Converting multiple JPG to PDF

Using Imagemagick it is easy, just do: convert *.jpg output.pdf

The problem is that my scanned files and using version 6.5.1 of Imagemagick on Kubuntu just gives me a Segmentation Fault error, and no valid pdf.

Well at least this way it works: convert *.jpeg -compress Zip output.pdf

Firefox and Dropbox syncronization for Bookmarks and Passwords

After upgrading from Mozilla FireFox 3.0 to 3.5 I tried Mozilla Weave for syncing my bookmarks and passwords in all my computers. I was using version 0.8 (1.0b1 is out now), but despite working more or less, most of my bookmarks where misplaced, put out of order, moved to unsorted bookmarks… a mess. Tiding up the bookmarks on one browser doesn’t mean that it would be ok on another, so after only 5 days of use, I thought that there is probably a better solution, and I found it.

The solution is to use Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE1NTQzMTA5, the FireFox Addon SyncPlaces: http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces/ for syncronizing bookmarks and passwords. It works as it should. It doesn’t mess with Bookmarks, the order is kept, Icons are kept, and passwords are synchronized without any issue.

So, what are the steps:

- Install Dropbox and create an account.

- Install the Syncplaces add-on for Firefox

- Create a directory for storing Firefox information on your Dropbox folder, for example: mkdir ~/Dropbox/Firefox

- On your Firefox menu, goto Bookmarks->Syncplaces->options

- Select the Server tab and then select on the Connection sub-tab, the protocol File

- Select now the Syncronization tab, and define the path for the files: prefix the suggested name with /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox. So it should look like

JSON PATH: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/syncplaces.json

If you want, you can output also in HTML and XBEL format. Use the same path for the files.

- For synchronizing passwords select the checkbox passwords, and input a strong password. The password path is like the previous ones: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/passwords

You’re set. So down on the FireFox status bar, there is now an icon with a blue and red lines/circles, right click on it and select Send Bookmarks/passwords. Make sure that on the Dropbox Firefox folder files where created. Now DropBox synchronizes these files into the “cloud”, and they are available to your other Dropbox computers.

On the other computers, just repeat the configuration process (Install Dropbox, SyncPlaces, same configuration) but this time select on those computers on the SyncPlaces icon, the Receive Bookmarks/passwords option. (Make sure that you use the same password for the password export/impor feature in all computers).

Voilá, full no fuss workable synchronization! You just decide now which is the master machine, if you want to, namely by tweaking the merge options of the Syncplaces Addon. Also to avoid bookmarks duplication, I recommend that the BookmarkDD addon at http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/installation.html be installed and set not to do pop-ups when duplicated bookmarks are found. This way, during import, no duplicate bookmarks are imported.

Now you can automate the synchronization process by just configuring Syncplaces to synchronize at a specific time, or periodically/automatically and your set.

Vmware 6.5.3 on Karmic Koala

Installing: At least these instructions worked for me:

#sudo bash
#chmod +x VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.x86_64.bundle
# export VMWARE_SKIP_MODULES=true
#./VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.x86_64.bundle
# vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

Voilá, installed Vmware without any issue. I’ve compiled the modules after installation because there are reports that it may hang by using the installer. Not sure, because I didn’t tried it. All VM Machines appear to be working.
Now for the other issues:

After upgrading from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, I needed to upgrade to Vmware Workstation 6.5.3 as is the subject of this post… My previous version was 6.5.0. With this upgrade some older issues where back and new issues appeared…

- Keyboard mapping where again all wrong, with my Portuguese keyboard wrongly configured and some keys wouldn’t just work.

- The other annoying issue was the grab/ungrab mouse cursor problem. Kubuntu task bar area and the floating vmware toolbar area where unusable when the VM machines are in full screen. So for example the Windows task bar is, when the machine is full screen, at the same screen area than the KDE taskbar. The cursor on this area just flickered away like mad, and it was pretty difficult to do anything on this area. This also mean that Windows taskbar and systray where almost unusable and unacessible, and just couldn’t do anything on this area. The temporary workaround was to use machines not in full screen…
The solutions:
For the keyboard problem, on my home directory, just went to .vmware hidden directory (create one if it doesn’t exist) and add the following to the file named config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
xkeymap.keycode.61 = 0x035
xkeymap.keycode.61 = 0x5f
xkeymap.keycode.47 = 0x027
xkeymap.keycode.47 = 0xc7
xkeymap.keycode.48 = 0x028
xkeymap.keycode.48 = 0xaa
xkeymap.keycode.51 = 0x02b
xkeymap.keycode.51 = 0xfe52
xkeymap.keycode.34 = 0x01a # +
xkeymap.keycode.34 = 0x2a # *
xkeymap.keycode.35 = 0x01b # ´
xkeymap.keycode.35 = 0xfe50 # `
xkeymap.keycode.20 = 0x00c # ‘
xkeymap.keycode.20 = 0x3f # ?
xkeymap.keycode.21 = 0xab # «
xkeymap.keycode.21 = 0xbb # »
xkeymap.keycode.49 = 0x029 # \
xkeymap.keycode.49 = 0x056 # |

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Now if you copy and past the above content, just make sure that x is an ‘x’ letter, because WordPress may change it to something else that looks like an x but it isn’t. If you don’t due this, when you press a mapped key on VMware, you will get a popup window with an error complaining about a key code.
For the mouse issue, it looks like that the solution is this:
Temporary fix (solution from http://communities.vmware.com/thread/240766):

Open a shell window and start vmware from it with as follow:

#export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

#export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0

#vmware

It seems that to make the first two lines permanent, you just, as root, edit the following file: /etc/vmware/bootstrap and add the first to lines to the end of the file.
I hope that all issues are covered now….

