Autarchy of the Private Cave

Watch this:

If it’s convenient and well-designed, I wouldn’t mind visiting such a fast food once in a while. Though it’s hard to imagine having breakfast there every day: too dull, I suspect. But have to try first to be sure.

Some more videos of delivery and disposal:
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Out of roughly 100 spam messages, accumulated in the one of webmaster@-type mailboxes, there were two about the forthcoming parliamentary elections in Ukraine. Both seemed to have originated from the same political party: they have links back to their website, and also their contact emails. One had apologies inside, saying “We don’t use the money of others, thus we had to contact you the way we did” (approx. translation from Ukrainian).

I do not yet know (and might never know for sure, actually), if this is a true spam-campaign, or a “black PR”. Though “black PR” scenario seems highly unlikely - the party didn’t get into the parliament during two previous parliamentary elections, and has a negligible expected electorate percent (I’d say below 0.2%).

If it’s not “black PR”, then we’re seeing a new trend leading us to the truly “electronic government”.

We now only need some web-resource to become sufficiently popular and conduct law-enforced elections on-line - of course, with IP blocking to disallow repeated voting, and other pseudo-secure whistles :)

I wonder if other countries have the experience of true (non-fake, non-black-PR) political unsolicited bulk mailings.

Anybody? Examples, study references?

Found Aptitude vs Apt-Get post. Worth reading - both the post and the comments - if you are looking for a Linux distro or want a better package management tool.

If you are considering an installation of a Linux or Unix-like system, then the Compare distros is a good place to visit. As a Slackware user, I find some evaluation methods a bit controversial, but still the resource is very good, and I’m currently perusing it in order to identify the system I might want to install on my older computer. Currently the candidates are (in no specific order) Kubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, and probably ALTLinux.

For the sheer simplicity of choosing a Linux distribution, the polishlinux.org also has Distro chooser. After answering the questions, I got this list:

1. Fedora
2. openSUSE
3. Ubuntu Linux
4. Debian GNU/Linux
5. Mandriva Linux

As one can see, out of 3-4 distributions I’m currently considering, this list of 5 gave an overlap of 2 distributions (Ubuntu, if we assume that Kubuntu is roughly the same, and Debian). I’d say the Distro chooser, being somewhat simplistic, gave a close match to my own list (except for the not-so-well-known-by-me Fedora, openSUSE; Mandriva, based on my current knowledge, is a kind of superseded by Ubuntu’s ease of use).

There’s another wizard-like Linux Distribution Chooser. This one is pretty and thus fun to complete. (Thanks to the authors for adding some JS-based questions which do not require page reload - this definitely adds to the comprehended speed of answering questions; I’d say the proportion of JS-based and POSTed responses is nearly perfect.) This time, I got 6 recommendations:

1. Fedora
2. Kubuntu
3. ArchLinux
4. Debian
5. openSUSE
6. Mandriva

Again, I have Kubuntu and Debian in the list. It’s more interesting though, that Fedora, openSUSE and Mandriva are repeated from the previous list! Well, it might be due to the short-list nature of really popular Linux distros. But Fedora appears on top in both cases, Mandriva appears at the bottom, and Debian/openSUSE are not decided Based on these results I’m going to have a closer look at Fedora, might have missed my perfect match

If even after these wizards/tests/tables you do not feel the complete satisfaction of a (converted?) believer, there’s also yet another Linux Distributions Chooser. It’s short and simple, and gave me only Mandriva and SUSE (without specifying which exactly SUSE flavour).

When you are done choosing Linux distro, and your mother tongue isn’t English, it would be wise to look for already localized distros. For example, I’m using DeepStyle Slackware-based linux, which differs mostly in Ukrainian (Cyrillic) support and some add-on packages/enhancements. There are also many other examples, much more known and popular. Taking a localized distro, you save time and do not lose anything.

