June 2009 - main - earth.li

Face Recognition
by Mark Rogers 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

On the back of a bus I saw an advert for the Apple Mac talking about its ability to use face recognition when processing photos. Is there anything like this in Linux? It looks like Google had it planned for Picasa back in 2006: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/better-way-to-organize-photos.html .. but as far as I know it's not there yet? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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How things have changed
by Steve Fosdick 10 Jul '09

10 Jul '09

I've just bought a couple of new bits of hardware and was very pleasantly surprised how things have changed for the better. I got a wireless trackerball and a UPS both with USB connections. I plugged the trackerball receiver in, pressed the connect button and it started working. That wasn't a great surprise but obviously nice. I plugged the UPS in and, before I had a chance to check that it had been detected and then look for software for it an icon appeared telling me the UPS was fully charged and also reporting on the batteries in the wireless trackerball. For simplicity this beats having to install software from an accompanying CD in order to get the same features. It seems when manufacturers adopt standard protocols or are more open about the protocols and interfaces they do use the pace of development increases dramatically. Steve.

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xsession-errors again...help!
by Peter Alcibiades 28 Jun '09

28 Jun '09

My xsession-errors file is filling up with a constant stream of messages like this: Cannot index Thunderbird contacts because a Beagle.Util.InvalidMorkDatabaseException was thrown: This file is missing a valid mork header Could not read Pidgin buddy list file: Document element did not appear. file:///home/peter/.purple/blist.xml Line 1, position 1. And yet I have neither Thunderbird nor Pidgin installed. Nor the Debian equivalent, icedove. How to stop this stuff? In desperation I tried installing them and then doing completely remove. Is this something to do with Mozilla, that Firefox aka Iceweasel demands that you have this other stuff installed and configured with addresses? Why? Is the solution maybe to just get rid of Firefox and go to Konqueror - which I have done for one other person, on account of the impossibility of printing properly? Or any other suggestions? Al

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Identica/Twitter
by steveydoteu 21 Jun '09

21 Jun '09

I am looking for means of posting to both at the same time. For example if I post on Twitter, it also reposts to Identica. I know that Identica offers this feature, but as of yet I have not found a means of doing so via Twitter. Any suggestions? Linux or Windows.

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http://identi.ca/group/alug
by steveydoteu 21 Jun '09

21 Jun '09

http://identi.ca/group/alug That is all. Just thought it wise to share with the list.

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A KDE 4 mystery
by Barry Samuels 20 Jun '09

20 Jun '09

I have just upgraded my laptop running Debian Testing/Squeeze. This caused KDE 3.5 to be replaced with KDE 4. I have set up 6 workspaces under KDE 4 and if I log out or shutdown and reboot then go back into KDE there is only one workspace shown. If I do the same again I go back to 6 workspaces - ad infinitum. Why should the number of workspaces alternate like that? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Handheld technological frontiers
by Richard Bensley 19 Jun '09

19 Jun '09

Check it out, copy and paste on the iPhone! Check it out, copy and paste on the iPhone! Check it out, copy and paste on the iPhone! Check it out, copy and paste on the iPhone! Check it out, copy and paste on the iPhone!

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Program to tail and highlight
by Jon Dye 18 Jun '09

18 Jun '09

Hi all, I'm currently tailing some log files so I can watch what's going on with a particular process. What I'd really like to do is to highlight particular matches in the file, preferably with different colours. Does anyone know of any command line applications that could do something like this? Thanks, JD

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DNS
by Mark Rogers 16 Jun '09

16 Jun '09

I've always shied away from running DNS for "real" customers, as it's such a critical part of the infrastructure and is easily managed by the domain registrar (usually 123-Reg). However, after a second DNS outage in 2 yrs at 123-Reg (which should be near impossible, as DNS is the one thing it is easy to make redundant) I've reached the point (again!) of considering running my own. I've always found configuring Bind to be, er, a bit of a bind, so are there any simpler options out there or should I just bite the bullet and install bind? What is the typical system overhead of running DNS - should I add it to my web/mail servers or should it be separate? It makes sense to use our (separate) web and mail servers, if only because if both of those are down then it doesn't really matter than DNS is down too! Requirements are to be able to handle domains and subdomains (ideally multi-level subdomains although we don't have that at the moment so I won't miss it), and wildcards, with A,CNAME and MX records. So pretty basic stuff. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] Gentoo kernel installation hangs while removing something under /var
by Jim Rippon 15 Jun '09

15 Jun '09

----- "Dan Hatton" <vi5u0-alug(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > > what size was the partition you had mounted? > > IIRC, 12GB, so not _that_ small. > That sounds like plenty - there may indeed be something else wrong. Were you using the stages from the CD or downloading them, and had you chrooted when you installed the kernel? > > I'm tempted to make /var/tmp/portage a symlink to something in the > root filesystem, then. Is there any reason that would be enormously > stupid? > I have never tried - if you haven't come across it already, gentoo-wiki.com is an excellent resource for particular system setups and packages - although I don't know whether this case would be on there. There is an article I came across with a quick search for using tmpfs (swapping RAM disk) for portage here http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Speeding_up_emerge_with_tmpfs It may be easier to configure portage to use a different location to extract/build packages - see man make.conf for details of how you can redirect this, or have a look through the portage section of the online docs http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3 Jim

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