The cloud: Firefox bookmarks sync

Using Firefox at home, at work, and having several computers that I use, syncing all the bookmarks started to get to be a large problem…

So after upgrading to version 3.5 of Firefox, Mozilla Weave Is a good solution, mainly because of two things:

- You can synchronize all your data across computers, including passwords

- You can deploy and use your own Weave server, which solves the lingering question about the privacy of my data: http://phaseshiftllc.com/archives/2009/10/09/setting-up-a-custom-weave-0-5-server

Anyway, after a few days of use, synchronization is not always without any problems. It works, but some times, I get duplicated folders, and bookmarks that I have to delete by hand… Not good. I’ll try to use it a bit more, to see if this is due to the number of computers and bookmarks that I have. One neat solution for finding duplicated bookmarks is the bookmarkDD plugin at http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/

If these issues keep going I’ll have to try Google Toolbar…

Phase 1: Upgrade my work computer from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

Today at work I had a lot of documentation to read, so, why wait, lets upgrade my Kubuntu 9.04 running on an HP nx9420 portable computer to the latest Karmic Koala release, while I slip through documentation…

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on this computer was a bit of a pain, mainly because I was already running KDE 4, so at the end of the upgrade I was without any graphic environment installed and working… but everything was solved by accessing the console and installing manually KDE 4 again.

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 I was also bitten by the drop of support of ATI for this HP graphic card an X1600, so I ended up with the open source drivers, and some problems that I didn’t had with ATI proprietary drivers: screen corruption on refresh of some application areas (pretty annoying), crash on street view on google earth, vmware console missing buttons, to name a few. At the begining I had also a lot of crashes related to screen activity, but upgrading to the tormod ATI driver, solved most of the crashs, but other issues still remained.

So, I was expecting some problems upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 this time, but the upgrade mostly went well, except one minor detail: menu.lst for grub was not updated with the latest kernel, so after booting up, and logging in I ended up with a garbage full screen and an unusable desktop… going to a session console and back again restored the desktop screen but everything was too slow. So I corrected the Grub configuration to use the correct kernel, and things started much better:

- Boot time: way faster on 9.10 than on 9.04

- Screen appearance and fonts seem more streamlined and better. I think my screen real estate is now better used.

The bad news: My company provided vmware workstation stopped working on kernel 2.6.31… The vmware modules are unable to compile, so I’ll have to download version 6.5.3 and see how it goes. (Edit: using VMware Workstation 6.5.3, does work)

I’ll have to do further tests so see if at least the ati driver issues are better, and also to see if I don’t have any new issues.

Anyway, one of the things that happened is that 9.10 uses Firefox 3.5, and I was using 3.0… Some plugins that I had on 3.0 stopped working on 3.5, namely switchproxy tool and fxinfo… The good news is that now I can use Mozilla Weave… yeay!

On my home computer, I’ve also upgraded firefox, but due to the issue with vmware, I’ll see if I can fix it before upgrading this one… also I have an ATI 4870, so I’ll wait a bit more before jumping…

My office sucks

My office sucks.

This is a real office:  http://picsfromtheoffice.blogspot.com/

Flight simulator is nowhere near this…

The Cloud, the AVCHD and backups

Most developments and news are around the “cloud computing” phenomenon…

Ubuntu will have it: Ubuntu One, and there are a lot of players on the market, namely dropbox, skydrive to name a few.

While you can buy a lot of space on these “clouds” to make sure that you follow the backup paradigm 3-2-1 (three copies, two different media types, and one copy offsite), and use the cloud as the offsite backup for photographs, digital documents, and other small files, backing up AVCHD media into the cloud is not yet a sound proposition… Files are HUGE, in the GB area, and backing up into the cloud would take hours if not days…

So for this kind of critical files, I’ve not yet found a solution than copy them into a pen and move them offsite by “sneaker” net….

Digikam and KDE 4.3.2

After upgrading to KDE 4.3.2, digikam right pane stopped to show pictures thumbnails. So no pictures or thumbnails where shown, which meant that the program useless.

The solution was to install the latest Digikam compiled with the latest kde libs from here:

https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa/+archive/backports/+index?field.series_filter=jaunty&start=0&batch=75

Free/open source software

Why we should only use free and open sourced software:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/30/159232/Company-Uses-DMCA-To-Take-Down-Second-Hand-Software

You not own what you’ve bought….

ASUS VH242H

I’ve just bought one of these ASUS monitor: the VH242H… It’s an huge amazing quality monitor, with all the needed requirements that I was seeking: HDMI for connecting my Canon Legria HF200 and integrated columns to clear desk space, and of course big screen…

I’m using Kubuntu 9.04, and it recognized the monitor and the resolution of 1920×1080 without any problem with the drivers 9.7 from ATI (64 bits).  Sound is more than OK for my use, much better than I was thinking based on the net reviews…

At first, the image quality was not very convicing, but I’ve found out that the monitor comes with over sharpness. On the  Sharpness menu it was set around 52 and so letters had this bright shadow on them. I’ve pull it down to 27, and it solved all the image quality problems. So no problems at all.

Recommended!