wincdemu acts as a virtual optical drive that allows you to mount disc images. what’s nice about that is that you don’t need to actually burn a cd/dvd to either view the contents or run the program on the disc. i think most people use disc mounters to play games (including myself), though i’ve used it for a few other purposes as well.

i personally love these sort of programs because i am unorganized and hate having to keep media around. i’ll most likely scratch it up, break it, or lose it.

there’s other software that accomplishes this same task, most notably daemontools. personally, i stopped using daemontools years ago. at one point it included some kind of sketchy adware-ish type thing. that was bundled with the install. of course you could always say you didn’t want to install it, but if you weren’t paying close enough attention..i.e. Next Next Next, you’d get it installed. i’m all for freeware/opensource developers making money, but a better sponsor probably could have been chosen. anyways i believe the internet community released a version that came without the adware garbage. i haven’t followed daemontools since then.

i eventually moved on to use Virtual CloneDrive by SlySoft, a freeware product. can’t say that i have any complaints about virtual clonedrive…it’s an awesome product. however, since i really like to use true opensource software i’ve begun to use wincdemu.

the linux counterpart for iso mounting would be acetoneiso.
also to mount from CLI:
mount -o loop mydvd.iso /mnt/iso

we’ve had an existing prompt recorder script that uses one set of credentials to alter every prompt. that solution works great when just one person manages every prompt and they make themselves forever available. however, now we’re starting to absorb more departments into UCCX and that means more prompts and more people likely to want to change those prompts. so we need to disperse the management of them.

at first i simply cloned the existing script and had it authenticate against a different user. that worked fine, but it also meant that at the very least i’d need a new app and trigger for every department. that dawned on me to be very wasteful.

i got around to resolving this by making a single script to authenticate everyone…in a very simple but effective manner, a switch statement with entries for each dept’s PIN. the upload prompt step still needs a callmanager user authenticated first though. so i just provided the script with complete credentials – username, PIN. so prior to using “upload prompt”, both “get user” and “authenticate user” steps need to be used.

pt1
not sure why, but PLF respositories don’t have any pcsx packages. i’ve chosen pcsx-reloaded (pcsxr) to build because i couldn’t get the other well known fork to compile – pcsx-df.

pcsxr builds quite easily…the single problem i encountered was that by default this version still builds with an OSS sound plugin. to build with ALSA support use “–enable-alsa” during the configure process.

and pcsxr ran fine..not sure if it’s the default video plugin or not, but i don’t remember playstation1 graphics being so bad. could be though i guess..
i’ll do some research.

pt2
needed to change my hostname in mandriva recently. and just changing it in /etc/hosts didn’t do the job. so i googled. the hostname must also be edited in /etc/sysconfig/network: HOSTNAME=
found that info here: http://www.brunolinux.com/05-Configuring_Your_System/Changing_Hostname.html

pt3
the advancements of kernel mode-setting and plymouth are obviously pretty cool. i am practical though and like to see what’s going on during the boot process. to re-enable non-graphical booting, edit the grub configuration file and add “splash=verbose”

just upgraded one of my PCs to 11.2. i think i started out this PC with opensuse 10.3 and have continuously upgraded ever since. 10.3 ran great on it..i ran into what seemed to be performance issues when i first upgraded to 11.x.

and by that i mean a sluggish desktop environment, gnome in particular. all of a sudden with 11.x, gnome didn’t seem very responsive at all. in defense of 11.x…this isn’t exactly a new computer…
model name    : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz        : 996.702
cache size    : 256 KB

BUT…gnome was running great in the prior release so it was puzzling. it was still running fairly crappy even after i minimized the amount of daemons and other startup apps running. so then i started using xfce and lxde on this particular computer. of course i would have much rather used gnome….

and now the good news! 11.2 seems to have restored the prior performance with gnome that i was getting in 10.3.  this pc could really almost not even boot X since it’s mostly used for file storage. occasionally though, i use it to scan pictures and documents (as in it is hooked to a scanner).

if mandriva ever disappeared or it became complete garbage i would most definitely choose opensuse to be my desktop distro. it has always been a very close #2. i used sled10 for about 6 months as my main desktop at work and it was a great experience. in fact, sled10 is the most polished desktop linux distro i’ve ever laid my eyes on. i haven’t got around to trying sled11 yet…

my third choice distro? can’t say that i’m sure. probably fedora..?

