/usr/bin/picasa: line 189: 14526 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) “$PIC_BINDIR”/wrapper check_dir.exe.so
/usr/bin/picasa: line 248: 14642 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) “$PIC_BINDIR”/wrapper set_lang.exe.so

BOOM! Picasa works again.

If you are wondering what did the trick ? Picasa tries to use its own wine installation. RedHat reckons its not a bug as it is using a different wine ( here) . So make sure you install wine from fedora and use it to launch Picasa . Thanks to the guys at “Man vs Technology”

From: http://www.manvstech.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

You want to use Linux and OpenSSH to automize your tasks. Therefore you need an automatic login from host A / user a to Host B / user b. You don’t want to enter any passwords, because you want to call ssh from a within a shell script.
How to do it

First log in on A as user a and generate a pair of authentication keys. Do not enter a passphrase:

a@A:~> ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/a/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory ‘/home/a/.ssh’.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
3e:4f:05:79:3a:9f:96:7c:3b:ad:e9:58:37:bc:37:e4 a@A

Now use ssh to create a directory ~/.ssh as user b on B. (The directory may already exist, which is fine):

a@A:~> ssh b@B mkdir -p .ssh
b@B’s password:

Finally append a’s new public key to b@B:.ssh/authorized_keys and enter b’s password one last time:

a@A:~> cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b@B ‘cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys’
b@B’s password:

From now on you can log into B as b from A as a without password:

a@A:~> ssh b@B hostname
B

A note from one of our readers: Depending on your version of SSH you might also have to do the following changes:

* Put the public key in .ssh/authorized_keys2
* Change the permissions of .ssh to 700
* Change the permissions of .ssh/authorized_keys2 to 640

Thanks to Mathias Kettner

Of these i find Mondo Rescue the most interesting let me play with it and get back  soon.

Our connected world

Apart from this you can use SipXecs which itself supports a range of hardware but the work involved to set this up is much more complicated . Go on have a play with it

VoiceXML (VXML) is the W3C‘s standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It allows voice applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser, VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser. A common architecture is to deploy banks of voice browsers attached to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) so that users can use a telephone to interact with voice applications.

While HTML assumes a graphical web browser with display, keyboard, and mouse, VoiceXML assumes a voice browser with audio output, audio input, and keypad input. Audio input is handled by the voice browser’s speech recognizer. Audio output consists both of recordings and speech synthesized by the voice browser’s text-to-speech system.

More info from http://www.vxml.org and http://www.voicexml.org

VoiceXML example

VoiceXML has the following advantages

• Leverage of the World-Wide Web and of its capabilities.
• Latest developments in computer-based speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis.
• Spread of Internet to everyday life

Another important mention is Automatic speech recognition (ASR)systems .

Over the phone, and with no speaker training, a speech recognition system needs to be given a set of speech grammars that tell it what words and phrases it should expect. Recognition over mobile phones in noisy environments, while problematic, can be improved with a new technology called distributed speech recognition, where the early analysis is done on the handset. Advances are also being made in speech synthesis, or text-to-speech (TTS). They can be hard to listen to, and at times even incomprehensible. But newer TTS systems are much more lifelike – they use a technique called waveform concatenation, in which speech is generated from libraries of pre-recorded waveforms.

Why is VoiceXML important ?

First, the phone is important. There are over 1.5 billion phones in use, far more than there are Internet-connected computers. Phones are easy to use and don’t need to be booted up. Telephone networks are much more reliable than data networks.

Second, voice is important on the phone. Voice has always been the natural mode of communication for phones. Even though some mobiles have WAP/XHTML browsers, their small screens and keypads make micro browsers hard to use, especially while driving. The i-mode system is more compelling, though shares the same limitations.

Automatic speech recognition or computer speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term “voice recognition” is sometimes used to refer to speech recognition where the recognition system is trained to a particular speaker – as is the case for most desktop recognition software, hence there is an element of speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, to better recognize what is being said. Speech recognition is a broad term which means it can recognize almost anybody’s speech – such as a call-centre system designed to recognize many voices. Voice recognition is a system trained to a particular user, where it recognizes their speech based on their unique vocal sound.

