January 2004 - main

Mozilla - two questions
by Chris Green 16 Jan '04

16 Jan '04

A couple of simple questions about mozilla (I'm running version 1.4 at the moment):- Is there a list of the 'about:*' things that you can enter as URLs anywhere? They are incredibly useful but I can't remember them. The only one I can remember is "about:plugins" Sort of follows on, where/how does mozilla decide what file type suffixes it recognises? My mozilla at work recognises .jfif files but my copy at home doesn't. I've searched Google for the above and I've looked at www.mozilla.org but haven't had much joy. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk)

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Re: my recent mozilla query
by Chris Green 16 Jan '04

16 Jan '04

If you remember yesterday (I think) I asked about what 'about:' URLs were available in mozilla. Well the latest version of mozilla (1.6) has 'about:about' which lists them all for you - they must have heard me! :-) -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk)

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Server side (CGI, perl, etc.) photo album application
by Chris Green 16 Jan '04

16 Jan '04

Can anyone recommend a CGI (or other) server side application for managing images (and possibly text documents)? What I want is a very simple way to be able to navigate a hierarchy of directories with photos in them without having to (re)write HTML whenever pictures are added or moved around. The directory hierarchy will provide all the indexing I want. E.G. I want a directory hierachy on my web server with the top level directory called, say, "pictures". I will then create subdirectories under "pictures" such as "dogs", "horses", "housesInFrance", etc. I want the server side script to enable me to navigate the directories easily, so when I go to http://www.my.server/pictures I would expect to automatically see a link to "dogs", and if I navigto "dogs" I want to see the pictures that are in that directory. Thinking about it I doubt if this can be done dynamically but a script to autogenerate all the required linking HTML would be OK, it can be run whenever the picture hierarchy is changed. I suppose even more wonderful would be a way to 'drop' images and such onto a web page and they will be FTPed up to the server and added to the phot album - however that does seem a little too good to be true. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk)

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problem with command line arguments
by Vasko Tomanov 15 Jan '04

15 Jan '04

1. The code lives in a library 2. The library that it lives in does not include the main() function because that will be in the users code. 3. The users code in this case is wxWindows based and so the main() function isn't actually written by the user anyway, but this is a side-issue and I don't want the library to assume that the user is wxWindows-based 4. There is no main() function available for the user to customize. This means that there is no main() function, so how can the user store the argv[] somewhere? 6. But I need to have available for my part of code all the command line arguments Some Ideas ?

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Re: [ALUG] SuSE Update
by Wayne Stallwood 15 Jan '04

15 Jan '04

On Thursday 15 January 2004 10:28, Graham Trott wrote: > Ah, it must be that I have my system set for daily auto update, so I > already have it. On this system uname -a is reporting > > Linux main 2.4.21-166-athlon #1 Thu Dec 18 18:24:05 UTC 2003 i686 athlon > i386 GNU/Linux > > which is some way beyond the 144 you were offered. > > -- GT Ok thanks to those kind souls who responded I have solved this problem. It would appear that YaST had gotten itself all confused, the clue was why was my system trying to download a older kernel version than the one that is currently available. Surely it didn't need to install the patches incrementally when it looks like the patch is the whole kernel ? Then I noticed that the progress bar was going up to 14% downloaded very quickly and then I was getting the error. It turns out that had been halfway though downloading 144 when it was interrupted somehow, when it was trying to resume the download it was failing (for whatever reason). So by using lsof to find out where YaST hides it's download cache I was able to delete the partially downloaded kernel and then bingo on the next try YaST offered 166. New problem became obvious though, Why does my system report linux 2.4.21-166-default #1 Thu Dec 18 18:23:14 UTC 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/ Linux Yet YaST said it was downloading the Athlon kernel, it's been saying default ever since I upgraded from 8.0 (which admittedly was running a kernel I had recompiled)

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USB Camera
by James Green 15 Jan '04

15 Jan '04

Hi all, I was given a USB camera for Christmas. It is not supported by the latest gphoto2, however a not dissimliar sounding model is. I cannot get gphoto2 to recognise the camera, although 'lsusb' sees it, as for 'usbview' as a "Trust 715 LCD Powerc@m Zoom". This thing can be treated as a removable USB Mass Storage Device. Yet I cannot even mount. cdrecord --scanbus lists it as: scsibus2: 2,0,0 200) 'Trust ' '715 LCD POWERC@M' '1.00' Removable Disk Could someone lend me some clue as to how to at least mount the camera as a disk drive so I can get the photos on it? I might poke the gphoto2 folkes about experimenting with drivers too. Thanks, James

