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These social networks are getting out of control.  read more »

Firefox 3.5 now supports native playing of ogg theora video files. This means you don't need to install any plugins to view them. Just click and enjoy!  read more »

Just in case you missed it, the plenary videos from UDS are now up: http://video.ubuntu.com/uds/karmic/

Tomorrow, July 3rd, we will be recording the next episode of the Linux Action Show starting at 5:30pm Pacific Time.

Immediately following that we will be recording the season finale of CastaBlasta at 7pm Pacific Time.

All, of course, with live video and live chat.  Good times will be had by all.

For this episode of the Linux Action Show, we would love to get some audio feedback to play during the show.  I know many of you have disagreed with some of the things we’ve said in the last few episodes (on Mono, the FSF, Fedora, etc.) … well now is your chance to be heard!  Head on over to the Jupiter Broadcasting Contact page for info on how to send us an audio message (phone, skype and google voice are all available).

Think we’re crazy?  Think we’re just plain wrong?  Or, perhaps, you think we’re the smartest chaps on the whole darn plannet?  Either way, speak up!

I’ll be keeping people posted via Twitter tomorrow as show-time approaches.

So I thought by now there would be a flood of blog posts on the Interwebz by those who already have a Google Voice account making my measly post mute, but I haven’t really seen that many so here’s my .02.  I received my Google Voice invite on Friday evening June 26 and immediately signed up.  Now that I have been using it for the better part of a week it has already started to feel like one of the applications you-don’t-know-how-you-ever-lived-without.  You can read all about Google Voice here so I won’t waste your time spelling out every feature but only mention the ones I have come to appreciate the most.  The first is that you have four chooses when a call is coming in; you can of course, press 1, to answer it; press 2 to have the incoming caller go directly to voice mail; press 3 to listen-in live while the voice mail is being recorded, or press 4 to record the conversation.  Pressing 4 makes the announcement “Recording” so the caller knows they are being recorded.  Somewhat surprising I have also enjoyed the voice-to-text feature that I expected would be klugey at best but has in-fact been very useful and the conversion of speech to text surprisingly actuate.  Also nice is receiving that text as a SMS message on my cell phone.  One thing did catch me off guard and I have not yet found a way to change it is…When someone calls you for the first time Google Voice sees the incoming caller ID as a new caller and asks the person to record their name so when your phone rings you her that person’s name recorded in their own voice…fine; except when, a business, which may have hundreds of lines all sharing one out-going caller ID.  So now when I receive a call from XYZ business it always announced to me as the name of the first person you called me from that number.  There are certain numbers that I would like Google voice to ask the caller each time to record their name so that I know whether I want to press 1 thru 4.  I might even want to do this when several people in a household share one phone, because there are some people I want to answer the phone for and others I don’t.  Anyway I betcha Google will fix that issue pretty quickly, but hey for free I’m not complaining, and unlike Gmail it’s not in Beta

This is a clip from the 1989 Bollywood film “Nafrat Ki Aandhi” staring Amrish Puri (who played Molo Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

Molo Ram singing and dancing?  That, alone, is enough to justify the price of admission for this flick.

But this scene… it is a singing, dancing, He-Man.  Complete with Orko.  I kid you not.

I have added couple blogs here recently and have come to the conclusion that there are just too few of them to fulfill the vision(tm).  Therefor, this is a public plea for all you readers and bloggers out there to go through your list of linuxy blogs you keep track of and ask their authors to become part of the LinuxPlanet.org family!  Oddly enough, a few of the bloggers I really enjoy here have mentioned in passing that they believe their linuxy content somehow not worthy of the site!  Not so!  If you read here and blog about your Linux travels, we want you too!  Just shoot me an email and I’ll get your content right on here as well.  Remember, there are folks if every skill level so no content is unimportant.  We need it all here to make this site something special!

Let’s all make LinuxPlanet.org/Blogs the place to go for great Linux written content!

Let’s all make LinuxPlanet.org/Casts the place to go for great Linux audio content!

Recently at work I had an issue come up where I needed to ftp a multi-gigabyte file up to a vendors site and they had mentioned that their ftp server had experienced problems with receiving such large files. So they recommended that I split the file up into smaller chunks.

Splitting

Here is an example of how I used the UNIX command split to chop the file up. For this example, NOTE: I’m going to use a file that’s ~347MB.

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# file to be uploaded
% ls -l | grep exp_db
-rw-r--r--   1 oracle   dba      347181617 Jun 25 15:06 exp_db.dmp.gz
 
% split --help
Usage: split [-l #] [-a #] [file [name]]
       split [-b #[k|m]] [-a #] [file [name]]
       split [-#] [-a #] [file [name]]
 
# split file exp_db.dmp.gz
% split -b 100m exp_db.dmp.gz segment_
ls -l | grep seg
-rw-r--r--   1 dbapps   staff    104857600 Jun 30 10:14 segment_aa
-rw-r--r--   1 dbapps   staff    104857600 Jun 30 10:14 segment_ab
-rw-r--r--   1 dbapps   staff    104857600 Jun 30 10:15 segment_ac
-rw-r--r--   1 dbapps   staff    32608817 Jun 30 10:15 segment_ad

Here’s the basic form of the split command:

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split [ -b  n | nk | nm] [-a suffixlength] [ file [name]]
 
# -b switch, size of output files where:
# n  = bytes
# nk = 1*1024 bytes
# nm = 1*1048576 bytes
 
# -a switch: the number of letters to use when creating a "chunks" suffix
# (defaults to 2, e.g. aa, ab, ac, ... )
 
# file: the file you want to split
# name: the prefix portion of the name of a "chunk" of the split up file

Joining

And here is the command to join the segment_* files back into the original.

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# example join command
% cat segment_* > exp_db.dmp.gz