Both acoustic modeling and language modeling are important parts of modern statistically-based speech recognition algorithms.  Modern general-purpose speech recognition systems are generally based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM). These are statistical models which output a sequence of symbols or quantities. One possible reason why HMMs are used in speech recognition is that a speech signal could be viewed as a piecewise stationary signal or a short-time stationary signal. That is, one could assume in a short-time in the range of 10 milliseconds, speech could be approximated as a stationary process. Speech could thus be thought of as a Markov model for many stochastic processes.

If you feel like developing your own application download the CSU Toolkit. It is a comprehensive suite of tools to enable exploration , learning and research into speech and human-computer interaction.

Applications best suited for VoiceXML

Information retrieval(IR) is a good example for VoiceXML. In such an application the audio output tends to be a pre recorded infromation. Voice input can be a few browsing commands or a whole street address , it can be simple as well as quite rich. Let us consider using this IR application for weather information , where people can call a number and use post code as a commands to retrieve the weather forecasts. Unified Messaging is another example where emails can be read over the phone , outgoing email can be recorded . Directory assistance applications also work well with VoiceXML, this is already demonstrated by many telecommunication providers.

What is the future for Voice XML

The W3C is trying to ensure a VoiceXML standard is available to ensure interoperability between different implementations of VoiceXML can execute the same content the same way. There could be standardised audio playback controls . Speaker verification is a major security concern that needs to be addressed to ensure the authenticity of the messages. Support for multimodal markup standards is also a proposed solution.

Or

find / -type f -size +200000k -exec ls -lh {} \;

route add default gw 210.x.x.x bond0.604
route add -net 172.31.0.0/16 gw 172.31.9.1

Bonding . What is bonding ?

It is combining interfaces  wherever you need redundant links, fault tolerance or load balancing networks. It is the best way to have a high availability network segment. 802.1q VLAN support is a very good example of bonding .

There are different modes or types of bonding

mode=1 (active-backup)
Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond’s MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the behavior of this mode.

mode=2 (balance-xor)
XOR policy: Transmit based on [(source MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC address) modulo slave count]. This selects the same slave for each destination MAC address. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

mode=3 (broadcast)
Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

mode=4 (802.3ad)
IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.

• Prerequisites:
  • Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed and duplex of each slave.
  • A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Most switches will require some type of configuration to enable 802.3ad mode.

mode=5 (balance-tlb)
Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

• Prerequisite: Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed of each slave.

mode=6 (balance-alb)
Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the server.
Also you can use multiple bond interface but for that you must load the bonding module as many as you need.

Based on the above decide which is the bonding you need.

Check if the module is loaded using

#modprobe –list | grep bonding

/lib/modules/2.6.18-92.el5/kernel/drivers/net/bonding/bonding.ko

# modprobe –list | grep mii

/lib/modules/2.6.18-92.el5/kernel/drivers/net/mii.ko

This should return values and now edit the modprobe.conf

# vim /etc/modprobe.conf and append the following

alias bond0 bonding

options bond0 mode=1 arp_ip_target=192.168.52.1 arp_interval=200 primary=eth0

Want to know more about the options

#modinfo bonding

load the module

#modprobe bonding

#modprobe mii

Now edit the following files bond0 , eth0 , eth1 .

bond0 is a copy of eth0 without the hardware address and ip address

# vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

DEVICE=bond0

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

IPADDR=192.168.52.4

USERCTL=no

GATEWAY=192.168.52.1

TYPE=Ethernet

IPV6INIT=no

PEERDNS=yes

#vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

MASTER=bond0

SLAVE=yes

USERCTL=no

TYPE=Ethernet

#vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

DEVICE=eth1

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

MASTER=bond0

SLAVE=yes

USERCTL=no

TYPE=Ethernet

Once done restart the network .

#/etc/init.d/network restart

Check the status of the bonding

cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

Requirements  Centos 5.3 , NICs that support bonding and 802.1q (VLAN) , ethtool and mii-tools installs . If you dont have the latter two use yum to install it .

reference:

• http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bonding
• http://www.howtoforge.com/network_card_bonding_centos