Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

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 —

Bugzilla

Bugzilla

Originally uploaded by netwizard

A creepy crawler recently sighted. Otherwise known as the house centipede or Scutigera coleoptrata.

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Turning Playlist.com into Podcasts and Playing Them on Cell Phones

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.

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Tags: playlist.com, podcasting, rss —

Deleting Amazon S3 Bucket with A Lot of Files

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;

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Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04

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.

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Tags: jaunty, ubuntu —

New Abuse Reporting Format Draft Posted

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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Tags: arf —

New Fees for Google Checkout

Google announced today changes to their fee structure for Google Checkout. The new fees bring their service in line with Amazon Payments and Paypal as seen in the chart below:

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: amazon, google, google checkout, paypal —

Chimneys and Five Corner Stars

Just something strange I saw on a drive this past week and thanks to the magic of Google Street view you can see it too. If you zoom in on the house below, you will see a five cornered star smack on the chimney. If anyone knows what it is for, leave a comment.

View Larger Map

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