Abbas | Bassu » Life

Mother India – copyrights?

Abbas — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:56:56 +0000

While I was listening to the song ‘Dunya mai aey ho tou jina hi paray ga’ (you’ll have to live if you came in this world), I came across to one of the finest technicolor prints of Mother India movie. The original source of print of the legendary movie is unknown but yet one of the bests I’ve ever seen so far! As old movies’ copyrights are a lot gloomier than the modern ones, I’ve decided to share this movie as I couldn’t find any recent copyright owners or any proclamation for this film despite searching. It was released in 1957 and is first Indian movie to win an Oscar. I’m going to post a link of it soon by the end of this weekend or as soon as I get some time.

Cheers.

Messy Mesh

Abbas — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 07:24:07 +0000

Just a teaser of being messy I can literally pinpoint each cable for where its going and what it does

Arabian Beer Goggles

Abbas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:58:34 +0000

Lol, just kidding. Its about a new beer I’ve ‘discovered’ after being in search for an alternative to Arabian Moose Beer for a long time since it had gone missing speaking of scarcity of brewery brands no more than few available here, at the place I live!
Its called Barbican and keeps some history with it!

Its pretty awesome and a friend of mine just made it more awesome. She said, “Barbi Can!“.
Lol, what a name!

Total Rsync Progress

Abbas — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:13:30 +0000

If you use rsync frequently, you might be aware of the fact that rsync doesn’t show overall or total transfer statistics when you’re syncing directories recursively. Even options like ‘–progress’, ‘–stats’ and ‘-vv’ won’t do that. I was searching for that, was about to write a script to run in dry-run mode and measure an overall rsync progress but found a patch here written by Graeme Humphries. This patch later was incorporated into latest dev version 3.1dev downloadable here at http://samba.anu.edu.au/ftp/rsync/dev/nightly/ with an option invokable by ‘–info=progress2′.

Excerpts from the man pages:

There is also a --info=progress2 option that outputs statistics based on the whole transfer, rather than individual files.  Use this flag without outputting a filename (e.g. avoid -v or specify --info=name0 if you want to see how the transfer is doing without scrolling the screen with a lot of names.  (You don't need to specify the --progress option in order to use --info=progress2.)

So, I downloaded, compiled and installed this dev version and guess what now, there’s no creepy scrolls in shell console filling up the screen with individual file progress.
Yea, I know Red Hat and CentOS are slow in updating their packages repository but lets hope when this build is final, Dag’s repo may have an rpm for it.

Easiest way to create selfsigned certificates

Abbas — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 06:22:23 +0000

For Linux its going to be with tool ‘genkey’ – a part of crypto-utils package available in Red Hat distros.

# genkey servername

And for Windows, easiest way to do is with SelfSSL available in IIS 6.x Resource Tools.

Cats in an international airport!

Abbas — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:55:10 +0000

Just came across this snap in my cell’s pic gallery which I took at Zia Intl. Airport. Funny!

Mail from root, root and root! :>

Abbas — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:40:04 +0000

I’m sometimes pretty sick of getting emails from ‘root’ reporting crons, updates, errors and rest of things I would usually use daily in any Linux machine. My eyes just get sore when I see email from root in all of my email clients specially Gmail. Perhaps that’s because I’m fed up of seeing root everywhere and that’s why I’ve an alias for root to forward all these rootish emails to one of my email addresses. But that’s just not enough as I actually want to see a humane human name as a sender just instead of root :>

To add to it, this just becomes more anguish when common, rather I would say major, Linux applications suck in changing the default sender address off from ‘root’ (although some apps like ‘exim -f’ and mutt having SET FROM defined in ~/.muttrc allow you to change sending address while emailing from command line but this isn’t what I needed). And so called mighty default MTA, sendmail just brings more panic to it when trying to change it during an in-mail transport (btw, I already dislike sendmail mainly cause of its sluggishness during startup and restart)! As I really had to do something about it and I already knew that Exim’s address rewriting can be helpful here so after installing it and changing default MTA with ‘alternative –config mta’ I added a quick rewrite at transport.

$ grep -A 5 remote_smtp /etc/exim/exim.conf | tail -5

driver = smtp
headers_rewrite = root@*  some-email-address@example.com fsr

This worked but didn’t change the FROM field’s name as expected. I tried combinations of different settings including the rewrite tag ‘F’ but the FROM envelop address kept showing the original sender root. I was searching till I stumbled upon http://www.exim.org/exim-html-2.00/doc/html/spec_32.html#SEC671 where it states the FULL ‘from’ envelop address is changed with ‘w’ tag and allows to have a new sender name (RFC 822) to be configured. So I added.

$ grep -A 5 remote_smtp /etc/exim/exim.conf | tail -5

driver = smtp
# Adding to rewrite the stupid root@ FROM field which I hate
headers_rewrite = root@* "Abbas " fsrw
return_path = some-email-address@example.com

And boo you naughty (!) root