Had the need recently to generate a bunch of thumbnails for some PDFs we had. ImageMagick to the rescue.

for P in `ls *.pdf`
  do echo $P
  outfile="thumbs/`echo $P|cut -d . -f 1`.jpg"
  convert -quality 50 -geometry 64x82 $P[0] $outfile
done

The [0] tells it to …

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Dell sent me another one of their catalogs recently, which included this entry. You can get Windows Vista, or a “bonus” of an Windows XP Professional downgrade. I have nothing left to add.

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Bob (from marketing): I have this great new idea for our product!

Joe (from engineering): Lay it on me!

Bob: Let’s make our product easier to use! People will love it!

Joe: OK, we’ll need three months to develop and test that feature.

Bob: Great! We’ll start …

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I recently installed the Jaunty/KDE3.5 remix. I had some interesting issues in that I was trying to install on an existing LUKS/LVM setup. Whole-disk encryption on LVM rocks, but if the installer doesn’t support it, you’ll have to fiddle to get things working right.

It …

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Today I was trying to figure out how to ssh into one system, and then automatically ssh into another system. The logical way:

ssh user@outside_host "user@inside_host"

wasn’t working. The logs on both inside and outside hosts would show a connection, but I would get no prompt. I …

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So today I discovered that my first ever contribution to an Open Source project was accepted. Before I was let go from WordStream, my boss was having me work on a feature addition to Buildbot.

I was allowed to contribute that addition, under my own name, and today that change …

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So, my contract with WordStream has ended, and I am now in the ranks of the unemployed. If you know of any programming or system administration positions you could point me to, that would be greatly appreciated!

My resume is linked over on the right side of this page. Feel …

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I had this conversation this morning via a random AOL IM sent to me:

(10:09:04) AtypicalCoho: If you respond with an away message containing a phone number, I will laugh… then rickroll you by phone. (10:10:08) Me: I am not available. If you need to contact …

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[The meat of this post was actually a reply to a UAF (Univeristy of Alaska Fairbanks) LUG (Linux User’s Group) mailing-list thread a few months back. It’s been reworked for this blog post. In addition, this post was moved from my person blog, jjncj.com where it was …

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Over on his blog, Raphael Pinson has a post about creating a package with “minimal dependencies.” In short, make the dependencies of the package the “real” dependencies, not just the latest and greatest version of the package you rely on.

I have been waiting way too long for someone to …

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