To share a (usb-attached) printer between Ubuntu machines, do the following:

1. See if your scanner is recognised: sudo scanimage -L
   For me the output is device `hpaio:/usb/Deskjet_F2100_series?serial=CN82C4Q4V304TK’ is a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet_F2100_series all-in-one
2. Add yourself to the saned user group: sudo usermod -a -G saned `whoami`
3. Modify /etc/sane.d/saned.conf to include your subnet (for me it’s 192.168.1.0/24)
4. Confirm that the service port is open: cat /etc/services|grep sane
   Your output should be something like this:
   sane-port 6566/tcp sane saned # SANE network scanner daemon
5. Uncomment the relevant line in /etc/inetd.conf:
   sane-port stream tcp nowait saned:saned /usr/sbin/saned saned

Finally, on the clients, add the server’s ip address (or hostname, if you have populated your /etc/hosts file) to the file /etc/sane.d/net.conf

References:

• http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/57798
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ScanningHowTo

The film & music industries have little fantasy, arguing with ISPs about illegal file sharing, who’s responsible etc.

They could simply
1) push for universal IPv6 adoption, thus eliminating the problem of matching IP addresses to computers;
2) then just ask the ISP (with a judge’s warrant) to reveal the location of the computer;
3) seize the offending computer;
4) finally, see which user created the illegally shared file!

I have to admit I can see a few problems with this approach, but nothing that a lot of money can’t solve:
a. Downloading is not (yet) illegal, sharing is. So what if the user who downloaded a file is not the same one that shared it?
b. What about mobile users? Their (our) numbers are increasing!
c. If IPv6 addresses are assigned (sold?) to single, identifiable users, would that partially elliminate step 2 and issue b. above?
d. What if IPv6 spoofing became technically possible?

Google provides a public DNS service at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, which can be useful if your browser stays for many many seconds at “resolving host” (like is happening to me now in my hotel room)…

Reference: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Even when building small packages, it’s easy to miss the useful warnings/errors in the whole river of output of ‘make’. A simple tool that helps improve the situation is colorgcc, a perl script written by Jamie Moyers that is so well-written that it hasn’t been updated in 10 years!!!

Just sudo aptitude install colorgcc, then create symbolic links like this:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc /usr/local/bin/gcc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc /usr/local/bin/g++
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc /usr/local/bin/cc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc /usr/local/bin/c++

Finally, do sudo ldconfig after making sure that /usr/local/bin is included in your path.

Here’s a few url’s for search engines to be used with Google Chromium:

• enwiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
• gmaps: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=%s
• yt: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
• imdb: http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
• fb: http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=%s
• dict: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%s
• wrenit: http://www.wordreference.com/enit/%s

I knew how to use autotools (./configure, make, sudo make install), but never really had the time to understand how everything works under the hood and how to tweak it. So here I go:

./bootstrap will (usually) do 5 things for you:

1. aclocal will read configure.ac and generate aclocal.m4
2. autoconf will read configure.ac and generate configure
3. autoheader will read configure.ac and generate config.h.in
4. libtoolize ???
5. automake will read Makefile.am and generate Makefile.in

Then ./configure will create the config.h and Makefile

I was getting the following error message:

bash: ./configure: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied

The solution was to add the exec parameter to the appropriate filesystem’s mount options in /etc/fstab

A very useful tool if you work often on the terminal: cdargs.

After installing, add this line to your .bashrc:

source /usr/share/doc/cdargs/examples/cdargs-bash.sh

Reference: http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/114073

Was reading earlier about USPTO patent 7617530, which is Microsoft’s patent of the sudo command behaviour. A few questions came to my mind:

1. Is it really possible that Microsoft didn’t know about sudo?
2. Did the USPTO officer do ANY research before granting the patent?
3. Is there any punishment for companies that try to patent stuff that they demonstrably know already exists in competitors’ systems?
4. Is there any punishment for patent officers who wrongfully approve patents?
5. Does the USPTO have any incentive to try and remedy this?

Reference: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111094923390

Downloading the video from the Panasonic NV-GS60 videocamera. You can connect it either with a USB or with a FireWire cable. However, while over FireWire you get 720×576@25fps, when using USB the camera goes into “webcam mode” and you get 320×240@6fps (which is 95% lower quality)!!!

After connecting with FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE-1394), use Kino (as a frontend to dvgrab) to download the video onto your computer. Kino will control the videocamera (rewind, start, stop, etc). While downloading, the videocamera is playing back (on its display and speaker) the video, which can be annoying. Fortunately, you can close the screen and mute the speaker, without any effect on the downloaded video…

A small annoyance: normally kino gives you an error in the status bar “raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394“. You need to manually modprobe raw1394, and to run kino as root!

The output is a collection of .dv files.