Make Firefox New Tabs Always Open On The Far Right

In versions of Firefox previous to 1.6, new tabs opened up at the right end of a list of tabs when you middle-click or ctrl-click on a link.  After the 1.6 update, the Microsoft approach to opening tabs was adopted which keeps these "related" tabs closer to each other by opening up new tabs right next to the current tab.  To revert this behavior back to the pre-1.6 days, do the following:

• Browse to about:config and accept any warning.
• Search for tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
• Toggle it from true to false
  

Converting 3gp Video Under Ubuntu

I was given a pair of video recording sun glasses for Christmas which records pretty poor quality video onto some internal storage.  Worse, it records in a very difficult to work with 3gp wrapped mp4 implementation.  Here's how I convert those video files into something a little more workable, Mpeg4/AAC wrapped by an mp4.

First, you may need to install a codec to even be able to read these files: (Change Karmic to whatever version of Ubuntu you are using)
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/karmic.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list;sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install mplayer w32codecs non-free-codecs mplayer libavcodec-extra-52 amrwb amrnb  libopencore-amrwb0 libopencore-amrnb0libamrnb3 libamrwb3

Here's a command to type to convert these files.  The following will convert starting at 2 minutes and ending after 5 minutes of time (7 minutes into the original):

ffmpeg -i Vid0004.3gp -acodec faac mp2 -ab 128kb -ar 22050 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -ss 00:02:00 -t 00:5:00 output.mp4

Book Review: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

I took a vacation to Michigan two weeks ago, and a few days before leaving, I purchased a Barnes & Noble Nook.  This was the first full-length book I put on the Nook.

First of all, the Nook is a decent PDF reader if you are reading a lot of narrative.  But, you can't use the device to "zoom" into a page that has a lot of code because the only "zoom" functionality the device has is a selector to change the font which causes code to re-flow and become unreadable.  I solved this little problem by cropping the PDF on my computer before loading it onto the Nook.

Now, the review:  This book was great.  The narrative was descriptive and not overly-complex.  Having read the book cover-to-cover (as it where given it was a PDF on a Nook) without walking through any of the examples left me feeling like I could take on a small Hadoop project and know where to go to do it right the first time.  Additionally, I gained a much richer understanding of distributed programming using MapReducers as well as some of the tools build on Hadoop.  There was a chapter for each of the following tools: Pig, HBase, Zookeeper, plus a chapter on use cases that introduced Hive, Nutch, and Cascading using real-world examples from developers at well known companies actually using Hadoop such as Yahoo, Facebook, and Last.fm (CBS).

I recommend this book to anybody who needs an introduction into MapReduce to anybody who wants to actually build a Hadoop cluster.  Some of the information required my pre-requisite Computer Science background in distributed systems, networking, etc (specifically the Algebra of network typologies) and a good understanding of Java (to read MapReduce job illustrations) to comprehend.

Book Review: Confessions Of An Economic Hitman

I admit that I only got 1/2 way through the book and I couldn't take it any more.  It's complete conspiracy theory trash, most of which is founded on unsubstantiated psuedo-facts.  I wanted to get into it, but I kept asking myself, "How does he even know that's true".  He doesn't. 

Trash.

Zooming PDF files for Nook.

I just got a Barnes & Noble Nook.  It's a great little reader based on Android with a standard e-ink display and an additional LCD display for navigating quickly to the book and page you would like to read.  The most annoying feature was it's handling of PDF files.  If I chose the font "small" I got a full page display of the PDF as if it were a small print out.  Any larger font caused the PDF to be improperly re-flowed - severely re-aligning source code such to make it completely unreadable.  Worse, the "small" font preserved the thick book-like margins found in the original PDF, which caused the text to be uncomfortably small.  What I wanted was to zoom into the page, cropping out the margins.  Here's how to crop out the margins using a PC:

1. Install pdfedit.  Under Ubuntu, it's found in the Synaptic Package Manager for one-click installation.  Under Windows, the installation process is quite involved.
2. Open your e-book in PDF edit. 
3. Choose page->edit page metrics (alt-p, d)
4. Adjust the top four boxes until the PDF is cropped the way you want it to be for the current page by changing one at a time, and applying it to the page.  Don't worry, no data is lost, and you can always just change the number back if you make a mistake.
5. Once you are sure that the numbers are set the way you want them, adjust the bottom two boxes to change all pages (Apply from = 1, How many=999999999).
6. Before doing step 2, you may have to open pdfedit and before opening a pdf, delinearize your PDF using the Tools->delinearize option to open the original pdf and re-save it to another file. 

Finally, if pdfedit has any other trouble opening the file, the PDF may be damaged.  Under Ubuntu, I use the command pdftk to repair my file.  Pdftk is available in The Synaptic Package Manager.  Here's the command:

pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf

Converting CHM to PDF for the Nook

Here's what I do to convert a CHM file to a PDF file for reading on my Nook using Ubuntu.

First, install chm2pdf using the Ubuntu software installer.  Next, from the command line, use the following command:

chm2pdf --bottom margin5 --left margin5 --right margin5 --top margin5 --book chmFileName.chm

And, if I get an error, change the --book to --continuous

Book Review: The Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith

I listened to this book on Libravox.  The reader did a great job, and I recommend the book to anybody who wants to read the father of Classical Economic's seminal work.  By today's standards, this would definitely be considered a "dry read".  In this multi-volume work, Smith lays out the definitive argument against mercantilism, the prosperity of a nation is dependent upon its supply of capital to the world economy.  This over-simplistic view gave way to classical economics, and the modern supply/demand method of looking at macroeconomics and microeconomics.