Curioso!

Often sites display larger images split up in tiles of e.g. 256×256 pixels. The tiles can easily be retrieved using e.g. curl. The full image can be reconstructed using ImageMagick montage:

montage +frame +shadow +label -tile NxM -geometry +0+0 *.jpg joined.jpg

where N is the number of horizontal tiles and M is the number of vertical tiles.

Network File System

Client

• Remount NFS mounts on Mac:
  sudo kill -1 `cat /var/run/automount.pid`
• Mac OS X as an NFS Client
• In Leopard the above does not work anymore, netinfo has been replaced by Directory Utility.

Server

• To map all access to a single uid/gid, put this line in /etc/exports:
  /x/d *(rw,all_squash,anonuid=101,anongid=100)

While setting up my openSUSE 10.1 system, I encountered a lot of “stale NFS handle” problems when accessing my server from a Mac. It appears this is a known bug, Stale NFS handles with kernel 2.6.16.21-0.13 , which requires a online update to the kernel.

My new Linux server will have an AMD Sempron 3000+ CPU, but my MSI RS482M-IL motherboard would not recognize this processor, the BIOS was too old. I did not build in a floppy, so the normal flash procedure does not work. Googling showed up some alternatives of doing this via CD. Free DOS did not work, but the following did:

• Burn DOS 6.21 on a CD.
• Burn the BIOS image and flash program on another CD.
• Boot from the DOS CD and note on which letter the CD drive is mounted, for me it was R:.
• Type R:
• Exchange the DOS CD with the BIOS CD.
• Follow the BIOS flash procedure.

The following command selects a random picture from the directory for the current year, copies it to the file random.jpg and stores the path in file.txt.

#!/bin/sh
cd $HOME/public_html/images
year=`date +\"%Y\"`
file=`/usr/X11R6/bin/xscreensaver-getimage-file --name $year`
cp $file random.jpg
echo $file > file.txt

It can be used to generate a random background image by e.g. running it as a hourly cron job.