Mini DV MD80 thumb camera: Usage notes with Fedora 12

So I bought this $10 mini DV camera on EBay. Since the user’s manual is pretty out of sync with itself and the product (Chinese and English doesn’t match, even by looking at the specification and drawings) I’ve written down some basic howto, in case I need to remember what to do at a later [...]

Xilinx “map” tool trimming just a little too much

Sometimes, in particular when working on a relatively new Xilinx device family, the “map” tool fails on several errors like ERROR:MapLib:979 – LUT5 symbol “project/project_core/module/module_empty_user_w_smb_wren_d_O R_201_o_inv1″ (output signal=project/project_core/module/module_empty_user_w_smb_wr en_d_OR_201_o_inv) has input signal “project/project_core/module/module_almostfull_d” which will be trimmed. See Section 5 of the Map Report File for details about why the input signal will become undriven [...]

A perl script sending mails for testing a mail server

Just set up your mail server? Congratulations! Now you should test it. In particular, check if it relays mails to other servers and if the response time is reasonable. Here’s a script for doing the testing. Just edit the arguments to send_mail() to match your setting. #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Net::SMTP; send_mail(’127.0.0.1′, # [...]

Perl script rectifying the encoding of a mixed UTF-8 / windows-1255 file

Suppose that some hodge-podge of scripts and template files create a single file, which has multiple encoding of Hebrew. That is, both UTF-8 and windos-1255. If the different encodings don’t appear in the same lines, the following script makes it all UTF-8: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Encode; binmode(STDOUT, “:utf8″); while (defined (my $l [...]

Setting up a VPS server. It was a bumpy road.

Introduction These are my own notes as I set up an OpenVZ VPS server, based upon CentOS 5.6 to function as a web and mailing list server. A $36/year 128 MB RAM machine was good enough for this. Since there’s some criticism about the hosting provider, and it looks like they’re OK after all, I’m [...]