Fixing Thumbnails in Nautilus

If you are like me and many other internet users, you’ve probably downloaded movies with one P2P program or another.

If you did that downloading while using Nautilus and Gnome, you might have noticed that Nautilus fails to produce Thumbnails for downloaded movies, presenting the film-roll Icon instead.

What happens here, is that Nautilus attempts to generate thumbnails for files as soon as you enter the directory that contains them, when it comes to files that are only halfway-downloaded it fails for obvious reasons.

The problem is that when Nautilus fails to generate a thumbnail, that failure is noted down somewhere, and therefore Nautilus does not attempt to regenerate the thumbnail once the file is fully downloaded.

Viewing Nautilus script parameter values

I’ve been working on some Nautilus scripts recently, and I’ve found that it would be easier if I could inspect the values that Nautilus passes to the scripts, so I wrote a little script to achieve just that, I hope you’ll find it useful if you ever set out to write a Nautilus script.

Code Gaess: Lelouch of the Rebellion

Ok, so what do we have here:

• Mechas wrecking havoc in the city: Check.
• Mysterious girl to make her appearance in key event: Check.
• Motivated but self-doubtful teenage male characters to pilot the Mechas: Check.
• Main character mysteriously better at piloting Mechas then anyone else: Check.
• Long time friends find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict: Check.
• Super-Mecha to end all Mechas presented to the world: Check.
• Bad guy with vague morals and sexual orientation: Check

Awesome EscapePod today

I just finished listening to the special Christmas story EscapePod released yesterday, and while I’m Jewish and live in Israel where this time of a year isn’t a time of holidays at all for most people, I find myself deeply appreciating this story.

This story brought tears to my eyes.

I won’t go into details about the story itself, because I want everyone to just go and listen to it, but I’ll just say it made me happy for the fact that humanity is still too young to have to come to terms with the harsh, dark and cold reality presented in this story.

Last but not least, I also enjoyed the very amusing closing song.

Deleting files as root in Nautilus

I’ve just seen the title of this post in my blog stats as search-term hit to my blog, and while they guy searching didn’t find his answer here (He got directed to my Nautilus Garbage Bin post), I decided to make sure the next one searching for that will find a decent answer.

I must admit that I firmly believe that root’s work should be done from the command-line, however, if a guy insists on doing it this way, well so be it, this is, after all, Linux, the OS of the free…

So basically I can see 2 ways of going about deleting files as root with Nautilus:

Cyrano de Bergerac is a girl! and her name is “The World”!

But really, other then that fun title-ish tidbit, I can’t find anything interesting about School Days.

After its description on AniDB as being based on a famously violent game caught my eyes, I sat down and watched the first three episodes of the series, thinking it may have an Elfen Lied kind of twist right around the corner.

But no, all I’ve seen so far was a rather stretched-out, kitschy, love story, and well, I’ve seen Kare Kano, this one doesn’t come close, nor does it manage to be funny.

So, another series down the drain, I’m starting to run out of ideas, anyone care to make a recommendation?

The value of source code

While this article cites some valid, and rather well known and understood reasons for one to prefer open source products over closed-source ones, for me the value in source code is in far simpler reasoning:

Given the following facts:

1. All software today is released with bugs, even ones that have been discovered during the development process and are well known to the developers.
2. Software vendors are unwilling to commit to the applicability of their software products to any task, indeed they are usually not even willing to commit that no harm will come to the software`s user from using it to the purpose for which it was made.

It is clear to me that the only means left for a consumer of software to guarantee some kind of long-term value in the software for oneself is to have the source code, and therefore be able to adapt or have it adapted to one’s purpose without being dependent upon the whims of the original vendor.

Not Gonna Watch Futakoi

While this series has a name that sounds like a promise for a rather hard-core Hentai series (In fact, I think I once came across a really “H” site named just that), in reality, Futakoi the series is a rather down-to-earth series in the Harem-Anime genre.

In fact, after having watched the first couple of episodes, I have to admit that the series is so down-to-earth that I can find little if any reason to watch it.

I admit I’m not very fond of the Harem-Anime genre, but in this case I think even avid fans of the genre will be hard-pressed to find anything special or interesting about the series, the twins element is supposed to make it interesting, but for me, it just seems like they were looking for an excuse to draw every female character twice…

Oracle prerequisites Puppet recipe published

I’ve been intending to do this for a while and finally found the time, without further ado, I present to you my Oracle prerequisites Puppet script.

I do hope someone out there will find this script useful, I know I do.

There are many ways this script could and should be improved:

DHCP Trouble on Debian

Here is one annoying little problem with Debian I do believe should have gone away years ago.

I’ve just finished installing a new machine on my home network with Debian 4.0, since I use “dnsmasq” as a combined DNS/DHCP server on my network, the installation had no trouble using DHCP to pull an address for my new machine, however, following the installation I tried connecting to the new machine from another machine using it’s hostname, since dnsmasq is configured to automatically register its DHCP clients in DNS this should have just worked, alas, it didn’t.