i’ve never considered myself a power user of any application. i just use the common functionality of most apps and thus i’m very easy to please. i want an app to do a few basic things and i’m happy. extra features are a plus of course, but it’s most likely that i will never delve into them.

and despite having used a few other platforms..i come from a ms-dos->windows 3.1->windows 95->and so on background. as mentioned before – http://resinblade.net/wordpress/?p=110, i like my UI a certain way. and that way is generally the win95/win98 model. because it’s the best layout ever? most likely not at all…but it’s what i’m used to. no matter what OS i am using i try to make my desktop reflect that. and when it comes to UI it’s always about preferences. to each their own. arguing about UI layout, though sometimes interesting, holds no real technical merit and arguing over what is “best” is pretty stupid.

all of that explanation leads to why i like my favorite audio player. i “grew up” on winamp and always really loved it. it was simple and efficient. so therefore i like players that resemble and mimic winamp. that used to be xmms(1), but that is no longer maintained and would need a considerable overhaul to modernize anyway. however, i use audacious which spawned from xmms1 at some point. it retains the same goal of being a winamp clone for linux. there’s an xmms2 in the works which i believe is still in its alpha stages.

most modern players seem to mimic itunes. i’m not really a fan of that layout. it makes sense if you manage your music…but i do not. though, if i do have to sync an ipod i use banshee (which is very itune-ish). i simply play single audio files, or sometimes a location, or rarely i’ll listen to shoutcast stations. that’s all i do really.

for playing music on windows i use songbird, also an itunes clone. i just put it in its compact play mode…it’s not bad. and this is because i don’t know of any opensource winamp clones for windows. why not use winamp? two reasons really…1. ever since version 5.x came out it has seemed bloated. 2. it’s closed source and owned by AOL.

just a note: to add mp4 support to audacious in mandriva install the PLF version of audacious-plugins

i was about to build chromium on linux today. why? well why not! i installed all the pre-req libraries. downloaded the source, a 700MB-ish tarball, that shocked me by extracting to near 2GB. i surveyed the documentation further..this time actually paying attention to details. and it appears that to build the app i’d need like 10GB free. that would be a horrible pain for me to free up at the moment.

so for now..i won’t bother trying to build chromium. i’ll wait for a more convenient build method or a binary package.
and btw chromium is the truly open source equivalent to the chrome web browser by google.

i’m a big fan of the transmission bittorrent client, having ditched azureus/vuze some time ago. though i used azureus for a very long time..it was pretty close to being my first bt client, but now it’s time to move on.

the commandline version of transmission (transmissioncli) is decent but doesn’t seem to be as featureful as rtorrent.

basics of transmissioncli:
transmissioncli -o /storage6/rawdownloads -p port# <torrentfile>

basics of rtorrent:
quit = ctrl-q
stop torrent = ctrl-d
remove torrent = ctrl-d, ctrl-d
start torrent = ctrl-s
backspace = add a torrent (use tab for listing)
1-7 = various views

rtorrent i love. both apps should be used with GNU screen. also of note, there seems to be a lot of attention on a bt client called: deluge. it’s cross platform and OSS. i’ll try it out sometime, but for the moment i like transmission/rtorrent.

update 5/25/2010:
i’m running rtorrent on debian lenny right now. it comes with a 0.7.x version of rtorrent. i’ve really wanted to use a newer version like 0.8.x for a while to gain DHT support. i held back for a long time because i saw that installing the newer version requires newer versions of other fairly important packages like the c library and gcc, etc.

and now i’ve done it by messing around with “dpkg -i” to install packages manually. took about 20 minutes or so and at least once i thought i brought disaster upon myself. the system is still running though (luckily). i grabbed the packages from the squeeze-testing repository.

when i first ran rtorrent after the newer package was installed my existing session was messed up. this is a known issue: http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/wiki/LibTorrentKnownIssues#session80

update 5/26/2010:
the path to the example config file for rtorrent (in debian at least) is
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc


make a copy of that to your home directory, but rename it to .rtorrent.rc.