Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

How to Create CD-ROM Partitions on USB Flash Drives

Many recent flash drives such as Sandisk Cruzer come built in with a read-only CDROM-like partition which appears as a CD-ROM on the computer, and a second writable partition. It seems that this is something not done via software but must have support in hardware since presenting a device as a CD-ROM requires providing a different USB device flag. The tools are chipset specific and require a compatible flash drive/controller. Some more technical details appear here.

You can check this Russian site for full instructions and tools, or use this tool.

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Tags: cdrom, flash, usb —

Getting Flash to Work in Opera 9.64 and Ubuntu

The easiest way is to install the standard Debian 5.0 package instead of the Ubuntu-specific package. Full instructions can be found in Ubuntu Forums.

For the technical among you – there seems to be an issue with the statically linked package for Ubuntu. The dynamic package for Debian seems to work better.

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Tags: flash, opera, ubuntu —

Charlie the Groundhog

Charlie the Groundhog

Originally uploaded by netwizard

A groundhog has been attacking our garden for the past few weeks. After a call to the exterminator he has been finally caught. You can see it in the picture waiting to be transported out of the city.

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Google Base and Unicode

For quite some time, Google Base feeds for some of of my projects were either partially ingested or rejected out of hand with a message “Required attribute missing”. I ran xmllint and several online validation tools, and found nothing. But thanks to a Mac blog, I finally figured it out.

It seems that while officially Google Base supports Unicode and utf-8 encoding in XML feeds as stated here. they don’t support it fully. Apparently it seems that instead of taking plain UTF-8 text, Google Base requires it to be encoded at Unicode entities like &xxxx; where xxxx is the Unicode codepoint. This was originally found by this blogger.

The solution in XSLT at least is to use us-ascii encoding which forces entity creation. In Perl you can probably use Encode.pm or iconv.

Many thanks to Michael Fourman of the Mac Tips blog for this.

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Tags: google base, unicode, xslt —

Hard Cover Support Added for PublicDomainReprints.org

Over the weekend, I added hard cover support to PublicDomainReprints.org. All requests will now produce both soft and hard cover reprints.

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Tags: publicdomainreprints —

Updated Resume Posted

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.

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Tags: resume —

WordPress Auto-Update Feature and 1&1 Internet

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)

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Tags: 1and1, wordpress —

Low Resolution When Printing to PDF on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

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.

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Tags: cups, cups-pdf, jaunty, ubuntu —

Imeem.com Autoplay Does Not Work with OpenDNS

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.

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Tags: imeem, opendns —

Manipulating Files in the Cloud

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.

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Tags: amazon ec2, ec2 —