ObjectClarity.com

I’m running Ubuntu 10.04LTS on my desktop at home and while there’s a year left on updates, my Thunderbird was telling me that it’s about to stop receiving security updates. While I typically don’t care about installing all the latest and greatest (as is obvious by my 10.04!), I don’t want to be using ‘old’ software either. I thought I’d investigate what’s required to update to the latest Thunderbird mail client.
As it turns out, it’s pretty easy.

We simply have to add the Mozilla repositories and re-install it. Below are the commands required to update your Thunderbird. It took only a couple minutes!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install thunderbird

Ever wanted to know what Oracle roles your oracle user has? This simple query will offer up a complete list including the objects and privileges for each as specified in the role.

SELECT a.role, a.owner || '.' || a.table_name tbl,
       a.column_name,
       a.privilege,
       a.grantable
  FROM role_tab_privs a, dba_role_privs b
 WHERE a.role = b.granted_role
                 AND b.grantee LIKE UPPER (USER)

Obviously it requires that you have a catalog role that allows you access to:

While on vacation my Canon 17-85 IS USM lens started giving me Err01 messages. It turns out it was a cracked aperture control cable, a fairly common problem with this lens.
I was able to locate a replacement aperture cable assembly at Global Electronic Supplies Team.

YG2-2169-010 POWER DIAPHRAGM ASS’Y

After reassembling the lens, everything works as it’s supposed to and in fact the lens feels better because there’s less ‘slop’ in the barrel.

Here are my pictures from the disassembly.

This is an honest-to-God snippet from a published User Guide for some technical documentation I’m reading. This is a user guide for some pretty sophisticated software but apparently they have a low expectation when it comes to their user base.

Navigation through the steps is accomplished by clicking on the Next and Back
buttons found at the bottom of each of the wizard panels. The Next button takes you to the next panel. The Back button takes you to the previously displayed panel. Navigating backward using the Back button will not cause you to loose any entries already made.
A Cancel button is available on all of the wizard panels. Click Cancel to close the wizard discarding any changes.
Click Finish to close the wizard saving any changes that have been made. No changes are saved until the Finish button is pressed.

I’m offended that they feel the need to write for me as if I’m stupid and left feeling a lack of respect for it’s publisher.

Note: I edited slightly to remove any product name references. If you need to know who it was, just ask me.

Every now and then I run into a site that has some explicit CSS styling on an element that really doesn’t fit with the site design. If the site is a one-off or ‘custom’ website, that’s easy to change but when it’s a 3rd party product or one that will need upgrading at some point, making changes to many files removing an explicit style is an unpalatable option.

I was working on a site that contained this bit of HTML in *many* files and having bits of red text splattered all over the website looked horrible.

<span style="color: #900; font-weight: bold;">

The last two times I ran into this I was able to fix the problem with a little JQuery script in the site header.

// Tweak span colors without modding all files in the website
$(document).ready(function () {
$('span').each(function(i){
if ($(this).css('color') == "rgb(153, 0, 0)") {
$(this).css('color', '#000');
}
});
});

The code above simply goes through all the Span’s in a page and checks the color that’s applied and if it’s Red (rgb(153, 0, 0)), it gets replaced with Black.

I expected to be able to see the colour change some time after the page rendering had completed but it’s fast enough that you never see it.  Perfect!

Coming back from a recent vacation I have reams of images and several video clips that are in serious need of editing. I thought I’d try using PhotoStory as my kids use it at school and I haven’t heard the end of how great it is and easy to use blah, blah blah. Problem is it’s a Microsoft product. That in itself isn’t so much of a problem but Microsoft has the gall to question the authenticity of my Windows license just for the pleasure of downloading the latest (2005!) version of the app. After jumping through the required hoops and installing countless service packs and the obligatory reboot, I got the software installed.  After a quick look around I realize that it won’t import videos and has a limit of 300 images.   Ok, we’re done here.  I have over 500 images and several videos.  That was the whole point of looking for something that could make a nice clean video compilation.

Enter OpenShot for Linux.

OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor for Linux. OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats. Check out the full feature list, view screenshots, or watch videos of OpenShot in action!

Now I’ve tried other Linux video editors and spent my share of time with iMovie on our mac but I didn’t expect quite this much.  It’s fast, simple yet capable and super easy to use.  In an hour of fiddling I didn’t run into anything it couldn’t do for me and I didn’t get bogged down with features I didn’t need.  Overall I’m very impressed.  Grab the latest build and give it a shot.  You’ll be uploading home movies to YouTube before you know it.

I’ve recently seen an influx of spam on several of the sites that I run. This led to a closer investigation of the default settings in Spamassassin.

You can automatically delete messages marked as spam. First set the number of hits required before mail is considered spam.

(Note: “5” is the default setting. The lower the number, the more conservative the setting.)

The description in CPanel isn’t as clear as it could be so I had to look further.

The numeric value is the measure at which Spam gets deleted.  Messages are assigned points based on how ‘spammy’ they appear.  Given that piece of info, the lower the number, the fewer messages get through.