KMFstudio

I’ve updated our development/backupserver to ubuntu intrepid, but unfortunately, mounting of external harddrives became a pain. Off the shelves, gnome in intrepid only allows root to (auto)mount external drives (way to go guys! make linux even more user unfriendly!).

To solve this issue:

1. Open polkit-gnome-authorization
2. Go to Storage => Mount file systems from removable drivers
3. Press the “Edit…” button
4. Choose “Active Console: Authentication” and chose the appropiate setting (I just gave every known user full RW-mount permission)
5. Press the “Modify…” button

rant:

Really, linux and especially ubuntu had been working for years to make Linux acceptable for the broad audience. With the netbooks revolution, a lot of people became familiar with Linux. So how can you do such a change that pisses the common people off? This much trouble to get some external drives working? Really?

I’ve just wasted an hour trying to figure out why some code didn’t work on a webserver. The code is getting some info from the database, which is replicated from a master database. I was selecting new data, which weren’t on the slave due to replication errors.

I just did this in mysql

SLAVE STOP;
SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1;
START SLAVE;

This way, they slave would skip the erroneous query and continue. Of course, the database won’t be in sync anymore. But since it was a dev-server, it doesn’t matter.

A small handy trick which I always forget.

To have mail to your linux-account forwarded to another address, just create a file in your direct called

.forward and type your preferred emailaddress in it. That’s all.

nano ~/.forward

I’ve patched rasterfarian to 2.5.2

Changes:

• Option to select shades of grays (if you use the old eink-screen, chose 4, if you’re using the vizplex screen use 8.
• Batch functionality works. (earlier versions will corrupt the TOC)

Notes:

If you’re using manga2ebook’s unsharp and contrast normalize settings, you might want to consider using 4 shades of gray. Otherwise the contrast could be too high and you get jagged text, if the fonts are really small.

The batch functionality only works if the PDF-files are in different directories. To use the batch, just start another instance of rasterfarian while one instance is running.

Install rasterfarian 2.5.1 and overwrite the directory with the patch. A new installation version will be released by the end of next week.

The patch

I’ve made this version of manga2ebook awhile ago, but never bothered to release it as I thought that there weren’t many people interested in the tool.

The comments made by users recently and me obtaining the new Sony Reader PRS505 urged me to release the new version anyway.

Here it is, Manga2Ebook 1.0.3

.net install version. You need to have imagemagick and .net2.0 installed

http://kmfstudio.com/downloads/Manga2Ebook1.0.3.rar

And the binaries version, with imagemagick included

http://kmfstudio.com/downloads/Manga2Ebook_ImageMagickIncluded.rar

Changes?

Added:
Increased speed.
Added unsharp mask option. This will create a sharper image which result in sharper contrast when pulled through rasterfarian
Added a “clear” option to quickly clear the filename.

Added features, but not fully tested:
Added crop option. Just type in the pixels you want to cut off the 4 sides of the image. Useful in conjunction with split.
Possible to split images into two. Useful for archives which has 2pages in one.

Due to a computer mishap, I lost the most recent version of manga2ebook, I’ve reprogrammed it from an older version and added a few enhancements too.

Now available here:

Manga2Ebook2

changelog:

• added batch-feature
• contrast/normalize image setting (higher contrast)
• custom filefilters
• settings are saved upon exit
• resize option “no aspect ratio” added (it will resize the image based on width AND height: maximum usage of the screen)

I’ve recently got my hands on a new Ebook-reader (the Sony Reader) which uses the Eink-technology. Electronic paper if you will. With this technology, an image is built up electronically onscreen. But after the initial image-creation, the screen won’t use any (electronic) power anymore. Because it doesn’t have a backlightit reads just like a real paper (newspaper quality)
Besides power consumption, the resolution, or better said, DPI is very good too. 166, this can be compared to a printout from a inkjet printer.

IMO, this technology would be mature in a few years, therefor I wanted to see the potential and become an early adapter to see how it could benefit our further development.

(i’ll write a review in later posts)

For this gadget, I’ve made a C#-program which would convert a collection of digitized comics and manga into a PDF-file which eventually can be used on an electronic reader device.

Because it’s written in C# you’d need to install .NET 2.0 (if you haven’t already.)

Also, it need the image manupilation power of the free and powerfull ImageMagick. Download and install the files here (or get the package which has the files included). Chose for the ones named -Q16-windows-dll.exe

This program can be found here:

base program

program with imagemagick-DLL included

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I’ve migrated our image server from apache to lighttpd, it certainly feels a bit faster, but preventing hotlinking is not as easy as with apache.

The standard documentation only tells you how to deny access to images when hotlinked, but I want people to know that they’re hotlinking images. So I needed any hotlinked image to be responded with a “don’t hotlink”-image.

It was a bit of struggle trying to find the right syntax, but I finally succeeded. This is doing it’s work great


$HTTP["referer"] !~ “^($|http://(.*)?kmfstudio|afspot\.com)” {
$HTTP["referer"] !~ “^($|http://(.*)?asianfanatics|afspot|hkadb|afmag\.net)” {
url.redirect = (
“(/.*\.(JPG|jpe?g|png|gif))$” => “http://kmfstudio.com/hotlinking/hotlinking.jpg”
)
}
}


Because our fileserver is getting inefficient for the insane traffic that our network is generating, i’ve rented a new server to test out lighttpd. However I found out that each time logrotate is run, the lighttpd-process will be frozen.

I’m now changing the logrotate-script. Instead of the usual “reload”, i’ve changed it force-reload. If that doesn’t work either, i’ll have to do a restart…

This is how /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd looks like now

/var/log/lighttpd/*.log {
daily
missingok
copytruncate
size=100M
delaycompress
rotate 7
compress
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
if [ -f /var/run/lighttpd.pid ]; then \
if [ -x /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d ]; then \
invoke-rc.d lighttpd force-reload > /dev/null; \
else \
/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload > /dev/null; \
fi; \
fi;
endscript
}

I found that the wp-cache is actually not working very well. So i gotta disable it. Here’s how
Open up wp-config.php. And add the following lines:

// Cache disabled. Comment out to enable.
define('DISABLE_CACHE', true);

Now it won’t try to create a cache.