Inkscape

Vector graphics program, similar to commercial packages like Adobe Illustrator, with advanced editing features and importing/exporting in a lot of different formats (e.g. PDF). The native format is the open format SGV.

Homepage: http://www.inkscape.org/
Developer: The Inkscape Team
Version: 0.47 (November 21, 2009)
License: open source free software
Platform: Linux/Windows/Mac

VirtualBox

There are several available platform virtual machines available. I generally use the Sun VirtualBox. I usually run a Linux server in my Windows-running laptop, using a virtual hard disk for it and accessing it with PuTTY and WinSCP.

VirtualBox is able to run a virtual machine also without an output terminal/window (headless). I use this for my Linux server.

Another possibility it offers is to run a machine booting from a real partition instead of a virtual hard disk. However this makes things quite difficult and is an experimental feature. The hardware found by the operating system will be different in a virtual box and booting as host, so this will lead to several problems. For example I was unable to run a deployed Vista from Linux and I could only run a deployed Ubuntu in Windows with command line interface.

Homepage: http://www.virtualbox.org/

Developer: Sun

Version: 3.0.6 (September 9, 2009)

Platform: Cross-platform

HandBrake

This software comes in hand, when you want to upload videos to a mobile phone or media player. It allows to transcode easily to mp4 format with a good control of options, encoder to use, resizing...

Here is my settings file (user_presets.xml), which I use to convert files to display them in my phone:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ArrayOfPreset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<Preset>
  <Level>0</Level>
  <Name>Mobile phone</Name>
  <Query> -f mp4 -w 400 -e ffmpeg -q 0.5 -a 1 -E faac -B 160 -R 0 -6 stereo -D 1 -m -v </Query>
</Preset>
</ArrayOfPreset>

My settings are: ffmpeg encoding, mp4 container format, aac stereo sound, 50% constant quality, resize to 400px width. Note that to be able to create a preset under Vista you need to start the application with administrative rights.

Homepage: http://handbrake.fr/

Platform: cross-platform

Version: 0.9.3 (Nov 23, 2008)

License: open source freeware

VLC media player

This media player allows to reproduce a wide spectrum of media files. It is extremely flexible and has a lot of advanced features, probably more than any other media player. The graphical interface (which is one of the different interfaces it has) is nevertheless very simple and lightweight.

You can select the GUI language using Ctrl+P and changing the first option in the dialog.

Homepage: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Developer: VideoLAN project
Version: 1.0.1 (July 27, 2009)
Platform: cross-platform
License: freeware, open source

Colors in grep

To turn on colors in grep, you may add --color=auto to the GREP_OPTIONS environment variable. The way to do it is of course shell-dependant. E.g. add the following to your shell rc file:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'

ls colors

add an alias to your shell rc file:

alias ls "ls --color=auto"

Gimp

Gimp is great if you cannot afford on do not want to pay a lot of money for professional software (i.e. Photoshop). According to some it *is* a professional level software, according to other not yet; however it has more than enough features for amateur photo manipulation and other image related tasks (e.g. icon editing, image conversion, resizing etc). The first version was realeased in 1996 by two computer science students (Kimball and Mattis, currently Google engineers).

It is quite complicated to use and probably extreme complicated to master, however it is intuitive enough for simple tasks. Since version 2.6 they invested in an effort to make the interface easier to use (see Wikipedia article). An user manual and documentation page is also available.

If you want a different language than your operating system, here is the howto. In my Vista laptop I wanted the english version, so I did the following: I created a .bat file in C:/users/program files/GIMP2.0/bin (you need admin privileges to write it there) with the following content:

set lang=en
start gimp-2.6.exe

Then I changed the startmenu entry to point to the bat file instead of the exe file (other settings: execute minimized, use icon of the .exe file).

Name: Gimp

Homepage: http://www.gimp.org/

Version: 2.6.7 (August 14, 2009)

License: free, open-source software

Platform: cross-platform

rsync and symbolic links

some possible behaviours of rsync (from the man page):

(1) SKIP:

default case => symlinks are simply not followed

(2) COPY THE LINK:

"symlinks are recreated with the same target on the destination"

rsync --links

also: rsync --archive implies --links

(3) FOLLOW THE LINK

rsync --copy-links

safe/unsafe:

relevant for case 3 is the "safe" vs. "unsafe" difference which I did not understand good.

This is what is written: "An example where this might be used is a web site mirror that wishes ensure the rsync module they copy does not include symbolic links to /etc/passwd in the public section of the site. Using --copy-unsafe-links will cause any links to be copied as the file they point to on the destination. Using --safe-links will cause unsafe links to be ommitted altogether."