Kopete supports yahoo webcam and it works seamlessly. Although it doesn’t work right away after installing kopete. If you try to access anyone’s webcam you’ll get the following error.

Unable to find the Jasper image conversion program.
Jasper is required to render Yahoo webcam images.
Please see http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Kopete%20Webcam%20Support
for further information.

You can fix it simply by installing jasper packages available in Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install jasper libjasper-java libjasper-runtime libjasper-dev libjasper1

You can now send and receive anyone’s webcam.

Cheers!

I had a primary NTFS partition with windows 7 installed on it. Somehow, its bootloader went corrupt so I used install-mbr in ubuntu to fix that but it only made the problem worse. Now my system didn’t recognise the partition as NTFS partition and I couldn’t access the partition.

I modified the partition ID using fdisk but that didn’t work. Fdisk recognised it as NTFS but gparted didn’t, nor did Ubuntu. To fix it, I followed the following steps:

The disk should be accessible again now

Cheers!

I had this problem where subtitles were not being shown in VLC. No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t display. I reinstalled VLC but still it had problems. So I removed all the vlc config files to reset the settings and fix the problem.

rm -rf ~/.config/vlc

That fixed it.

Cheers!

Its easy to delete all mails from a label/folder or inbox, but sometimes we’d like to save our starred mails and delete all the rest. The search box in gmail comes in handy in such situations. Its really a very powerful tool with various operators to make the search more efficient. The gmail search really gives it an edge over other free email applications.

I have subscribed to one of the yahoo groups and over time it has accumulated over 9000 mails. I quite frequently star the mails which I like. I wanted to delete the rest. To do that I just typed “label:techgroup -is:starred” without quotes in the search bar and clicked on Search. It displayed all the emails from that label which isn’t starred. Notice the hyphen, it means exclude.

Explanation

Its really simple and I doubt anyone would be needing this section.
label:techgroup means we want to display all the mails from label techgroup.
is:starred means we want to display all starred mails form the label.
But the – infront of is:starred negates what it does. It means we want to exclude starred items from the search results. So we get unstarred mails from label techgroup.

After making the search, click on the checkbox beside the ‘Archive’ button to select all the emails on that page. You’ll get another option just above the search result which would say:

All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search

Click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search’. This will select all the matched results. Click on ‘Delete’ and empty the trash if you want.

Read more about the advanced search in gmail.

Cheers!

Caching is one of the most important things to keep in mind when you are developing a website which is expected to get large amount of visitors. Most web developers neglect caching, some even don’t know correct ways to implement it.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to enable browser cache of static files simply using htaccess file. Basically server adds the Expires header to file-type you specify. Expires header will make sure the browser stores the file locally and use the same file until the time mentioned in expires header has passed.

Before we move ahead, please make sure apache’s mod_expires is loaded. You can check it using phpinfo() under ‘Loaded Modules’ section. If you don’t find it there, you can see this tutorial to enable mod_expires.

Copy the following code and paste it into .htaccess file in your website’s root directory.

# Turn on the Expires engine
ExpiresActive On
 
# Expires after a month client accesses the file
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/x-icon A2592000
ExpiresByType text/plain A2592000
 
# Good for one week
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript M604800
ExpiresByType text/css M604800
ExpiresByType text/html M604800

Explanation:

ExpiresActive On turns on the expires engine. ExpiresByType image/jpeg tells server to check if MIME-type of file is image/jpeg. If yes, set the expires header.
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You can enable or disable any apache module using a2enmod and a2dismod. You don’t need to edit the conf file for that unless you are having some problem with this method. The syntax of these commands is really simple:
To enable a module:

sudo a2enmod module_name

To disable a module:

sudo a2dismod module_name

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We can check the php configuration, apache’s loaded modules and all other kinds of PHP configuration using a simple function called phpinfo(). Create a file called infophp.php in your web’s root directory and put the following code in it:

<?
phpinfo();
?>

This would output all the php configuration info and apache information. You can pass on an argument to phpinfo() to limit what information is displayed. You can checkout the phpinfo documentation here.

PS: This is a beginner tutorial for absolute beginners.

There’ve been lots of times when I wanted to use the mail() function on my local server. I am sure lots of you would’ve been wanting it too but most of you would’ve settled for PHPMailer or just used a web host to test the code instead. I myself had been doing the same until recently when I finally decided to do some research and get it to work.

Here are the steps in short for the geeks who like to do things on their own:
All I did was used smtp client called msmtp, configured it to work with my gmail account and configured PHP to use msmtp to send emails.

This tutorial is only applicable for linux users. I’ll write another article for windows users soon when I get my hands on a windows box.
All the commands used in the instructions are for Ubuntu, however you may use corresponding commands for your distro (for eg; you can use yum install instead of apt-get install on fedora, redhat, centos.

Step by step instructions:

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Msmtp is a small but powerful and highly customizable smtp client. You can access gmail smtp using msmtp, which is exactly what I’ll teach in this tutorial.

Step by step instructions:

1. Install msmtp and ca-certificates for use with SSL:

   sudo apt-get install msmtp ca-certificates

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I came across this simple script on ubuntuforums which I thought was really very useful and worth sharing it on my blog. You can either make a function out of it and put it in .bashrc file or make an executable script and put it in /usr/bin/.

Method 1:

Open your ~/.bashrc file using any editor.

gedit ~/.bashrc

Copy and paste the following code at the end of it:

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extract-file () {
if [ -f $1 ] ; then
case $1 in
*.tar.bz2) tar xjvf $1 ;;
*.tar.gz) tar xzvf $1 ;;
*.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
*.rar) rar x $1 ;;
*.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
*.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
*.tbz2) tar xjvf $1 ;;
*.tgz) tar xzvf $1 ;;
*.zip) unzip $1 ;;
*.Z) uncompress $1 ;;
*.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
*) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via extract-file" ;;
esac
else
echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
fi
}

Now you can use the following command to extract any archive:

extract-file

The command extract-file would be available only to terminals which have been opened after saving the .bashrc file with the above code. Also this code is user-specific, so if another user logs in he cannot use this command.

Method 2:

Use the following command to create a new file in /usr/bin directory and launch the gedit.

sudo gedit /usr/bin/extract-file

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