February 13, 2007 in the early evening
· Filed under CLI, burn DVD, cdrecord, centos, linux
I has been using xcdroast to burn system backups to DVD for archiving purpose. The support of DVD burning is provided by ProDVD and the latter required its free key renewed every so often. Yesterday I was told the key expired again. As usually, I retrieved the README file off Helmut Jarausch, the author’s site. Surprisingly, no more new keys found in the file. The DVD support has been contributed to the open source project under CDDL since last May (I really needs to read Slashdot or get out more often). After some mucking, I couldn’t use xcdroast to burn DVD under CentOS 4. Read the rest of this entry »
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February 12, 2007 late at night
· Filed under CLI, DST changes, centos, command line, fedora core linux, linux
As early as 2005, tzdata package on Linux had been updated to accommodate the coming DST changes in North America passed by US Congress in 2004. For example, CentOS 4 (RHEL 4) has such applied changes in its 2005m version of tzdata package. For your convenience, I compiled locally on this site a list of tzdata RPM packages for various RHEL/RHL/CentOS/Fedora Core linux.
For ease of mind, it’d be nice to verify the tzdata is indeed effective for the proposed DST changes on mission critical systems. Here is a simple harmless how-to for Linux taking advantage of the ubiquitous date command.
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February 1, 2007 around lunchtime
· Filed under CLI, HIDS, command line, fedora core linux, linux, mp3
My son scrubbed one of his favorite music CDs with his oily hands last night. Destruction by love 
I couldn’t play the CD for him on a regular CD player any more. In hope that I may have better luck extracting the audio tracks off the CD, I popped the CD into a Fedora Core Linux 6 desktop, to extract the audio tracks from the CD and convert them to MP3. Read the rest of this entry »
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February 1, 2007 around lunchtime
· Filed under CLI, command line, fedora core linux, linux, mp3, site_news
lame-3.97-1.i386.rpm, a new rpm, has been built and added to my little stash of useful RPMs for FC6 (Fedora Core Linux 6). As said by its RPM summary tag line, “LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder… but it’s the best.” I used it recently to convert WAV files to MP3. The WAV files resulted from extracting audio tracks off my son’s music CD. All from command-line. Here are the steps.
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January 20, 2007 around mid afternoon
· Filed under CLI, command line, unix, windows, windows 2003 server, windows xp
Being a unix- and linux-centric person, I have been spoiled by various useful small utilities. It’s a bit frustrating to find their Windows‘ counterparts, when I need to do some quick work on Microsoft Windows platforms (such as Windows XP or Windows Server 2003).
While studying for MCP 70-290 certification, I hold my nose and read the Microsoft’s self-study guide. Surprise, surprise! Once I RTFM (read the fine manual) line by line, I found them magical utilities. Some with different names, while some are just an oddly-named switch away. Read the rest of this entry »
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