installing mplayer

sudo apt-get install subversion; mkdir -p ~/downloads/mplayer; cd ~/downloads/mplayer

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

Download codecs.

Build.

More work needed here.

NFS mount ls shows user numbers not names

Machine 1 has user, `me'. `$ id me' shows 1004 as `me' was added as a user late in the life of the machine.

Machine 2 has user, `me'. `$ id me' shows 1000 as `me' was the first user added.

`$ sshfs 192.168.1.100:/home/me ~/remoteme' mounts the remote location ok but attempts to write to the remote drive fail with permission errors.

Attempting the same process with `$ sudo mount' generates the same result.

Setting NEED_IDMAPD=yes in /etc/default/nfs_common made no difference.

`$ls -lha' at the local machine to view the remote drive shows no user names, only numbers. The numbers indicate 1004 as the owner.

So, move the remote `me' user from UID 1004 to UID 1000 by logging into the remote machine as a user other than `me' and executing,

`$ usermod -u 1006 olduserat1000' to free up UID 1000

then

`$ usermod -u 1000 me'

Simplest latex example?

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\section{A section}

Hello world.

\end{document}

hard drive benchmarking

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda
[sudo] password for you:

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.02 seconds = 88.88 MB/sec
$

Compression using parallel cores.

pbzip2 I think. Detects number of cores automatically and uses them.

Examples:

to come!

An alternative: pigz sounds interesting.....

funny characters in mutt or midnight commander mc

In .bashrc use,

export LANG=en_US.iso88591

Possibly better approach:

export LANG="C"

scanning web data with python

page = urlopen("http://www.whatever.org")

text = page.read().decode("utf8")
start = text.find('findThisText')