umask determines what permissions any new files or directories will have by default. Like file permissions, it historically takes an octal value (e.g. ‘umask 002′), but can also symbolic values (e.g. ‘umask a=rx,ug+w’). I’m going to just focus on the octal values.
Read more…
Here’s a bunch of programmer jokes – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke
If you should happen to need to know the current time as a unix timestamp, try http://www.unixtime.se/. Alternatively typing
date +%s
at a convenient command line might be faster, and more accurate…
With any Linux Standard Base compliant distro (Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc…), there is an easy way to find its version number, and code name.
FFmpeg is an open-source command line utility for performing audio/video file conversions. It can be used to simply convert straight from one video format to another, or to crop, pad, rescale, change bit-rates, merge or split out audio and video, and so on…
I only came across this command fairly recently. It’s a simple command, but immensely useful.
The watch command is used to run a given command at a predefined interval, and to monitor the output in real-time until the watch command is terminated. When run, it initially only displays the first output of the given command, and then only updates it if something in the output changes.
It seems to have been a long time coming, but finally an alpha version has been released. Although it’s an alpha, it’s still a vast improvement over the 32-bit version which I’ve used up until now with the aid of NPS Wrapper.
Andreas has produced a cladogram (tree diagram) showing the timeline and relationship of probably every known Linux distribution. You can see the latest version of the diagram (v7.6) here, or visit the homepage http://futurist.se/gldt/.
Linux Outlaws is a weekly podcast, primarily about Linux, but also covering other open source goodness. The hosts of the show are Fabian Scherschel in Germany, and Dan Lynch in the UK. The show is presented in a humorous, laid-back manner, and fills the gap left after the demise of LUG Radio.
A remote Windows PC can easily be shutdown, assuming you have Samba installed on your Linux box, and you have a user account on the Windows PC that has the necessary rights.
