Tuesday 10 February 2009

Bulk file renames

I was always using shell scripts to do mass file renamings. But now there are definitely simplier tools exist. One of them came to my knowledge recently is rename. It is standard tool and does the most simple and common task—replace one substring with another in filenames.

Second useful tool is convmv. It not only allows to convert filenames between different encodings, but also to convert between upper and lower case.

Also mmv deserves mention. It could do replacement basing on pattern.

Monday 9 February 2009

RPM verify and restore capabilities

Good that RPM could verify files (-V option) and restore permissions and owner modes (--setperms and --setugids keys). More here: How to reset the permissions of the installed rpm packages with --setperms option. It allow me to repair part of root filesystem with accidentally changed owner.

Saturday 7 February 2009

Typographic layout

Finally, typographic layout has been included into xkeyboard-config release 1.5 that is available in rawhide now. It enables access to symbols like «, », ©, ≠, —, … from keyboard which is very convenient for typing web texts.

Unfortunately, something makes it non-working when selecting from gnome keyboard config dialog. So, I had to add typo typo:2 to xkb_symbols from setxkbmap -print output and put call of setxkbmap in autostartup programs. Resulting command line is:
$ setxkbmap -symbols 'pc+us+ru(typewriter):2+inet(evdev)+group(shifts_toggle)+level3(ralt_switch)+typo+typo:2'

Yay! I have typographic symbols in both English and Russian layouts switched with AltGr.

Friday 6 February 2009

Interpretation of old paintings

Pierre Carrière-Belleuse. La place Pigalle in Paris. 1880.

I’m not frequent visitor of museums, but was recently here in Gallery of Impressionists. And it is interesting how old paintings could be interpreted.

For example, this picture. It clearly looks for me as picture from some pseudo-3D isometric computer game. Really, it has broken perspective close to isometric; it has level of detail—only near people have detail faces; it has sprite-alike layout—carriages and people are moving mainly parallel street edges.

Hmm… my mind is too computer-aligned. Need to go for a walk… :)