Finally, if you are a Linux newbie but do want to learn the ins and outs of Linux, you may try Slackware-based Topologilinux (which also runs within windows). Slackware is not usually considered an option for newbies, but based on my impressions Topologilinux is quite friendly and easy to install/configure, at the same time providing more than enough space for experiments. The whole OS is in a single file, so after initial installation you may backup the ‘tlinux’ folder for the case that you experiment too much and kill Topolinux - then just unroll the backup in place

Really finally, over the period of the last 2-3 years linux distros became so user-friendly, that migration from any other OS shouldn’t be too complicated. And, based on my blog’s statistics, Linux + MacOS X (BSD-based, if I remember correctly) already make up ~35-40% of all the visitors’ OSes

As a primer and a generally good guide, read Linux on old hardware. Pay special attention to kernel arguments (”cheat codes”): those do come handy often with older hardware.

From personal experience, have to say the following:
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I had just installed the latest ATI video drivers for Linux onto my Slackware 11 (with kernel 2.4.33.3); I have Radeon Mobility X600 with 64MiB of non-shared memory.

Running glxgears, I got ~2050 FPS (glxgears window focused) and ~4900 FPS (console window focused, glxgears window out of focus).

But running fgl_glxgears yielded values as low as 1 FPS! As fgl_glxgears is much more similar to the real-world game visuals, it’s apparent that no game will be playable at e.g. 0.2 FPS.

Also, there were numerous repetitions of a single error in the console window:

FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Function not implemented) __FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed! fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!

I found the solution which worked perfectly for me:
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Today, after starting ./configure to make one of the programs, I noticed this in the logs:

I don’t know what is that intended to mean, but this is definitely funny: configure script, able to detect if the Force is with Skywalker…

Non-Programmer’s Tutorial for Python

… which covers some of the FAQs Python startes have.
The guide was complete in December’2004, but does have lots of useful information for Python newbies and beginners.

I found a sample of Python code to iterate through all the files within the specified folder (directory), with ability to use wildcards (*, ?, and [ ]-style ranges). Below is a portion of code from a working script:
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I’ve been away from Internet for quite a long while… but now I’m back, and writing again!

As I’m moving to Linux as my primary OS, my readers should expect more Linux-related posts in the nearest future. However, this does not mean any changes in the overall blog ideology and priorities - they will be kept as they are now.

I’m currently completing a DNA sequence-analysis server, which will be announced later; I might post additional details on making an automated pipeline-like analysis web-servers for bioinformatics and/or data analysis; but the decision “to post or not to post” will be made based on “popular demand” (if any…).

When ‘make’ing krename (after ./configure, of course), it failed with an error message like:

libtool: link: `/usr/libGL.la’ is not a valid libtool archive

After reading this topic (in Russian), I found that libGL.la is a configuration file for libGL.so.
This configuration file is created when installing ATI or nVidia video drivers - they replace the bundled libGL.so and create libGL.la.

The solution to the “absent libGL.la” file is, thus, either to install ATI/nVidia drivers (if you have ATI/nVidia video card), or to manually create “fake” libGL.la.
Here is the sample of “fake” libGL.la (to copy-paste, click the “Plain text” header) :
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Today I was looking for some simple but convenient source-code editor. I came across this post, and decided to try Geany. I’m using Slackware 11 at the moment, and as there were no packages available, I downloaded Geany source to compile and install.

However, the ‘configure’ script failed. When trying to compile ‘conftest.c’ with gcc, the following error was produced:

libc.so: file format not recognized; treating as linker script

(Note 1: in the error above, I removed all the paths which were prepended to the actual error message.)
(Note 2: I suspect that this error is the result of incomplete/failed/erroneous update of glibc slackware package I attempted a while ago. Will have to fix that more properly than described below.)

Here’s the solution which helped me to install Geany successfully:
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This helped me, maybe it will help you: How to convert between utf8 and cp1251 without iconv
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Update: if you were looking for a downloadable libmp3lame.so.0, then go here or here.