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FW: [Sheflug] The Economics of Open Source Software - Prospects,
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 15 Jan '04

15 Jan '04

This just arrived from Shef-lug. I probably won't be able to go along to it (unfortunately -- it would be interesting to observe the audience). However, maybe someone might manage it ... I was going to froward it to Clug too, but can't find their address for the moment ... Cheers, Ted. -----FW: <20040114220107.GA1354(a)lagodelbonso.demon.co.uk>----- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:01:07 +0000 Sender: shef-lug-admin(a)list.sheflug.org.uk From: Simon Brown <simon(a)cliffestones.demon.co.uk> To: "shef-lug(a)list.sheflug.org.uk" <shef-lug(a)list.sheflug.org.uk> Subject: [Sheflug] The Economics of Open Source Software - Prospects, Pitfalls and Politics [tbm(a)cyrius.com] >From debian-uk, food for thought? > MICROSOFT RESEARCH LECTURE > This is a PUBLIC lecture > ________________________________ > > TITLE: The Economics of Open Source Software - Prospects, Pitfalls and > Politics > SPEAKER: Dr Stefan Kooths > INSTITUTION: University of Muenster > HOST: Alexander Braendle, University Relations > DATE: 15 January 2004 > TIME: 13:30 - 14:30 > MEETING ROOM: Lecture Theatre > ADDRESS: Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley > Road), Cambridge > > Open Source Software does not represent a suitable alternative to the > commercial software market from an economic point of view, neither in > terms of creating value-added nor in terms of economic efficiency. OSS > does not create any new value-added potential, and offers only a > fraction of the opportunities of the commercial market. The impact of > OSS on sales and employment are therefore less than the effects of > commercial software. Furthermore the de facto free availability of > GPL-licensed software, and hence the lack of a market price, have > far-reaching economic consequences that are elaborated in the > presentation. As far as packaged software is concerned its free > availability very much limits the creation of profits, income, jobs or > taxes. The loss of turnover in the area of software sales cannot be > fully recovered with services linked to the software. So-called > complementary OSS-business models work in the smaller customized > software sector only. The incomes earned there are substitutive and not > additional to those created in the commercial software sector. The lack > of cost-reflecting prices for GPL-licensed standard software also has > consequences for the market process as the pricing mechanism is > associated with an important information and coordination function in a > market economy. If there is no price, and hence no decisive guide figure > for a market, it is, for example, more difficult to identify customer > requirements. Further problems can be identified when it comes to the > allocation of resources, productivity-oriented factor compensation and > incentives for innovations. The lower value-added potential and the > reduced efficiency of coordination are weighty economic arguments. They > demonstrate quite clearly that the promotion of open-source software > cannot be an economically justifiable role for the state. ___________________________________________________________________ Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html GNU the choice of a complete generation. --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 14-Jan-04 Time: 23:44:11 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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SuSE Update
by Wayne Stallwood 15 Jan '04

15 Jan '04

Is anybody else running SuSE 9.0 here ? When I try to get the kernel bug fix update from YOU, using any of the selectable sources I get the following error ERROR(You:RPM has invalid signature.) All of the other updates go on fine, only the Kernel package. Is there something wrong with the kernel package at SuSE, or has my system somehow obtained an invalid signature that it is comparing the Kernel package to ?

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I managed to delete half my operation system yesterday
by bsamuels＠beenthere-donethat.org.uk 14 Jan '04

14 Jan '04

I managed to accidentally delete a lot of my operation system yesterday. Having restored it from my backups some minor problems have come to light. I use a combination of 'Find' and 'Afio' but have realised that Find does not pass empty directories to Afio thus causing some software to fail until the directories are recreated e.g. apache and /etc/apache/conf.d. Is there any way I can get Find to include empty directories as well as all others? Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Cocked up telephone DDOS?
by Keith Watson 14 Jan '04

14 Jan '04

Here's one that'll make you smile. I can't be to specific because of commercial confidentially issues. We recieved a number of support calls yesterday from private users. They had been complaining to BT about charges incurred when their computers repeatedly dialed the access number of an ISP that they didn't use (in fact most of them didn't know it was an ISP number). BT in their usual cock-eyed way had spotted that we are a customer of this ISP and told the users that it was a number assigned to our business. It wasn't, in fact it was nothing to do with us. We told the users to check for viruses. However the circumstances made us suspicious that some script kiddy somewhere was trying a sort of telephonic DDOS against the ISP. The killer is that the number used was an 0845 number. :o) Keith

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