log of Logfish.net

Doing small experiments with databases will almost always make your disk-activity led flicker like it needs to be replaced. However, all that disk activity is not needed as most computers nowadays have enough memory to store even a 100Mb of experimental random data.

Using a memory based SQLite database is not always doable as you may have to share it between different languages and processes. The easiest and most general solution is to create a small disk in memory which you can use to store whatever you want. Here is how...

There is a new page on logfish.net, a preview of TrueType fonts available in Ubuntu packages. The previews are pretty large and the whole page weighs in at about 7MB.
You can find it at: http://logfish.net/pr/ubuntufonts/

The Ubuntu MOTU team has brought out some video's on YouTube. Want to see geeks tell you about packaging? Here is how to download them all.

If you ever encounter one of those old APE files, you should consider either recoding it to FLAC or simply cut it up and put it into a lossy OGG container. Here I will go through the command-line steps to do that last option.

Say we start off with these files:

There are actually video's on YouTube which will guide you into becoming a Master of the Universe (in the sense of Ubuntu packaging that is) and you can download them by installing youtube-dl:
sudo aptitude install youtube-dl
and then downloading and executing the attached script. Happy viewing!

Running one of the usual autotools generated configure scripts, I came across this:

So I can actually support one million five hundred seventy two thousand eight hundred and sixty four command-line arguments on my 64 bit Linux. That rocks!

Hmm... I should definitely try to pass the Gutenberg project as a command-line argument to echo now.

If you want to turn of your computer form the command-line, doing a simple sudo sh -c 'poweroff' is nolonger really an option. The problem with this command is twofold: it will kill everything and you need root privileges for this.

If you want to turn of your computer without root privileges, you can do so using the privileges that gdm has (the login manager). If you are running a GNOME desktop you should use gnome-power-cmd.sh shutdown. You can give other commands to gnome-power-cmd.sh, running it without commands will tell you so.

The attached package contains the datafiles for lgeneral. They where created using the instructions from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=435317 and then packaged into a package. I don't think this is in anyway related to the platform, but if it doesn't work, try the ubuntuforums method (after uninstalling this package)

There is a new firewall, which is probably going to become the Ubuntu standard firewall configuration system. It's called ufw, which stand's for uncomplicated firewall. The script allows you to easily add rules to the already in kernel iptables firewall system and makes sure rules are saved and restored on reboot.

First install the firewall with:

You might also want to change /etc/default/ufw and add add the netbios_ns line so you can use samba:

Here is a list of things I had to do to try to get Panzer general 2 working with wine 0.9.59 on Ubuntu Hardy. However, in the end I could not get it to work and was told that this game has the same problems on Windows XP.

My last hope is to install Windows 98/95 in a virtual machine, but I think I might just have to mark this game as a victim of time.

If you find a solution or have anything else to add, feel free to comment on this post.