No Znx!

October 18, 2010 — The Grand Comics Database today announced that it has posted its 300,000th comic book cover scan.

The 300,000th cover posted to the site was Captain America #248, published by Marvel Comics in 1980, with a cover pencilled by John Byrne and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

The cover scan was uploaded by Ramon Schenk of the Netherlands, a regular contributor to the GCD.

The Grand Comics Database (GCD) is the Earth’s largest repository of indexed comic book information. In addition to its 300,000 covers, the GCD has, to date, recorded more than 600,000 individual comic books and indexed more than 140,000. More than 5,000 publishers from around the world are represented in the GCD.

The GCD is a nonprofit project of international volunteers, with the goal of documenting and indexing all printed comics for the free use of scholars, historians, researchers, and fans worldwide.

The GCD is open to all and anyone can contribute information to the project.

For further information, go to www.comics.org.

(Mike Catron is a volunteer with the GCD and is the author of this press release. To contact a board member of the Grand Comics Database, email to gcd-contact@googlegroups.com)

Sometimes you come across something striking on the internet. An excellent thread on MetaFi is one of those.

Two Russian girls were dead set on going to NYC for a very suspicious job offer. A worried friend of theirs posted a question, the rest you can read for yourself.

Whilst using Firefox I normally use the key press Ctrl+w to close the tabs, however on occasion my fingers strayed into Ctrl+q which, to my horror, quit Firefox!

A quick Google pointed me towards a post on the useful Add-On Mirrors site. I then went to the homepage of the author and installed the nice tool KeyConfig.

A quick restart of Firefox, then open KeyConfig (via Tools > KeyConfig), search for the Ctrl+q key press and disable.

Another restart of Firefox and it’s complete, no more accidental quits of Firefox! KeyConfig is a very nice and simple to use Add-On and will certainly be added to my default Firefox pack from now on, ace!

A friend of mine just recently posted a trick with long hostnames when using SSH. I have commented before many times when I see people making aliases or shorthand’s like this that they just don’t know about the magic that is possible in the SSH configuration file.

Take for example this, imagine having a long hostname, with an odd port and a different user. Typing that would be a pain, most people would do something like:

alias ssh-short="ssh -p 12345 someotheruser@somelong.hostname.com"

In their ~/.bashrc, however the same can be filled into the configuration file. Edit the file ~/.ssh/config (or make it!):

Host short
  HostName somelong.hostname.com
  User someotheruser
  Port 12345

After doing this you can simply do:

$ ssh short

How much easier do you need it to be?!

So I was recently scripting with the unrar tool and discovered something stupid:

unrar t file.rar
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "Rar file is good?"
fi

However it was returning zero all the time, even when the file wasn’t a rar:

# unrar t file.rar
 
UNRAR 3.80 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2008 Alexander Roshal
 
file.rar is not RAR archive
# echo $?
0

So it fails the test but returns zero regardless. This makes it very unhelpful for using in scripting. Fortunately enough a mate on IRC discovered that his version did.

So I first download the existing SRPM and installed it:

# yumdownloader --source unrar
# rpm -i unrar*.srpm

Then I installed that and simply modified so I downloaded the latest, created a RPM and installed.

I have submitted the updated spec file to RPMfusion.