7zcat

Sometimes you just want to "grep" someting in a compressed text file, but it is too big to be decompressed and then processed. This is why I love zcat and bzcat: I could decompress and pipe it on the flow to grep/awk/whatever, but unfortunately I do not see a 7zip cat like.

7zip is so awesome because I got better and faster compressions using it, but it's command line options are too many and hard to remember, so I put this alias in my ~/.bashrc:

alias 7zcat='7za e $@ -so 2> /dev/null'

Do We Need a New Internet?

After reading the NYTimes article "Do We Need a New Internet?", I can't stop laughing about the ingenuous opinions expressed there.

The real issue isn't the Internet security, but the security flaws at the most used Operational System. The communication layer is not responsible for keeping the user data at his computer secure, but the OS is. What we really need is more secure and less bugged OS, but wait, we already have this! So, if the computer users want security, they should choose an alternative OS and not giving up their freedom because of obscure excuses...

Install Ekiga 3 on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

I always was worried about Skype closed-source code, but after reading this article about "NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution", I became almost paranoid... Happilly there is nice and free open-source apps availiable, like Ekiga.

Ekiga is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application, using H.323 and SIP protocols, suporting many audio and video codecs. You can read some good reviews here and here.

lit2pdf: Convert Microsoft Reader .lit ebooks to PDF

The .lit files are Microsoft Reader proprietary ebook files, but you can convert them to HTML with clit (ConvertLit). To install clit from source, follow this tutorial (or just download this and this .deb compiled versions and double-click them to install).

After installing it, you can use this script that convert the .lit to .html and open it with firefox browser. At the browser, you can "print" them as PDF or just save the HTML, if you want.

I've made this script to install everything and also create an lit2pdf script to make things easier:

doc2odt: Converta seus documentos para um formato aberto e padronizado

Que tal converter seus arquivos do Microsoft Word pro OpenOffice? Utilizar um formato internacionalmente padronizado tem uma série de vantagens, sendo a principal delas você ter a possibilidade de abrir seu documento no programa que preferir:

dmesg fun: endless printing like "hacker movies"

Did you notice that every Hollywood movie that show some guy hacking in a deep-voodoo-programming-frenesi has some cool stuff being printed in a lot of black-green terminals? And that nonsense lines are printed so quickly that only the "hacker" can read??

When I'm programming or analyzing logs, the line-breaks flow slow and boooring... The closest thing is when I'm compiling something with 'make'. So I was thinking: why I can't have my own hacker-like cool printing to impress my girlfriend by pretend doing important stuff?

Yes I can!

Then i wrote this (useless) command to print a infinite looping dmesg in a black-green terminal: