Personal Website of Yakov ShafranovichShafTek.org = SHAFranovich TECHnologies |
Over the last few days I completely redid my resume. Last time it has been edited was over 5 years ago. The newly minted version is available right here. If you know of any consulting/employment opportunities, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Wordpress v2.7 comes with a feature that allows plugins and the program itself to be updated within the web interface. However, I was never able to get it to work until I happen to see the following instructions at the Wordpress Codex:
1and1 (fails running PHP 4, but works with PHP 5. Add the line: AddType x-mapp-php5 .php to the file .htaccess in your main wordpress directory to enable PHP 5. This also appears to not only affect Core updates but some Plugin updates as well.)
(Something about many eyeballs and bugs rings a bill here)
Recently, after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) from 8.10 (Intrepid) I noticed that PDF files produced via the “Print” command in various programs (similar to Adobe Distiller) produces very low resolution files and renders all text into images. It turns out to be a bug in CUPS-PDF, which is the package handling that functionality in Ubuntu. For some reason, the pdftops filter in cups got replace, you can get a fixed version here. Hopefully, a fixed package will be reduced soon.
While using Imeem.com, a free music streaming site, I noticed that the autoplay feature in their playlist as well as autosuggest were not working. It turns out that Imeem requires “ads.imeem.com” domain name to be accessable. At the same time OpenDNS is blocking that domain because of adware. I sent in a report to OpenDNS to alert them regarding this issue.
A few days ago I got to the see the power of cloud computing up close and personal. Someone had a large amount of files already stored in Amazon S3 which needed to be combined with another large set of files. The problem was that my desktop could do it but it would take forever to download and upload. The solution: one EC2 instance of stock Ubuntu 9.04 running for about 15-20 minutes. Download the files with s3cmd, rename using shell scripts, combine and reupload.
A creepy crawler recently sighted. Otherwise known as the house centipede or Scutigera coleoptrata.
PlayList.com is a website that allows anyone to put together a playlist of their music and then share it via their Facebook/Myspace/etc page via an embedded flash Playlist. A nifty hack allows you to play a PlayList.com as a podcast or even via a cell phone.
1. Transform PlayList.com’s ASX playlist into Podcast RSS via this link:
http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/xslt?xslfile=http://www.shaftek.org/code/asx2rss/asx2rss.xsl&xmlfile=http://www.playlist.com/playlist/XXXXXXXX/asx
Where XXXXXXX is the Playlist.com user ID.
2. Use the resulting postcast with your podcatcher, or mobile phone. Or even cooler, use PodLinez.com or FoneShow to listen over a regular phone.
DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any illegal behavior that results. You should keep in mind that PlayList.com may be indexing illegal music which you will end up downloading via the podcast RSS. It is your responsiblity to check.
Here is a short script that can mass delete files in an Amazon S3 bucket. It is limited to a 1,000 keys at a time:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Amazon::S3;
my $s3 = Net::Amazon::S3->new(
{ aws_access_key_id => 'ACCESS_ID',
aws_secret_access_key => 'ACCESS_KEY',
retry => 1,
}
);
my $bucket = $s3->bucket("BUCKET") or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr;
my $response = $bucket->list or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr;
foreach my $key (@{$response->{keys}}) {
my $key_name = $key->{key};
print "Deleting '$key_name'\n";
$bucket->delete_key($key_name) or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr;
}
exit;
Just some notes from my upgrade today. I upgraded from 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) to 9.04 (Jaunty). When the computer rebooted, and started X, the keyboard and mouse would not work. It seems that the HAL daemon failed on startup with a segfault. Upon further digging, it seems that this is a known bug caused by compatability issue between HAL and software RAID. A temporary fix is provided by Chris Coulson here.
Large memory support/PAE is still not present in the desktop version. The server kernel boots but freezes 2 minutes after login.
Murray Kucherawy of SendMail has kindly taken over the editing of my ARF drafts. He just posted another version (-07), which you can find here. You can find all previous versions here.
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