Vitor Rodrigues

If you are into photography, then you should already know that calibrating your monitor is something really important if you plan to print your pictures. I recently printed some photos and noticed that the printed colors were considerably different from the colors on my LCD. After comparing my monitor with a few others, it was obvious that mine, and some of the others too, were not color calibrated.

Monitors can be calibrated to display the “correct” colors by using a calibration device, complemented by the vendor software. I decided to buy the Spyder2Express since it had good reviews and a reasonable price. Unfortunately, there is no color calibration device that is supported on Linux by its vendor and I currently use Linux (openSuse) as my main operative system. I could use my work laptop running windows to calibrate the monitor, then export the color profile and import it in Linux. There is an article here on how to do it. With help from one of the comments in that article, I found about Argyll Color Management System. Argyll is a monitor calibration software package for Linux that supports most of the existing calibration devices. It uses the Windows binary software to create a Linux binary in order to be able to communicate with the device to run the calibration tests and create a color profile. It also provides an utility to apply the color profile to your monitor.

The steps to calibrate your monitor in Linux using Argyll are pretty simple. In my case, using the Syper2Express device, all I had to do was runt the following commands(as root, or give the user permission to communicate with the usb device):

$ cd Argyll_V1.0.3/
$ ./spyd2en -v /media/ColorVision/setup/setup.exe (creates binary file to communicate with device)
$ ./dispcal -v -y l -o MyMonitor (runs calibration tests and creates monitor color profile)
$  ./dispwin MyMonitor.icc (applies color profile to monitor)

The generated color profile can also be imported to your post processing software like GIMP in order to use the monitor color profile instead of using a more common profile like sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Very useful tip from Novel CoolSolutions on how to increase the disk size of a VMWare image: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tip/15344.html

I currently develop mostly in Windows using Eclipse, so I decided to create an openSuse 11.0 vmware image to test some of my code, as our product supports various platforms, including some flavors of Linux. The 10GB disk size soon became too small and now I need to increase it. Here are the steps I had to do:

To resize the guest Os hard disk size, I issued:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 15GB opensSuse.vmdk

However, step 1 only resized the disk, not the partitions. Starting the partition manager from within the guest Os didn’t work, because the partition can’t be altered while it is still mounted. A simple solution to overcome this issue is to use a Live CD. I still had the openSuse live CD ISO image I used to install the guest Os, so I just pointed the guest OS cd-rom drive to that .iso file.

After booting from the CD-ROM drive, go to Yast -> System -> Partitioner , select the partition you want to expand and click Resize. Select the new size for the partition and click Ok to apply the changes to the partition table.

Reboot your machine and voila! You existing partition will now have the new size.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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This seems to be the trouble week. After struggling with Websphere errors, then it was DB2 and now AIX. I changed my password, but at the same time I had an FTP connection opened to the machine using SmartFTP client. It happens that the connection timed out and the FTP client tried to login again.. and again and again… with the old password

Result: account blocked! Message displayed:

3004-303 There have been too many unsuccessful login attempts; pleasesee the system administrator.

Procedure to reset the account:
1.  chsec -f
/etc/security/lastlog -a "unsuccessful_login_count=0" -s username

2. 

chuser
"account_locked=false" username

Popularity: 13% [?]

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One of the things I like to have in VIM is the backspace key working just like in all the other editors. I like the backspace key to delete the characters in in the right-to-left direction and delete also the line breaks when it gets to the beginning of a line. However, most of default vimrc files I find don’t have this enabled. Sometimes the backspace doesn’t delete at all, other times it doe not delete the line breaks…. arghh…

To have the backspace key in VIM behaving just like in all the other text editors,  just add the following line to your vimrc file:

set backspace=indent,eol,start 

Popularity: 25% [?]

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