ditoinfo in english

We all know wireless network hardware builders don’t like Linux much. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, making it work is usually a hassle, and if you got here, probably VMWare network isn’t going any good for you.

The problem is that bridged networking on VMWare (the best one for home use) requires the host’s network card to enter promiscuous mode. It is not something most Linux drivers do. You have 2 options, then: find out a way to make your card promiscuous (dirty jokes goes here) OR you use NAT networking. Much less trouble, works fine for basic Internet, but maybe can’t be used in some situations.

If you are a normal user without special needs, just try NAT network for your VMWare when you are using wireless.

I was building my slides for a speak I’ll make on this Sunday when I came to such a disappointment with OpenOffice that I had to scream! And I was searching for the adequade place to do it when I remembered of my blog. So forgive me for any english mistakes, but this post is being written on the heat of emotion (anger, by the way).

Turns out that, if you want to define a custom background for your slide on OpenOffice Impress, you have to create a bitmap fill, then, go to the master slide, and then select the bitmap you created before, and then close the master slide. Can you imagine something less obvious to do? I mean, on PowerPoint, all you have to do is to right-click your slide and select “Change Background” or something like that. On the window that opens you choose for a bitmap, a gradient, a color whatever you want, and even choose if it will apply to all slides or not.

The model chosen by OpenOffice developers is absolutely pathetic. I’m sorry guys, you have made a GREAT software on the overrall, but this is exactly the kind of thing that blocks new users. How on earth would a normal user find out how to place a custom background? “Look on the help files” ? Two things: It’s not there, I looked. And if I, who work with computer and tech support for more than 10 years, looked and could not find, what would you say of the average end user (grand-ma)? Even if it is there, average end users DON’T look on the help files. They don’t know it exists. I’m serious. As I said, I work with tech support and you would be amazed the number of people to whom I’ve shown the help files and say “WOW! If I ever knew there was such a thing!”.

So, I’m not sorry for being angry, because it’s an absolutely ridiculous approach and I need to scream this aloud! MAKE IT SIMPLE FOR GOD’S SAKE! You’ll never beat MS Office working this way.

By the way, here is the procedure:

1) Go to Format / Area (Yes, believe me! We start going to “Format Area” )

2) Choose BITMAPS on the window and click the Import button

3) Name your imported bitmap

4) Go to View / Master / Slide Master (Shouldn’t it be Master Slide?)

5) Right click on a free area of the slide and go to Slide / Page Setup

6) On the background tab, choose bitmaps from the drop-down menu and select your previously created bitmap.

7) Find a way to tell OO developers that it is a terrible way to select a background.

I’m starting to like this new layout. I believe it to be much more beautiful than the previous one. You should be proud of yourself of being part a small club of people who read this article. If you really want ( ), you can leave a comment here and tell what’d you think.

Sometimes, you will want to save a picture of a movie scene. Say, you are watching a screencast, and want to save a picture of the piece of code on screen now. You then find out that PrintScreen has no use for videos. Or you may be watching a fast scene, with lot’s of information and you would like to see each frame carefully.

You can save each frame of a video to a series of PNG or JPEG files using mplayer. It’s quite simple.

First, create a directory for the pngs to be saved on. Say, /home/<you>/pngs

Get into that directory

type this command:
mplayer -vo png -ss 00:02:37 -endpos 67 /path/to/movie.avi

The -ss and -endpos parameters tell mplayer where to start playing inside a movie, and when to stop. you see, it’s quite unlikely you would want to convert an ENTIRE screencast to png. So, just take a note of the time the scene shows up (2 minutes and 37 seconds after start of movie on my example) and how long do you want to record (67 seconds for me). Every frame on this interval will be saved to 0000001.png, 0000002.png on your current folder.

Hope this helps someone.

Best

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Well, I have to share this one:

It’s damn simple, so of course I couldn’t find it. It was my girlfriend, Lívia, who doesn’t use computers more than the strictly necessary. She was on a Cyber Cafe and had to type her CPF (Something like USA Social Security Number) on a form. Then she found that her number was saved on the autocompletion “feature” of IE. She did the first thing she thought of: select the number and pressed DELETE. Yes, delete on the keyboard, or DEL in some.

Just too simple for someone who works with computers find out. I was wondering things like check the registry or clear all items through the Options Dialog. But no. Just press DELETE.

Thanks, Livia!

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This guy has made a fine selection of plugins for gedit (yes, gedit) to make it look like TextMate, the dream of every Rails developer not working on a Mac. So, take a look. I have installed everything and will try out today.

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Everyone who build software (like me) hates this, but every system is going to be used by people. By humans. So, we have to deal with the human factor. I came upon Phira’s Blog, where phiras presents us with a great algorithm to measure password strength. He gives points to certains characteristics of the password. Here’s the link. Worth a look.

OK, no flame wars, please, but fact is: I like VIM. So, I wanted one of these days, to send e-mails through it, since I read on Richard Stallman’s website that he uses e-macs to read and send e-mails. Well, can’t vim do that?

In fact it can. But I don’t use normal e-mail providers, so no POP3 or IMAP for me (you can use this plugin if you have a SMTP, IMAP/POP3 account).

For GMail, I came upon this wonderfull piece of code on DJCraven blog. It allows me to send the content of the current buffer as an e-mail to the person you specify on the GMSend vim command. The first line is treated as the Subject. So, you type your message, :GMSend someone@somewhere.com and voilá!

That’s what the e-mail was ment to be!

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Sometimes you just run a command people on websites ask you to. Well, you actually won’t do something like “rm -Rf /”, but you will  follow some apt-gets for example. I did this today, and ended up with a system that did not play any video (the site was explaining to me how to convert FLV to AVI – I can’t do that yet). So, I messed it up. But how to undo the changes?

Fortunatelly, DPKG (wich apt-get uses under the hood) mantains a log of it’s works. It’s right there at /var/log/dpkg.log

Good lines to look at are those wich the first word after date/time is INSTALL. It says that you (or apt-get) requested to install that particular package.

I’m trying to undo my mess here!

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Rails 1.2 came with great new features. One of them was the REST able applications. Other was the ability to serve results based on how the request was made. So you could send different results for controller/action.html, controller/action.xml or contoller/action.rss, for example. This one came with a price though: If you had any routes on your site that uses a dot (“.”), it will not work on rails 1.2.

Why is that? Well, the dot “.” is now a route separator, just like the slash “/”. But, of course, there’s a way to work around it if you don’t plan to use the dot for specific actions. Just place a :requirements => {:yourparam => /.*/} to your routes.rb. Here is an example:

Before:

# Here I could use an username like “john.smith” or “lys.cohen”, but not on Rails 1.2
map.connect “books/feed/:username”, {:controller => :book, :action => :book_feed}
After Rails 1.2:

# Now it works on Rails 1.2
map.connect “books/feed/:username”, {:controller => :book, :action => :book_feed, :requirements => { :username => /.*/}}

It worked great for me. And, best of all, it does not break the functionality, so you can use dots as they are intended to be used on other controllers and even actions on the same controller.

This tip was extracted from TextDrive Forums