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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Your Bookmarks are auto-backed up in SeaMonkey! (and maybe FireFox?)

I started the stock SeaMonkey browser by mistake as my Unity icons disappeared (i.e. seamonkey as is on my command line started /usr/bin/seamonkey which is not the correct version!) This had several bad side effects. For of all, it destroyed my bookmarks (argh!) and then it decided to install the 64bit Flash plugin. That did not work well since the version I like is a 32bit version.

Once I had the correct version started again, each time it was trying to open a Flash animation, it would be "stuck" for a few minutes, until I tried to open a page with a movie in a Flash shell. That ...

MS-Access has forms, but no real means to know whether a form exists. It looks like you could go through the list of forms (Forms.item(i)) but I'm not too sure that would work in all circumstances.

Instead, I used code I found on another site which runs a system command to determine whether a form is currently attached to a window (has a state other than zero.)

The code looks like this:

IsLoaded = False
If SysCmd(acSysCmdGetObjectState, acForm, strFormName) <> 0 Then
    If Forms(strFormName).CurrentView <> 0 Then
        IsLoaded = True
    End If
End If

The first ...

Polkit-1

This feature works along systemd and loginctl to create sessions for users and check current statuses defined in rules files. This is supposed to be enough to prevent someone from shuting down a computer from the GUI when an administrator is logged in via SSH.

Thus far, I have not been able to find a way to get that to work for like 1 year. I'm going to put information about my research. Various pages talking about, documentation, etc.

First of all, there is a manual page which is likely already installed on your system:

man pklocalauthority

Now a list of pages I have ...

CUDA on NVidia Quadro 600

As I'm slowly learning CUDA, I got some of the tests running. Those under 1_Utilities actually define the parameters (stats) of the card. There are the parameters for an NVidia Quadro 600:

Device 0: "Quadro 600"
  CUDA Driver Version / Runtime Version          5.0 / 5.0
  CUDA Capability Major/Minor version number:    2.1
  Total amount of global memory:                 1024 MBytes (1073283072 bytes)
  ( 2) Multiprocessors x ( 48) CUDA Cores/MP:    96 CUDA Cores
  GPU Clock rate:                                1280 MHz (1.28 GHz)
  Memory Clock rate:                      ...

The attached package currently includes a C function and a SIMD function that both are used to blend two images together.

At this point I do not like the fact that the result is invalid (1 off with large values—if you have an alpha of 255, then you are likely to get the source component value minus 1). Outside of that, it works nicely and it is VERY fast.

I can blend 3,300 NTSC images per second with my i5 (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz.) With my newer computers I can run 3,750 NTSC images per second. These have Xeon processors (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31220 @ 3.10GHz.) The ...

I've been working on a TCP/IP server/client with Qt and got a problem which I present in the attached package.

The example called tcp-bug. Start it with:

tcp-bug -s

in one console and then start the same command without the -s in another console:

tcp-bug

The client (this second tcp-bug without the -s) saves the file sent by the server in /tmp/out.html and it has to be exactly the same as the example.html file in the project. If not, then the transfer failed.

Most often, the transfer works so I wrote a script called many-hits.sh to run the client many times and test the result. ...

meld -- advanced graphical diff utility

Find the difference(s)

I used subversion and now git and once in a while I have a rather large number of changes to check in. In most cases, I can just do svn diff or git diff . and be done with it. But today I have changes in quite many files (12, I know, it's not that much, but still... when you're by yourself on a project...) and some of the changes were quite large.

To have something better than svn diff, I looked into the different graphical diff tools available a little while ago and I installed meld:

sudo apt-get install meld
meld .&

I think that's the best I can find under Linux at ...

mov eax,dword ptr fs:[0000000h]

As I was trying to debug a problem using an STL vector, I looked at the resulting assembly and saw this strange thing:

mov eax,dword ptr fs:[0000000h]

And a little further down, the opposite:

mov dword ptr fs:[0000000h],eax

These statements are from VC++ so the first is "put fs:[0] in eax" and the second is "save eax at fs:[0]".

Curious I looked around and found a page describing what's really hapenning. If you need to know, that's actually initializing the exception structure for this function. The fs:[0] location is where that structure pointer is saved ...

Upgrading Ubuntu to use NVidia

IMPORTANT NOTE

These are instructions for Ubuntu 10.10 and these worked in Ubuntu 12.10 (which I have now). It may break in the future though.

I generally install my Ubuntu systems using the Server version of Ubuntu because it tends to works a lot better. The result is that I don't get all the Desktop features installed by the installer. That prevents me from installing the NVidia driver automatically.

The newest drives for X.org make use of some source for the client-side driver and that requires you to install the linux source code and headers. I'm wondering if each time we ...

Getting Ubuntu to playback DVDs

In order to playback a DVD you need to make use of commercial encryptions (also called codecs.) Actually Ubuntu calls them "non-free". The reality is these are patented and protected so people cannot just ripoff a DVD. Which is not true at all since pretty much any computer can play DVDs and thus can copy all the data. Anyway, because Ubuntu is by default for free software, it doesn't include all the necessary DVD stuff. This being said, they provide 100% of all the necessary code, pre-compiled and all you have to do is install it all with apt-get as follow.

(You must be root to ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Polkit-1