Fast and bleeding edge Firefox.. version 7

Firefox 7.0 nightly builds have started and it seems to be quite fast. So, if you dont care about some sites not opening or once in a while your browser crashing, been using for 2 days on Windows , has not crashed so far and worked on all sites so far :), then you should install the Nightly build.

Head over to the nightly build site and install the appropriate build for your OS.

RawTherapee — Raw imagr processor for all platforms

Do watch this series for more information on my adventure with Windows in Dubai and Photography….

For the impatient ones, download the application here.

Recently I was stuck with a Windows only laptop for a months time and I was in Dubai. Went to Dubai Aquarium and Underwater Zoo there and as usual took the photos in RAW mode with my D5000 Nikon camera. Alas, now I did not have a decent application to modify the images. On my Fedora system I use UFraw and the hunt began for a decent and somewhat advanced software for windows. Couple of them looked promising like Picasa, FastStone Image viewer but nothing comparable to UFRaw until I remembered anothe one that I used RawTherapee (BTW, UFRaw port for cygwin is there but I was not able to install it on cygwin, the server was not reachable). So, here is the features of this pretty good image editor having the capability to edit RAW images.

browsing the windows machines and their shares – listing

smbtree is a very nice command to check all the machines that are present in the LAN (your connected network). For this to work you may need to look at this article also.

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      smbtree -U <strong>username
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Related articles

• Prompted for a username and password when browsing to an IIS virtual directory (ask.metafilter.com)
• How to Delete History in Internet Explorer (lockergnome.com)
• How To Guide: Deploy VNC via Group Policy (edugeek.net)
• Windows just doesn’t like tunnels (ask.metafilter.com)
• Windows Tips – Speed Up your Network Share Browsing (hitechbarkadaz.wordpress.com)

client lanman auth is disabled error for samba

The error:

Server requested LANMAN password (share-level security) but ‘client lanman auth’ is disabled

is easily fixable. You just need to tell samba that client lanman auth is enabled. And here is how to do this:

If you are getting this error then add the following in the globals section of the samba configuration:

client lanman auth = Yes

Ensure that you change this in the file /etc/samba/smb.conf

use finch, less memory and cpu usage, in replacement for pidgin.

Well, if you are on linux then you have options – is a known fact. But how those options help?

I was working on a machine which had very less RAM and was quite old system and it was running F14. Guess what would be the state of the system with pidgin, xmms, firefox, evolution and couple of terminals. Now, this is where if you could save a few cycles of CPU then you can actullay see the difference in sluggish GUI and and an okay sort of GUI. So, first off, kill pidgin and use finch.

using gnuplot for time plotting

Couple of days back, I was working with some data and wanted to plot it. I had couple of options Excel, ploticus and then our own gnuplot. My choice here was gnuplot, as this is most commonly available and helps me write scripts that can automate my repetitive task. So far, so good. The data I was plotting was against time, that was the problem. Couple of quick searches did not result into any luck to get me on the path and hence with some man pages and some documentation, finally I found this, might be this will be helpful for others.

Take a screenshot of the window the user clicks on and name the file the same as the window title

Take a screenshot of the window the user clicks on and name the file the same as the window title

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      &nbsp;sleep 4; xwd >foo.xwd; mv foo.xwd "$(dd skip=100 if=foo.xwd bs=1 count=256 2>/dev/null | egrep -ao '^[[:print:]]+' | tr / :).xwd"
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In general, this is actually not better than the “scrot -d4” command I’m listing it as an alternative to, so please don’t vote it down for that. I’m adding this command because xwd (X window dumper) comes with X11, so it is already installed on your machine, whereas scrot probably is not. I’ve found xwd handy on boxen that I don’t want to (or am not allowed to) install packages on.