Resizing

My first thought was that I could use Gimp, but alas it does not by default have a batch conversion process. There is a plug-in called “David’s Batch Processor”, but it doesn’t allow you to specify just the X or Y dimension by itself.

The resizing tool I went for was ‘mogrify‘, which is a command line utility with awesome image manipulation capabilities. Since I wanted to get all my landscape format images down to 400 pixels wide, I just entered the following command:

mogrify -resize 400 *.jpg

For the portrait images that I wanted to all be 400 pixels high I entered:

mogrify -resize x400 *.jpg

Renaming

Once I had all the images resized, I wanted to set the names of my preview thumbnails to end ‘_pre.jpg’. It turns out that this is very easy to do with the ‘rename’ command, which was written by the creator of Perl – Larry Wall. The command is included by default with Debian and Ubuntu, and is easily added to other distros.

Just supply ‘rename’ with a regular expression, and it renames your files as required. The important part of the command parameter is:

's/ [pattern to match] / [what to replace it with] /'

To rename my images I just entered:

rename -v 's/\.jpg$/_pre\.jpg/' *.jpg

To test the command without actually renaming anything, just change ‘-v’ to ‘-n’.

For more information on the ‘rename’ command see http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-bulk-rename-files-in-linux-in-the-terminal

For example if you create a new directory with umask set to 022, the resulting permissions are set to 755, since 777 – 022 = 755.

Most of the time umask is set sensibly from the beginning, and you don’t have to worry about it. If you do need to change it, you’ll probably find it being set in one of your login scripts – ‘/etc/profile’ or ‘~/.bashrc’.

For more information just check the man page.

date +%s

at a convenient command line might be faster, and more accurate…

Because it can now running natively on a 64-bit architecture without the aid of a wrapper, it has a smaller memory footprint and is vastly more stable. With the 32-bit version I usually had to restart Firefox at least once a day to free up some RAM, or just to get Flash Player working again.

To get your copy, just go to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Just enter the following command, where ‘thehostname’ is the hostname of the remote PC, and ‘theusername’ is a valid user account on the remote PC:

net rpc shutdown -S thehostname -U theusername

If the hostname is not known, or cannot be resolved, then use the following instead, where ‘123.123.123.123′ is the IP address of the remote PC:

net rpc shutdown -I 123.123.123.123 -U theusername

For more information on the command, just enter the following:

net help shutdown

Additionally, the parameters that can be used with Windows’ own shutdown command such as ‘-f’ to force or ‘-t’ to set a timeout, can also be applied to the net rpc shutdown command as well. For example the following will wait 60 seconds, and then force all running programs to terminate before shutting down:

net rpc shutdown -S thehostname -U theusername -f -t 60

As root, simply enter the following command, where ‘cd1.iso’ is the name of the ISO image file, and ‘/mnt/cd’ is an existing directory:

mount -o loop cd1.iso /mnt/cd