blogger by email

Since blogger post gateway doesn't accept emails with jpg attachements, not too useful for Sai Inspires.

If it was just ignoring the jpgs it would have been OK, but it actually bounces, with "post failed". Of course, the text-only option is available with phplist...

Testing mail2blog - only attached html, no text in mail.

Dear Reader,   Loving Sairam from the Heart2Heart Team.   How important is gratitude? You will know that when you read Swami's message today.

Did you read "The Most Precious Gift... the Avatar's Time"? Click here to read now.

 

Sai Inspires - 25th March 2006
	Always be grateful, even for a small help.  Do not be ungrateful;  ingratitude is utter cruelty.  Any help received should be reciprocated to the extent possible.  Hurting someone who has helped you will result in your losing your eyesight.  It is only through the radiance of the sun that you see things, and the sun withdraws its radiance from those who commit the sin of ingratitude.  This is the suffering that an ungrateful person has to undergo.  Therefore, we should always be grateful and return help for help, to the utmost extent possible. -  Divine Discourse, 6th May 2002.
First and foremost, you should show gratitude to your parents, love them and respect them. - Baba

With Love and Regards, "Heart2Heart" RadioSai's e-Journal Team, In Sai Service.

To see the complete schedule of today's RadioSai programmes, click here.

Visit us at www.radiosai.org to know more about RadioSai and our e-Journal "Heart 2 Heart".

---

Quick Links:

 

1. Subscribe to Sai Inspires here, to unsubscribe mail us at h2h@radiosai.org.

2. For ‘Thought for the Day’ as written in Prasanthi Nilayam today, Click here.

3. ‘Heart to Heart’, our monthly e-journal : Read, Download pdf, see Archives.

4. Prasanthi Bulletin and Photo Album.

5. Listen to RadioSai here.

post about printing on dot matrix

I'd posted this on the PCQuest forum:
http://forums.pcquest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3459
Recently I had the need to print some stuff with a dot matrix printer (TVS MSP 345) which happens to be "Epson compatible". I wanted to print with the built-in fonts, which are clearer and also print faster. So, I first prepared my pages with a text editor (kwrite) with proper formatting and then applied the extra binary formatting with a hex editor (khexedit). This basically consisted of adding the required control codes (like compressed mode, emphasise text, etc) at the relevant places.

Notes:
1. The printer took 8 spaces for tabs, had to adjust the text editor accordingly.
2. I'd set the default printer to a "Raw/No driver" printer driver in cups. Probably this is not necessary.
3. My print command was cat filename.txt > /dev/lp0 - I had to do this as root, there may be better ways to do this.
4. Epson codes were obtained after googling, from http://webpages.charter.net/dperr/links/esc_p83.htm
A note about these codes is that you need to send the ESC character for some of them, and not for others. For example, for form feed you just need to send 0c (HEX) while for select condensed mode you need to send 1b 0f (HEX).

money making schemes

Sometime I've got to bust some money making schemes - like these..
http://www.avamail.com/faq.shtml and
http://www.scambusters.ws/
Probably some sort of review of such things will be useful for folks. Save them from wasing time and money. Just in case they really work also!

Edit: removed the links since they are "undesirable neighbourhoods" and may cause Google adsense to boycott me!

added MX records

Added MX records for saispace and krishna, both pointing to krishna, with Plesk.

corrections to postfix config

My earlier postfix post omitted another correction I had to make from the linuxquestions link: the virtual file needs the domain name first, then followed by mail ids relating to that domain. Eg

/etc/postfix/virtual:
            virtual.domain       anything (right-hand content does not matter)
            postmaster@virtual.domain    postmaster
            user1@virtual.domain address1
            user2@virtual.domain address2, address3

And with the configuration accepting local mails, it was creating some sort of problem with local addresses lookup. So, commented out the

mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost

line. It still accepts mails from localhost for local accounts. Then added the actual hostname to the virtual domains, with stuff like mails to apache etc being sent to me!

finishing the postfix configuration

In an earlier post I'd written about the postfix configurations for virtual domain-based forwarding. Actual implementation had a few extra steps - needing some googling to remove two errors caught with

tail -f /var/log/mail/errors

One more mystery solved was why nmap was showing port 25 as closed - postfix was listening only on the loopback interface - localhost.

inet_interfaces = all

solved that.

