Tidbits from the Tech Corner

• Let’s say you have a mysql install whose data you want to relocate somewhere else. I’ve done all that garbage with mysqldump-ing everything, but I seem to always have problems with column names being illegal or some such. Today I just copied the data directory with

  cd [old data dir]
  tar -zcf mysqldatabases.tar.gz data
  mkdir -p [new data dir]
  cd [new data dir]
  tar -zxvf [old data dir]/mysqldatabases.tar.gz

  (be careful with those permissions, but tar will preserve them on the data directory so you probably won’t have to do anything.) This worked, and only took a couple of minutes, and I didn’t have to dick with giant .sql files. (source)

• I had to take a bunch of Postscript files and concatenate them yesterday. Of course, Unix makes this easy and profitable.
  

  cat *.ps > all.ps

  Took all Postscript files in the working directory and built a single file out of them. This might be useful with some video formats as well–this source recommends usage with .mpg files.

• I’ve talked about the GIMP before, but I was about ready to bin it after using it at work over the last couple of months. The damn thing kept crashing. Luckily, I didn’t have a modern image editing tool on my computer at home and when I needed to do some graphics work there, I decided to give the GIMP one last try. The current version is very slick and feature-ful. I’ve done some fun things with it, and once I had such a good experience at home I upgraded to the latest version at work and have been happy there too.

  There are a ton of tips and tricks for the GIMP within easy reach of a Google search. A couple I’ve used recently are putting a nice coloured border around text and creating a neon sign effect with text. Here’s how the latter turned out:

  

  And as always, GIMP is free.

2 Comments »

1. Yeah. MPEG files (at least most of the variations) are packetized. They’re a stream of little discrete segments of audio and video.

   And PostScript files are just little interpreted programs, basically. They’re text, you can read them.

   Comment by Jared — 4/20/2009 @ 8:28 pm

2. Sure! Editing .ps is fun.

   I remember when the schematic capture tool we used wrote its data in ascii files. I didn’t know how good I had it until we went to a binary package. The page numberer went from a couple dozen lines of csh to a giant gcc/API piece of garbage.

   Comment by Dave — 4/21/2009 @ 4:14 pm

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