Today I compiled ffmpeg with –enable-libmp3lame. Of course, first I downloaded, compiled and installed lame (libmp3lame) itself. However, after doing make install for ffmpeg, and then running ffmpeg produced an error:

ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libmp3lame.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I looked for libmp3lame.so and found one in /usr/local/lib (evidently, ffmpeg couldn’t see it there; ffmpeg was searching for libmp3lame.so.0 in /usr/lib/, not in /usr/local/lib/). It was clear that /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so is a symlink to /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0.0.0. So all I had to do was making one more symlink in /usr/lib/, pointing at /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0.0.0:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0

After this, ffmpeg ran without any problems.

Updated on Apr 8, 2008.

Stimulated by the post of Eric Daniel, I compiled the most recent ffmpeg SVN source into Linux binary, which runs fine on my shared hosting (note: I’m using older ffmpeg binaries, which are at the end of the post).

mini-FAQ:
Q: Why the title has “for Gallery2″?
A: Just because I avoided the inclusion of libraries, which were not found on my shared hosting server. I hope this will work for other shared hosting environments.

Configuration, version and date can be found in the output of ffmpeg.

Versions built on April, 8, 2008:
ffmpeg (no lame) (checked: can be executed on godaddy shared hosting)

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:13:14, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]… {[outfile options] outfile}…

ffmpeg (with lame). For this one, grab libmp3lame.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:44:31, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Based on single request: ffmpeg (with lame and libfaac and libfaad). For this one, grab libfaac.so and libfaad.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 23:53:57, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

As an experiment, here’s ffmpeg freebsd binary without lame support. Did ran on some FreeBSD 6.3 hosting.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –target-os=freebsd
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 16:15:38, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Versions built on Ocotber, 28, 2007:
download ffmpeg without libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-pthreads

–enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 22:46:10, gcc: 3.4.6

download ffmpeg with libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-libmp3lame

–enable-pthreads –enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 23:04:59, gcc: 3.4.6

Shared hosting testing reports are welcome.

Below you can find even older versions of ffmpeg, which were tested and found functional on GoDaddy shared hosting.
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Googling for “practical artificial intelligence” gives only two (somewhat) relevant links:

• Open Content Free Web Books (on practical AI programming)
• Artificial Intelligence Lab (with some practical applications)

Looks like it isn’t widely acknowledged, that AI is, in fact, quite widely used. Though primarily in OCR, TTS, STT :), and NLP (including machine translation).

If you happen to need to check your linux filesystem, which is mounted read-write, and for some reason you do not want to reboot, then the simple sequence of commands listed below should help you. Note, that the commands provided put you into single-user mode, which kills web-server and mysql daemon.

So, running e2fsck on a live (mounted) filesystem isn’t recommended - and f2sck asks if you really want to check the rw-mounted FS (be sure to answer ‘n’o). If the FS you want to check is root (/), you cannot also re-mount it read-only - unless first you go to single-user mode:

init 1

Now you can re-mount your FS read-only:

mount -o ro,remount /dev/cobd0

(/dev/cobd0 is my device, replace it for your device when repeating step-by-step).
Filesystem is now read-only, and it’s safe to run e2fsck:

e2fsck -D -C 0 -f -t -v /dev/cobd0

e2fsck options are optional:
-D: optimize directory structure
-C 0: show progress
-f: force check (use if you get “volume is clean” with no check)
-t: e2fsck timing statistics
-v: verbose mode

Finally, return to your previous user mode:

init 3

Full Featured Multiple Sequence Alignment Editor, Analyser and Shading Utility for Windows.

Small and convenient. Can do sequence alignments (I recommend to limit the length to 2kb for alignments).

Latest version I found: updated July, 2001, GeneDoc version # 2.6.02.

Drawback: windows only (but has GNU-licence sources).

I added a new video to my Conspiracy theory in gallery.

I am an advocate of the official position: that is, HIV causes AIDS. In the movie description, I put my comments which dis-approve the point set and mentioned in that movie. I would strongly recommend that you stick to the official position in everything that is related to your health!

And now, with all the warnings, you may want to see it (326 MiB):
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