First I thought just copying the main.cf from the older server was the reason. But even replacing it with the main.cf.dist with appropriate modifications didn't solve the problem.

The first one was

 fatal: connect #11 to subsystem private/proxymap: Connection refused

and the other, later, was

 fatal: connect #11 to subsystem private/scache: Connection refused

Deleting the proxymap socket (present in /var/spool/postfix/private ) only changed the error to file not found.
mksock gave file not found - the mksock util was not in the system at least with that name...
Finally adding

proxy_read_maps = $local_recipient_maps
local_recipient_maps = unix:passwd.byname

removed the first error and gave the second one. This one was finally removed by later adding

smtp_connection_cache_on_demand = no

One more thing I'd overlooked was the differing postfix versions needing different commands to update the alias database and the virtual database. This is actually mentioned in the small text at the bottom of the linuxquestions link in small print. Anyway, for the record, they are

postalias /etc/postfix/aliases

and

postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

respectively...

two ways of going back in time

One is the wayback machine for seeing older websites and the other is www.oldversion.com for downloading older versions of software.

blog with access control or email grabbing scam?

Interesting site submitted by A, will have to see if it is legit. Collaboration featues including access control.

Update: It's legit all right - Google has taken it over and registration is temporarily down!

local processing of AWStats history files

As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, I wanted to generate static reports with AWStats with its history files generated elsewhere. Finally found the solution by reading the perl source code - the program actually prints out the options if none are supplied at command line! Simply add -month=MM -year=YYYY ...

block jpg in pop3

Now the requirement is to block certain mime types ... will fetchmail do it? Have to check up.

procedure for saicast update - uploading the video file

1. Upload the video files to saicast - Mediaroot - SaiCast - OnDemand

2. Open the video in gmplayer, pause at appropriate place(s), take snapshot(s) with ksnapshot, attach in mail and send to Prof G for him to update, including the mms://urlofvideo.wmv

procedure for saicast update - creating the video file

1. Video source either as mpg (VideoCD) or MiniDV

• VideoCD source grab to hard disk as .mpg file using VCDGear
  
• MiniDV cappture to hard disk, now firewire is available, so Premiere can be used.
  
• Composite RCA connector capture also possible with VirtualDub.
  

2. Add www.radiosai.org logo with VirtualDub

• Use the resize filter with Bicubic option to get final size 320x240 with cropping as desired
  
• Use the logo filter for the watermark, with WHITE.BMP as the logo image and "Use alpha channel from another image", logoMASK.bmp
  
• Use Video->Compression Huffyuv codec before saving avi.
  

3. Use the saved profile 350_100_20 with Windows Media Encoder to convert avi to wmv - DO NOT overwrite this file! Choose CANCEL if it asks if you want to save this file at the end!

4. Edit the saved append.bat files appropriately and add begin and end segments to the video using wmvappend.exe.
In case adding the 350_100_20 begin and end files crashes, use separate files for 350, 100 and 20 kbs as given in next step. Ensure profiles match for files being appended!

5. Split the multi-audience file into separate 350, 100 and 20 kbs files using Windows Media Stream Editor.

6. Add appropriate metadata with Windows Media File Editor, in the same format as previous files.

Best Freeware Lists

More good stuff from digg - These two lists would be quite useful. Esp right now the firewall and Image stitcher are relevant...

digging for gold

Two unrelated things to check out, via digg.com - ssh tunneling over http and keepvid.com

Making 16 hours of video into 1 DVD of DivX with FairUseWizard

Specific instructions for making 16 hours of video into 1 DVD of DivX

1. Choose encoding speed ESS in the bottom drop down in the first page
2. In the page after choosing the specific chain to encode,
(a) Adjust cropping if required using AutoSet on a frame which has no dark parts near the edges
(b) Check "include subpictures" and choose appropriate language for subtitles
(c) If required, crop the end credits by scrolling to the end of the part and clicking "Set credits start"

3. Use auto detect in the next page to choose the proper interlacing settings

4. In the final page,
(a) Check "Two pass" - better quality
(b) Move the Encoding speed slider 75% to the right for quality
(c) Choose size as 175 MB if you have 24 parts - 175 x 24 = 4200, enough space to spare for small extras etc
This is equivalent to approx 700 kBitsps which will be shown in brackets below.
(d) Choose the largest video resolution which is available after "Show only preferred resolutions" is checked.
(e) Defer processing (enqueue) if you want to run a batch job with many files.
(f) Defer even project processing if you want to run multiple projects as batch with iso files as sources for some of them.

added caching nameserver

Installed the caching nameserver rpm, which installed bind as a dependency on saispace2, leading to much faster browsing response in general.

