Dropbox is better than Ubuntu one even in Ubuntu

I’m using both DropBox and Ubuntu one services in my desktop and laptop machines and I find dropbox much superior. Here are the reasons why:

  1. You can get ridd of dropbox (just dpkg --remove it).
  2. Installation is very easy (apt-get install).
  3. It is very clear that dropbox is running (via the tray icon).
  4. The tray icon has all the functionality you want via the UI.
  5. The command line tool dropbox(1) is even better than the UI since you can check if the upload has finished or not, turn dropbox on and off and even configure if dropbox is started automatically at login time.
  6. Unlike ubuntu one dropbox does not seem to want to sync my bookmarks, contacts and more and certainly does not urge me to do that by DEFAULT which could lead to security issues.
  7. File syncing is just an application and as such should not be a part of the system administration menu as the guys in ubuntu seem to have been forced to implement by pressure from their management. Why not put backgammon score keeping in the sys admin menu too ?

These are also the reasons why I keep my most important files in dropbox and not ubuntu one. Ubuntu really need to do a lot more integration work to make me prefer them to Dropbox. Go Dropbox.

Blog upgrade to wordpress 3.0

I just upgraded the blog to the new 3.0 release. The upgrade is quite easy so there is no reason to fear it. The real reason for my upgrade is the multi site feature (I want to open another blog in Hebrew). The multi site feature is quite cool and allows you to have as many blogs as you wish or give blogs out to your friends and serve as their administrator. Check it out in wp3.0.

Converting videos to xvid on Linux

I wanted to convert some video files on my Linux system to the xvid codec so that I could see them on my PS3. The solution I found was using the mencoder package.

#!/bin/bash
 
# this script converts videos given to it to the xvid codec, IN PLACE,
# this means it replaces the original files...
 
for x in "$@"; do
    echo "$x"
    y="$x.tmp"
    mencoder "$x" -ovc xvid -oac copy -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 -o "$y"
    ret=$?
    if [[ $ret -eq 0 ]]; then
        mv "$y" "$x"
        ret=$?
        if [[ $ret -ne 0 ]]; then
            echo "problem moving file $x"
            break
        fi
    else
        echo "problem converting file $x"
        break
    fi
done

Finding thread info on Solaris

As part of a crusade to find bugs in a C++ program running on a Solaris system I needed to find out information about all the threads belonging to a certain process.

The program is written the way it is because you rarely need thread info about all threads running in a system but rather threads limited to a certain process. A different way to get this info is through the /proc file system but unfortunately (or fortunately ?!?) files in this Solaris file system usually have binary content as opposed to the textual content that one usually finds on a Linux system.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
# Give this script the name of a process and it will show you thread
# infomation about your process...
 
 
use strict;
use diagnostics;
 
 
if(@ARGV<1) {
    die("usage myps.pl [process names...]");
}
 
 
for(my($p)=0;$p<@ARGV;$p++) {
    my($pname)=$ARGV[$p];
    print "showing diagnostics information for process $pname\n";
 
 
    # first lets find out the pid of the process
    my($pid)=`pgrep $pname`;
    chop($pid);
    print "The process id of the process is $pid\n";
 
 
    # now lets print all the thread info for that process...
    my(@lines)=`ps -eL`;
    for(my($i)=0;$i<@lines;$i++) {
        my($line)=$lines[$i];
        my(@fields)=split(" ",$line);
        if($fields[0] eq $pid) {
            print $line;
            #print(join('-',@fields));
        }
    }
}

New blog set up

I have moved my blog from Google to my own machine. This is the new blog. I need to transfer all my old posts from my old machine. Hope you will like this one better than the old but this will assuredly give me more control over my data and the blogs look feel and features.