Category Archives: Utilities

Mar 11

Setup Mail Rules to Send Out Of Office Replies to Trash

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If you are on a number of maillist lists, you feel my pain. When you want to contribute to a listserv but are tired on receiving all the junk email associated with various people’s auto-responders for vacation or out of office, you can just go forward and delete all the mail you get telling you that “so and so doesn’t work here anymore” or “so and so will be out of the office on vacation” or you can just trash them through mail rules on your mail client. I will continue to update this post as I tweak the rules to best operate but here goes the first pass at it.

 

Here is a screenshot of my Entourage setup for the rules I detail below but these rules should be able to be created in whatever decent email client or web-based client you are using to manage your email.

Found in Entourage under 'Tools' Menu

Four criteria to dump to the Deleted Items

These correspond to the following rules I am working with so far.

FirstClass Servers
Auto-responders seem to have a “X-FC-MachineGenerated: true” in the header we can grab them via a header mail rule and use to route to trash.

Microsoft Exchange Servers
You can probably pick-off via the Subject line mail rule containing “Out Of Office” or “AutoReply” and dump them.

Gmail ‘Vacation’ Responders
Seems to have “X-Autoreply: yes” in the header of ‘vacation’ auto-replies so a header mail rule on that should do it.

 

If you have other rules you have constructed for these types of email servers or other settings you would like to share please comment. I have always thought of doing a consolidated page on this for general reference and would love some contributions and help.

Feb 12

Desktop Paging Finally Back On Mac OS X

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After the demise of Codetek’s Virtual Desktop a few years ago, many Mac users who love desktop paging and virtual desktops were left with no real options. CodeTek’s software was actually very nice, but they just stopped updating it perhaps due to major OS changes from Apple or the developers disbanded. The website is still up for some crazy reason http://codetek.com/ctvd/ and they continue to sell a product that doesn’t work on OS X versions beyond 10.4. I hope people are not being taken, but who knows.

Apple came out with Spaces in meant to provide some level of functionality along the lines of traditional virtual desktops, but Spaces on it’s own is pretty worthless and more of a hassle then a benefit for many of us who typically have a dozen or so applications running simultaneously and constantly bouncing back and forth. Exposé is another tool that Apple includes as part of the OS starting in OS X 10.5 onward, but again, not very helpful and most just get confused by it.

Enter the newly released Hyperspaces from The Cocoabots. I was dubious that it could provide something close to the wonderful utility built-into all Linux GUIs from CentOS and RedHat to Ubuntu in Gnome or KDE. Good news is that it comes pretty close yet still feels very Mac-like. It works in conjunction with Apple’s Spaces to get me back in business with multiple virtual screens to leave applications open and maximized in their ready positions. The setup with Spaces and Hyperspaces is also aware and capably of handling apps based in X11 and in Windows VMWare apps like Internet Explorer.

Here are some screenshots of my setup -

My only issue would be that I do miss the option to have a floating palette switcher option or to be able to put the switcher in the menu bar full-time. But, this tool is a major, major help for me and I am sure in future versions, more options will be available and the product will continue to improve. It is well worth the $10 though in the OS X App store. If you just want to try it, you can via the website download, but you can only work with three desktops which will not be enough when you really get used to working effectively with desktop paging.

Oct 15

Using Cron In OS X To Restart Symantec Backup Exec 2010 Agent

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Don’t get me wrong, I am happy Symantec finally released a Mac OS X 10.6 Agent for Symantec Backup Exec 2010 but it is a little buggy. So much so, that we feel we really need to just have it restart daily on the OS X servers. Here is what we did. This is just a simple cron job.

1. Login via Terminal or SSH to the OS X server
2. su to the root user (or sudo everything if you want)
3. enter ‘crontab -e’

crontab -e on os x

4. insert (i) the cron information because there will probably not be any existing cron information in there

crontab entry for os x for the VRTSralus.init restart

Then press the ‘esc’ and ZZ to save the crontab out. The above crontab entry will restart VRTSralus.init every day at 12:15. You can set it for any time you wish that makes sense or whatever.

