Ivan Zlatev » Linux

PicasaUploader 0.3: Batch Image Scaling/Resizing

Ivan Zlatev — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:53:57 +0000

I have just released version 0.3 of my PicasaWeb Uploader tool. The new things are:

High quality batch image resizing/scaling on the fly prior to upload.
Memory usage performance improvements.

Get it from (and also for more information): http://i-nz.net/projects/picasauploader

Photo Resize

MS Office 2007 SP2 OpenDocument Support

Ivan Zlatev — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:43:17 +0000

This seems to have gone unnoticed but Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 introduced native support for loading from and saving to the OpenDocument file format. So I went ahead and opened my OpenDocument final year project which is a 57 pages document with custom styles, formatting, frames, images, embedded diagrams and spreadsheets and more. The results was pretty bad and the resulting document was unusable for me. Basically only the text and bullet points were displayed properly and at least the following were broken:

No page breaks.
Wrong Frame size and placement, including caption
Wrong image size and placement, including caption
Extra spacing for Headings surrounded by borders
Merge with next paragraphs ignored
No embedded drawings/speardsheets.
Table content placement not preserved.
More quirks

I suppose for people who work with simple text documents the support for OpenDocument might be sufficient though. I for one am not going to rely on the ability to safely open my work documents with Word 2007 or such produced by Word 2007 in OpenOffice.

Who is to blame? Is OpenOffice not following the OpenDocument standard well or is it Word 2007 interpreting it badly? Gotta love standards! I am looking forward to see both office suits interoperating nicely together some day.

The test documents:

Some screenshots:

VirtualBox Windows 7 Glory (starring Mr. Seamless Mode)

Ivan Zlatev — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:01:45 +0000

VirtualBox in its full glory…

Windows 7 running in VirtualBox seamless mode

Nokia E71 as a USB or Bluetooth 3G Data Modem on Linux

Ivan Zlatev — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:23:12 +0000

1.) Install wvdial
2.) Add the following to /etc/wvdial.conf and adjust it for your operator settings:

[Dialer nokia-usb]
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 3600000
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2
Init3 =
Modem Type = USB Modem
Area Code =
Phone = *99#
Username = ppp
Password = ppp
Ask Password = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Force Address =
Idle Seconds = 0
DialMessage1 =
DialMessage2 =
ISDN = 0
Auto DNS = 1
New PPPD = yes

[Dialer nokia-bluetooth]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 3600000
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2
Init3 =
Area Code =
Phone = *99#
Username = ppp
Password = ppp
Ask Password = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Force Address =
Idle Seconds = 0
DialMessage1 =
DialMessage2 =
ISDN = 0
Auto DNS = 1
New PPPD = yes

3.) For USB when you connect the phone set it to “PC Suite” mode (else the modem won’t appear) and then:

su -c "wvdial nokia-usb"

4.) For Bluetooth, where ### is the Bluetooth Address of you phone

su -c "rfcomm release 0; rfcomm bind 0 ### `sdptool search \
--bdaddr=### dun | grep -i Channel | cut -c14-14` && wvdial nokia-bluetooth"

5.) Workaround for broken newer versions of NetworkManager where the DNS won’t be set properly can be found at http://seife.kernalert.de/blog/2008/12/11/using-dialup-with-111-if-networkmanager-does-not-handle-your-device/