Archive for command line

how to verify readiness on Linux for DST change in North America

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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how to extract audio tracks from a CD and convert to MP3 under FC6

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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new : lame rpm added for FC6 (Fedora Core Linux 6)

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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tip : what connects to 216.49.88.156 at tcp/80 and why

When I wrote about windows counterparts for useful UNIX/Linux utilites, I found an unexpected TCP connection to 216.49.88.156:80 on my home computer running Windows XP SP2. Running netstat with the magic ‘-b’ switch revealed the connection was used by MpfTray.exe, which is the systray application for Mcafee Security Center.

TCP 10.1.1.8:2133 216.49.88.156:80 ESTABLISHED 1524 [MpfTray.exe] Read the rest of this entry »

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Windows CLI utilities are odd but not bad (part I)

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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