+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Now that we know where the NTFS partition is, lets create a mount point.
# mkdir /mnt/ntfs

now lets mount it up:
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdd1 /mnt/ntfs

That should have your ntfs partition mounted to /mnt/ntfs

Change to the directory and list the contents:
# cd /mnt/ntfs
# ls

I purchased new JVC HDD camcorder over the weekend and took a couple test clips and found difficulties importing the videos over the firewire cable to my macbook in iMovie.  Plugging the video camera into the firewire port of my Macbook did nothing.  After some Googling I came to discover that the best way to import the videos is to actually use the USB port to do it.

The software needed is ffmpegX.  Download it, then copy the binary to your applications directory.  On your first launch, you will be prompted to get the encoders.  I downloaded the encoders into a newly created directory: /Library/Encoders.  Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the contents of the .zip file, click on the location buttons to tell the application where the encoders are.

Now lets look at the workflow:

1.  Plug camera into the usb port of your macbook, a new drive will appear on your desktop.

2.  copy the contents of the SD_Video folder to your mac excluding everything other than the *.MOD files.  (This means you want the .MOD files on your mac)

3.  Open ffmpegX

4.  Drag the video you want to import to ffmpegX

5.  Choose the video type you want to encode to (I like using DV, it makes bigger files, but is better quality IMO)

6.  Click the encode button.

7.  Repeat for all other video files you want to import.

8.  Open your video editing application (I use iMovie) and import the converted video file for editing.

That’s it!  Happy editing!

An ISO image is an archive file (disk image) of an optical disc using a conventional ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO. The name “ISO” is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but an ISO image can also contain UDF file system because UDF is backward-compatible to ISO 9660.

You can mount an ISO images via the loop device under Linux. It is possible to specify transfer functions (for encryption/decryption or other purposes) using loop device.

But, how do you mount an ISO image under Linux? You need to use mount command as follows:

Procedure to mount ISO images under Linux

1) You must login as a root user, if not root user then switch to root user using following command:
$ su -

2) Create the directory i.e. mount point:
# mkdir -p /mnt/disk

3) Use mount command as follows to mount iso file called disk1.iso:
# mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt/disk

4) Change directory to list files stored inside an ISO image:
# cd /mnt/disk
# ls -l

More about loop device

A loop device is a pseudo-device that makes a file accessible as a block device. Loop devices are often used for CD ISO images and floppy disc images. Mounting a file containing a filesystem via such a loop mount makes the files within that filesystem accessible. They appear in the mount point directory using above commands.

dd is a perfect tool for copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands. It can create exact CD-ROM ISO image.

This is useful for making backup as well as for hard drive installations require a working the use of ISO images.

How do I use dd command to create an ISO image?

Put CD into CDROM

Do not mount CD. Verify if cd is mounted or not with mount command:

# mount

If cd was mouted automatically unmout it with umount command:

# umount /dev/cdrom

OR

# umount /mnt/cdrom

Create CD-ROM ISO image with dd command:

# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/cdimg1.iso

Where,

• if=/dev/cdrom: Read from /dev/cdrom (raw format)
• of=/tmp/cdimg1.iso: write to FILE cdimg1.iso i.e. create an ISO image

Now you can use cdimg1.iso for hard disk installation or as a backup copy of cd. Please note that dd command is standard UNIX command and you should able to create backup/iso image under any UNIX like operating system.

I was sent this link today…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28039226/?pg=7#Tech_JerkGadgets

This is my response:
Linus is my homeboy. And yes, my mastery does excuse my “neck-beard”

I’m sick of how people complain about how hard Linux is. windows is just as hard… it’s just that people put forth the effort to learn it because “That’s what everyone uses”. They know windows and are comfortable with it and therefore Linux is too hard. OK, Linux may be a bit harder, but when it runs it runs… it doesn’t crap out for some unapparent reason like windows. it doesn’t get attacked by “In the wild” viruses. The only thing attacking it is script kiddies that think they’re hackers using a windows box. 99.99% of those attacks a so far from unsuccessful it’s ridiculous… the other 0.11% is an actual person that knows what they’re doing … probably using some attack application they wrote on a UNIX based system in perl, python or C.

if windows is so great, why is it that all the banking institutions run UNIX based servers for their highly sensitive transactions? why is it that the military servers run UNIX based servers? why is it that all your big phone systems have a UNIX based cluster under it? Wait they don’t I know of a particular one that was written on windows server 2003… and it crashes ALL the time, and they’re always chasing their tails trying to figure out why. at least Ma Bell knows better.

If UNIX/Linux breaks it’s because someone did something wrong or a piece of hardware actually failed and needs to be replaced… it doesn’t break “Just because it needs a reboot”.

I will be doing this on a Red Hat based distro, but should be very similar on a Debian or bsd style box.

First install mysql and mysql-server:
yum install mysql mysql-server

After the install has completed, start mysqld:
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

After that you need to login and set a root password. (It is BLANK by default)
mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

I would recommend changing ‘new-password’ to something you are not using anywhere else and not the one you are planning on using as the actual root password since this command can be viewed in the bash history and anyone with access to your box can read your shell history.

The next step is to login to the console and change it to what you want it to actually be. This step will not record the password in the shell history.

Login to mysql with the following command:
mysql -h localhost -u root -p

Don’t put the password after -p, if you do it will be recorded in the shell history. If you leave off the -p it will error saying no password used. Enter the command as above and it will prompt you for the password.

Now lets update the password:
mysql> USE mysql;
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('new-password') WHERE user='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now you can either go forth and set other user accounts from here or simply type ‘exit’ to exit the command line interface. If you have installed phpmyadmin or mysqllcc, or any other of the mysql admin tools, you may also go now and use those to do your db administration.

If you are running Cisco’s VPNClient on Mac OSX, you might be familiar with (or tormented by) “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem”. The simple fix is to quit VPNClient, open a Terminal window, (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type the following:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

and give your password when it asks. This will stop and start the “VPN Subsystem”, or in other words restart the CiscoVPN.kext extension. Cisco seems to have problems when network adapters disappear and reappear, something that happens commonly in Wireless or Dial-up scenerios. Sometimes putting a system to sleep, disconnecting an Ethernet cable or simply reconnecting your wireless will cause CiscoVPN to loose track of the network adapters on the system. Considering that CiscoVPN is typically used by telecommuters, this is an astonishing oversight on Cisco’s part. The above hack should side-step all of these issues by causing the CiscoVPN to re-initialize. It makes one ask, why couldn’t Cisco have just put the restart into their client? Or a better idea would be to not reinvent the wheel and use the existing IPSec VPN support in OSX! Am I missing something?