Merging pdfs

ImageMagick package has a tool called convert which can easily merge pdfs. so if you get tutorials that have a file each for a chapter , then just use convert
convert chapter1.pdf chapter2.pdf tutorial.pdf

and you get a combined pdf of all the chapters :)

Padma for firefox

I'm a regular reader of the Madhyamam newspaper but couldn't ever read its online version because of some font incompatibility with firefox. That was till I found out this plugin padma.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873

Now I can happily read all the malayalam websites without any problems. Thats one more reason to go for firefox. Flexibility like never before.

FTP troubles

We have an FTP server where we've disabled active FTP , so we often get complaints from users about being unable to use the server. Normally we just reply to specifically use passive mode, but we recently got a complaint from a user with a snippet of his output of the ftp client where he specifically mentions passive ftp and still gets a 550.
I set detailed logging on my vsftpd server using these parameters in the vsftpd.conf

log_ftp_protocol=YES
xferlog_std_format=NO

and started monitoring the vsftpd.log file.
It started showing me that despite the client showing me an output saying that the PASV command was issued, it was reaching us as PORT. On further investigation , we figured out that the person was using an ftp proxy and it was probably modifying the commands.

Ripping VCDs

Copying vcds on linux is a bit tricky. The normal cp and mv doesn't work.
So we need to rip the cds. Here's how to do it using mencoder
mencoder vcd://1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o Song1.avi

If you need to rip the multiple files, you can put in a small loop

for i in `seq 1 10` ; do mencoder vcd://$i -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o Song$i.avi; done;