Autarchy of the Private Cave

In my childhood, I greatly enjoyed the series of novels by Roger Zelazny about the Amber multiverse. I also did enjoy the book by JRRT.

Many of the epic and thrilling worlds have been brought to the wide screen in recent decades. So today I came to IMDB looking for just any film adaptation of the excellent novel series by Roger Zelazny, and found… nothing! Roger himself is accurately catalogued, though.

The Amber multiverse seems to me even bigger than that of JRRT’s world, yet the LoTR has a screen version, and Amber doesn’t. That’s unfair! I want a screen version of Amber world!

I’ve found a thread at IMDB, which asks for the movie, so I’m not alone in that.

P.S. Inspired by the recently re-viewed episodes of SW, including the CW animation series.

After trying several of the kind, I found CHXO email address to image converter a reliable and working one.
It supports transparent PNGs, and just works. Also, it comes with a complete PHP source, so it looks like you can embed it into your own web-applications. (As it is GPLed, I’ve saved a copy for myself.)

For Gmailers, there’s a nicer generator.

If you’d like to convert larger amounts of text to images, then use hidetext.net:

The following sites are available:

http://bacteria.ensembl.org
http://protists.ensembl.org
http://metazoa.ensembl.org

During summer, two more sites – for Fungi and Plants – should be made available.

Learn more about Ensembl Genomes project.

Connecting remotely via ssh to my Debian box at work, I needed to mount a CIFS (samba) share, but didn’t remember server name (or IP) and share name.

At least two convenient utilities are available in Debian Lenny for non-X Samba browsing.

smbtree (part of smbclient package) will list all visible workgroups, their servers, and share names of those servers – including “hidden” shares like C$, IPC$, ADMIN$, print$. Very handy and greppable!

samba-commander (smbc package) is a ncurses samba browser with “find file” functionality.

Linux users are not affected with a plethora of autorun.inf “viruses”, but that seems to be a real plague for Windows users.

Ideologically correct solution is offered by Panda software – a free Panda USB and AutoRun Vaccine. It can do two things for your Windows box:

1. with a single click disable auto-execution of programs from USB sticks and CDs/DVDs, and
2. with one more click – make the autorun.inf file on your pendrive inaccessible, so as to prevent infecting your USB stick with an “autorun.inf virus”.

Program does not require installation, but requires Administrator privileges. It supports FAT/FAT32 pendrives, but NTFS-enabled version is being tested and should be made available shortly.

Note, that if you perform step 2, re-enabling access to autorun.inf may require pendrive formatting. Also, after step 1 your favourite CDs and DVDs won’t start automatically anymore – but you will be able to start them manually.

And, of course, Linux users have nothing to worry about (yet).

Imagine you have some styles.css transferred from Win machine to Linux via FTP in binary mode instead of ASCII mode; then

cat styles.css | tr -d "\r" > styles-nocarriage.css

will create styles-nocarriage.css with ^M’s removed.

Alternative syntax:

tr -d "\r" < styles.css > styles-nocarriage.css

Most editors have global replace features which allow to get rid of control characters using regular expressions (exact instructions are editor-specific).

For multiple files, try this:

for f
do
mv $f ${f}~ && tr -d "\r" <${f}~ >$f
rm ${f}~
done

Save this shell script as a file (e.g. dos2unix.sh), then do ./dos2unix.sh . This script accepts wildcards (e.g. ./dos2unix.sh *.php), so be careful!

First, learn about custom CDFs and why they are needed.

The aroma.affymetrix R package google group has a how-to: create a CDF annotation file from scratch.

Also useful: how to convert CDF into an R package, which has all CDF data available (as a PDF with more details).