Get your pics and media files under control

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Time for another Cool Tools entry, and I have a great one for you if you have any amount of pics and even videos sitting around. It’s a tool called XnView, and it’s available for a bunch of operating systems; Windows, Linux, MacOS to name a few. It’s an awesome picture manager, providing a fast and pleasant interface to thumbnails and even basic image editing tasks. It makes slide shows easy, and can create web pages, and more. It can even thumbnail and play your movies too! There are lots of features in this tool, and it’s free. You gotta love free software, but don’t forget that someone put lots of time and effort into this, and authors love good feedback, compliments and donations that help keep them writing the software we all love.

Now, I am a dad, and I have over 8,000 pics and videos of my kid to take care of and manage, and she’s not even two yet! The point is, XnView makes browsing, viewing, and even some editing a breeze. It has become my default media tool, and has been for years. I highly recommend this, even for the Picassa users out there. Picassa is great, but I don’t think it can hold a candle to XnView unless you are using the Picassa web services to which it joins right up with. So, go check out XnView today!

Create a file of arbitrary size

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Have you ever needed to create a file of a specific size? Not where the contents are anything specific, but you just need a file that is whatever size so you can test disk I/O or network transfer speed or whatever it is you want to test. For whatever reason, I have found it very handy to be able to create these test files when needed, so I thought I would pass along some tips to that end. Here are some ways you can accomplish this with Solaris and Linux.

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Way too much information

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I found an article today that I thought might be worth mentioning. It’s an interesting, if not scary read to say the least, but mainly I wanted to use it’s content as an example or reason for some of the stuff I preach here. The article is from ars technica, a great site, and it provides some sobering information about data loss. In fact, they tally up some numbers to find that in under three years, 159 million personal records have left the building. Yep, you read that right. Where am I going with this? Well, this is exactly why you would want to follow good system administration practice and secure your servers, you know actually manage them. Keep your data safe, use common sense, follow the rules and don’t break the rules just because it’s more convenient to leave telnet running and have a root password of dog. You for sure don’t want your own data captured by the nasties, and when you take hold of some customer’s data, you are taking the responsibility to keep their data safe too, as if it were your own. Don’t wind up a statistic, secure those servers, and in the words of “Madeye” Moody, practice constant vigilance!

Working with cpio files

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Have you ever downloaded a cpio file and wondered what the heck you were going to to with it? I get them from Oracle all the time, and the first time I downloaded one I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In the end, I found that working with cpio files is a breeze, so I thought I would pass on some information that might help.

Ok, just what is a cpio file? A cpio file is an archive, and it is a concatenation of one or more files. Each file in the collection contains a header optionally followed by file contents as indicated in the header. The end of the archive is indicated by another header describing an empty file named TRAILER. There are two types of cpio archives, differing only in the style of the header. ASCII archives have totally printable header information, so, if the files being archived are also ASCII files, the whole archive is ASCII. By default though, cpio writes archives with binary headers.

How do we work with these archive files? Easy. Here is an example, say you download a gzipped cpio file:

  • First, download filename.cpio.gz and use gzip to uncompress.
  • Then use cat filename.cpio | cpio -icd to extract to contents.

There you go, when you are done, the contents of the cpio file should be extracted to where ever you put the cpio file and ran the command. If you want to create an archive, you can pass a file list, like with find to the cpio command and have it create an archive, much like tar does. In my own experience, I prefer tar, but if you have cpio and don’t have tar, it’s better than nothing! Check out this page for more details, a nice article from Linux Journal.

Download Internet Explorer 6

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Here is a tip that may help some of you out there that are working with Windows and Internet Explorer, which can get kind of quirky at times. I don’t know about any of you, but I have found it rather annoying that I can’t download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft’s website, other than the online installer that downloads as part of the install. Well, here is a way to use that installer to download the source files so you can perform an off-line installation, which has been useful for me sometimes.

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Sun and IBM make a deal that helps Solaris

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It appears that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to help Solaris adoption by supporting it on many IBM servers. This could really help Sun and IBM both, and from someone who is deeply entrenched in Solaris (ableit on the SPARC platform), I think this is great news. As much as I love Linux, nothing I have seen can scale as large or run as well as Solaris. Linux is great, and works for many things, but when you need big systems, Solaris and SPARC work wonderfully. Now, one note is that if it fits the situation, Linux clusters have proven very powerful. Check out the article.