Want to show off some mad bash skills while impressing hot babes and being the envy of your friends?

Then have a look at the bash goodness I laid on my linux neophyte friend. About about an hour ago he wanted to convert a whole directory of home videos (stored .wmv format) into .flv and thumbnails for upload to his site.

He had the option of using WinFF. But after playing with it for a while he realized it could not make thumbnails for him. So he called me to help.

First I showed him how to generate a thumbnail for each video file, then create flash versions of each of the videos using for loops and ffmpeg.

... or accountability.

I think every Linux user has committed the cardinal sin of working as root when they should not have been as they were cutting teeth on the OS.

I know I had my colossal blunder when typing the ill fated command at 'rm -rf ./*'  while I was root. Furthermore - I really sealed the fate of my workstation at that time because I was currently in /etc! Only after the command had finished and the command prompt was blinking at me again did I start to get that sick cold and sticky feeling in my gut. I realized what I had just done and hoped there was a way to undo it.

I had a a IRC session currently open and was idling in the #linux channel. I let my fellow Linux users know what I did and asked what the solution was.

I have never seen so many 'LOL's before or since. After all the laughter had finished they confirmed what I knew in my heart of hearts to be the stone cold truth .... I had LOBOTOMIZED my OS. Nothing left to do except stop the sobbing and get to re-installing.

Linux has no undo. Like other *nix OS's, it assumes that since you are bright and brave enough to login to it as root, then you are big boy ( or girl ) enough to take your lumps if you do something stupid.

In a production web environment that has several web servers, databases and mail daemons running countless domains, having a cool set of utilities is key for monitoring, logging and debugging.

A number of scripts I have written can have a 'testing' parameter handed to them so when they are run with that parameter set they will echo out all kinds useful information. Most of the time sending this to a log file for parsing later is good enough. But, sometimes I have a need to watch it as it happens while still writing the output of my script to a file.

Here is where the command 'tee' comes in very handy.

From the man page 'tee' is defined as follows:

 'tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files'

Simple enough, eh? You bet it is.

For instance, let's say I have written a script called uber-leet-script.sh, but I want to watch the output as it runs and still log the output to a file called 'uber-leet-script.out'. Just for simplicity, we will assume both the script (which I have chmod'd 755) and the file I want to log the output to are in the same directory.

I would run my script like so from the command line:

$ ./uber-leet-script.sh | tee ./uber-leet-script.out

Once I hit enter, I see all the output. Sometimes the bug in my script will be blatently obvious in what I see from the output and I can just CTRL-C it on the spot. Other times it may scroll past so fast and I could miss the telling bit of output. No problem there because I have the file, uber-leet-script.out to parse through until my heart's content.

Okay, it's been almost ten days since Google announced their Chrome OS. Ever since that date, all I seem to see on the IT news, geeks sites and blogs is wild speculation as to what the big G's strategy is going to be to beat the snot out of Microsoft on the desktop market.

Frankly, I am tired of seeing all the reading all the drivel by industry speculators that seem to dismiss or are completely ignore a few key truths about the desktop computing market.

The first thing these armchair industry watchers seem to miss is what Google put out there in plain black and white:

 "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies."

First, I want to point out something many people seemed to miss: Linux kernel.

All of those millions of users that would have no idea how to be productive without MS Office apps? I know - I work with about a dozen of them, and if their office products does not say MS on it somewhere with a stupid paperclip talking to them when they fat finger the wrong key - they are lost and forget how to tab their way through the simplest spreadsheets. Last time I checked, MS does not build office, Access, Power Point or any of their other garbage productivity applications for the linux kernal. So for the herds of office workers around the word will not be running anything but windows anytime soon.