Mod and hack the GNome main menu with automated scripts to create a menu of the directory.

Problem:
I had a directory with very good collection of my scripts and very organized in folders. The structure is something like this, first I have the broad classification of the category. Then I have the name of the tool/script as the name of the directory. All these are perl/python or shell scripts and luckily labelled so with the extension. I want to add these to the GNome main (Applications) menu.
Solution:
Lets take it stepwise:
1)  Add new menu tools to the Applications menu. Go to /etc/xdg/menus
Open the file applications.menu and add the following before

Bash histoy – common history in different terminals

I have been looking to do this for sometime. The bash history is per
session basis and the last session to quit overwrites the bash_history
file and thus all other terminals started between the time last terminal
lasted does not get to write the commands in the history file. Secondly
the history gets cluttered with lot of duplicate entries and entries
with ls and cd commands. So finally I added these to the bashrc file:

Happy New year and invitation to become author.

Wish all of you a happy and prosperous new year.. Now I am opening inivitation for authors. If you like linux and want to write on the same, please register yourself and leave a comment on this post with your username, and as soon as I am back I will do the required.

Once again Happy New Year.

Minimize the download size for updates.

Fedora has rolled out presto repositories. What this means to the users is that the download size for the updates would be greatly reduced. To use the feature, first install the yum plugin:

sudo yum install yum-presto.noarch

Presto uses delta rpms. These delta rpms are quite small in size (eg few kbs instead of 15 MB for firefox 3.5). These delta rpms are used to re-create the original rpm and this is completely transparent to the end user. So, next time when you update with the plugin installed you will see the difference in the download size.

Top 10 most ridiculous Windows Vista error messages – priceless though!!!

Windows Vista is always in the news on the blogosphere about how effective it performs. No matter what version of Vista you may be running, it’s

possible that you may have already seen these error messages more than once and may well probably be fed up with them!

Openoffice.org and/or Excel useful tips.

Today I was working on Excel sheets and had to do quite a lot of manipulations. Here are some of those:

1. Find the value of the cell whose number is stored in another cell.

You can use the indirect function.

Here is example:

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/screenshot_0022.jpe"><img class="size-full wp-image-959" title="indirect" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/screenshot_0022.jpe" alt="indirect" width="354" height="98" />

That&#8217;s cool and easy.

2. Indirect reference with some constant values.

You can add constant and cell id with &#8221;&&#8221;

Annotating the photograph with comments.

There is a nice Linux command called convert. This command can be used in various ways to do image manipulation. One of them is to embark your image with some text. Here is how to do it.

**echo &#8221;Annotating the image &#8221;$2&#8221; with $1&#8221;
convert -font  Verdana -pointsize 40 -fill red -draw &#8221;text 100,100 &#8221;$1&#8221;&#8221; &#8221;$2&#8221; &#8221;$2&#8221;
**

It will be good idea to save this as &#8221;annotate&#8221; as we will use this later too.