NAT on Linux instead

Trying out the stuff in the previous post...

RR's Windows machine has some problems with the "Routing and Remote Access" - it seems to automatically change from Red to Green, and when Red, says "Don't have permissions to access" even as admin - some misconfig or virus or what?

Also, the example firewall was not allowing outgoing connects from the proxy thru the external interface. In retrospect, probably I should've created a rule mentioning the external ip address, and allowing all outgoing. Just and allowing all protocols and all ports did not work, since it was just the reverse of the rule saying all IP traffic Block.

So, doing the NATing for POP on the Linux proxy, adding to /etc/sysconfig/iptables

*nat
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
-A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.x.z -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE
-A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.x.y  -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

and needs

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

of course...

AWStats older stats

Nettigritty just saves the older AWStats database txt files - doesn't save the html reports. Trying to generate reports locally ... following this onlamp tutorial. But the documentation and the FAQ are lacking in direct info on how to do what I want - convert the AWStats txt database into monthly reports...

Update: Read the code, dude - found the simple solution there...

Why the 500 GB drive didn't install on the PowerMac G5

Google saved the day with this report in xlr8yourmac.com


Notes on Seagate 7200.9/500GB drive P/Ns with SSC disabled - (from a drive db report)

" In the course of researching a hard drive purchase, I got the following information from Seagate presales support:

"All Seagate 7200.9 SATA drives with the Part Numbers that end in the suffix -301 have SSC enabled and are not compatible with the Apple controllers. (as mentioned previously here - SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking) is not compatible with the Mac onboard SATA. Seagate also has a PC/windows utility to disable this but not a Mac version of it.-Mike)

All other suffixes other than -301 on the Part Numbers are compatible ( -302, -303,-401, -402 etc).

Here is a list of part number with SSC disabled for ST3500641AS:
9BD148-302
9BD148-303
9BD148-401"

checking out zoneedit.com

Tried out (with a login as webmaster at rs ) zoneedit.com for forwarding sssihl.edu.in emails. But zoneedit also needs their dns servers to be made authoritative before the domain becomes live...

how to use ipsec "firewall" on Win2K

More stuff to check out - this article is pretty detailed...

This one has a downloadable registry file...

All this is if natting is enabled, as given in microsoft's site...

Six headed Linux machine

Nice idea - using extra graphics cards and USB kb/mice - article via digg.

using krishna to forward mails to sssihl

Reading http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Mail_forwarding_domains
seeing if krishna can be used for the sssihl mail forwarding...

Changes to main.cf:

1. #inet_interfaces = $myhostname, localhost
2. the changes as given in the wiki page above, ie.

1 /etc/postfix/main.cf:
2     virtual_alias_domains = example.com ...other hosted domains...
3     virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
4 
5 /etc/postfix/virtual:
6     postmaster@example.com postmaster
7     joe@example.com        joe@somewhere
8     jane@example.com       jane@somewhere-else
9     # Uncomment entry below to implement a catch-all address

10 # @example.com jim@yet-another-site 11 ...virtual aliases for more domains...

3. Opening port 25 on krishna's firewall

strip CRLF

Had to strip CRLF (or maybe just CR or LF - whatever) from PB's contribution because Blogger was changing all of them to <BR> tags! and even in the edit mode was not showing them as <BR> tags! Sometime I've to check out the methods given in the post I got by googling: a comp.os.linux.misc thread.

Learning ASP

For the last few days, I'm carrying around "Sams Teach Yourself ASP 3.0 in 21 days". Things to note:

<%= %> is shortcut for Response.Write

Default language is VBScript, tho JScript and even Python are supported....

Very useful set of VBScript built-in functions, esp for string processing and date processing.