After ESC and ZZ to save out of crontab entry

5. You can check to see if it is actually working by going into the /var/VRTSralus directory and looking at the modification dates of the error logs and pid file.

changing directory to /var/VRTSralus

6. Doing an ‘ls’ you can see the modification date/time of the pid and log files. They both get new modification dates whenever the service is started.

VRTSralus log and PID files

So, having the server restart it every day or so seems to make it run a little more reliably. There might just be something in the code that is buggy and perhaps they can fix it next release.

Oct 13

Fixing issues with Gallery 2 Import to Gallery 3

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http://gallery.menalto.com/

I have used Gallery for over 7 years or so now and really have found it incredibly valuable to have to share pictures with family and friends. I have migrated through many version updates and now that Gallery just released the flashy looking Gallery 3, I wanted to go ahead and move to that. We have a personal image collection of about 12,000 images or so in our gallery that we have been adding to over the many years and knew an upgrade to the new version 3 was going to be a challenge. I moved off version 1 a couple of years ago and was not really happy with version 2 and the various updates so that was another big reason I wanted to get the new GUI tools and look of the Gallery 3 environment.

To upgrade to Gallery 3, you need to really install 3 in a separate directory, create a new database in mysql and get that all squared-away first then enable the Gallery 2 import module and import your existing Gallery 2 setup and albums. This is a departure from previous updates in that you really need to get a clean parellel struture up and running then run the old environment through the import/scrubbing process. Documentation for this is sparse at the moment since Gallery 3 just really was formally released last week or so.

Anyway, so you do that and I what I did was get that all going by creating a mysql db for Gallery 3 data tables and ran the Gallery 3 installer, etc. and enabled the G2 Import, pointed the importer at the old G2 install path and watched as it grinded-away at the import of the 12k or so images. But, after the multiple hour import process was done, it was a mess in that I didn’t have thumbnails of images at the smallest or resized sizes. I checked the Gallery 3 Forum, but not much help yet. So, I thought, let’s just redo the setup and try the import again. I did and was really careful about permissions in the Apache directory where the new Gallery was going to be and everything, but still no dice. I did notice that when I click through down to the full-sized image, it was present – it was just the the small thumbnail and resized thumbnails were hosed (not present).

At the unix-level, going into the new location where G3 wants to put albums – now in (GalleryDirectory)/var BTW, I noticed for whatever reason there were no thumbnails in the album sub-folders. So, went into the Admin area and did all the Maintenance stuff, but no dice either. The generic ‘Fix’ option that goes through the various low-level checks was no help. Also, the ‘Rebuild Images’ came back with zero images for whatever reason.

I was able to get to a solution by kicking-off a rebuild through the Theme Options under the Admin>Appearance menu. If you do that and change your ‘Thumbnail Size’ and ‘Resized Image’ size, it wants to kick-off a total rebuild for out-of-date files. You will get a prompt at the top of the browser window to have the rebuild go. Even if the values are correct, I changed them to a different value, let the rebuild run and then changed them back and let it run again.

Gallery 3 Theme Options Modified

Gallery 3 Image Rebuild

After making the Theme Options changes and kicking off the rebuild you have to sit for a while and it grinds but after, you will get your thumbnails and resized images back. This is something to try in case you make the plunge and your Gallery 2 Import to Gallery 3 doesn’t fully take. I am sure later versions will check for this, but for now it is a workaround.

Oct 03

More On FFMPEG Settings That Work For Me

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After more and more testing off HD video, I am finding the best bang for the download speed buck is sticking with qscale 10 and chopping the frames to 15 while sizing the image size down to hd480. Here is an example -

ffmpeg -i 051810Perf1.m4v -qscale 10 -s hd480 -r 15 -async 2 051810Perf1.flv

Using a standard resolutuon that is based on 16 seems to be the best way to go. There are so many intricate elements to encoding video to flv to try and make it decent quality, but still large while having it load quickly for people with various speeds of broadband!