I had the need to convert a .uif file today. Most of the posts I saw mentioned using wine and a program called MagicISO. But, I finally found an easier and more *nix way of accomplishing this.

The brilliant Luigi Auriemma wrote and made freely available a small tool called uif2iso which is a small utility that, as it implies, converts a uif file to a usable iso image.

A vital module for any modern Drupal website that allows commenting, posting or form submissions of any kind is the captcha module. Any dynamic website that takes user submission should implement some form of "human authentication."

I have two sites, this one and my family's and my family's had just started receiving submission spam, both from the contact form and user registration.

Seems makedvd is also missing from the Ubuntu package. I still recommend downloading the full deb from http://tovid.wikia.com/wiki/Installing_tovid/Ubuntu.

After using tovid to create a video, I would normally use todisc to create the DVD file structure, but ever since my installation of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, I kept getting this error:

sox soxio: Failed reading `-': unknown file type `raw'

Sox is a utility used to process audio. The default Hardy installation of tovid doesn't install some necessary libraries and dependencies by default. Use the command:

sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-all

At work yesterday, I had to solve a problem with a strange error.

Sorry, user <user> is not allowed to execute '/usr/bin/command' as root on <box>

Reading the work order (which did not include the error message, just that the user could not access a file), I thought it had to be a permissions issue, and in a sense I was right, but not a file permissions issue as I suspected.

An if statement in shell scripting looks something like this:


if [ "$VAR" = 1 ]
then
#do something
elif [ "$VAR" = 2 ]
then
#do something else
else
#do something by default
fi


Notice we're quoting the variable to protect from shell expansion.

There are a variety of file tests one can use:


if [ -e /tmp/test.file ]
then
#do something
elif [ -d "$VAR" ]
then
#do something else
else
#another default action
fi


First in a series of notes in reference to shell scripting as I am just learning it myself. I have started on a script that will configure a bridged network interface for VirtualBox.

Working with variables in the shell is very easy.


#set a variable
VAR="Hello World"

#output the same variable
echo $VAR

#assign a new variable
#the value of our old variable
VAR2="$VAR"

echo $VAR2

Czzessi has blogged about his co-worker who decided to install Kubuntu on his laptop instead of buying Windows for it, and so far, loves it. =)

"For the record: When someone who is around 45 year old and used the pc only for office and email say: "Wow, it's amazing and so easy", then Riddell, his team did a great job."

I completely agree. Most people who don't play third party games love Linux in my experience. Especially Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Dave Richards from Largo, Florida has posted an excellent article on supporting your local governmental IT staff when they choose open source. Mr. Richards points out the obvious cost savings in choosing free software but makes some other excellent points.