Finally there is a very good color scheme program for Linux: GNOME Colorscheme. There are numerous commercial offerings for Windows like e.g. Color Schemer and there are some Web tools like e.g. Color scheme and Color Scheme Generator 2, but a native Linux version was missing.

I managed to install the latest colorscheme version 0.3.1 under Gentoo Linux with this ebuild file:

inherit gnome2

DESCRIPTION="Tool to display dialogs from the commandline and shell scripts"
HOMEPAGE="http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/"
SRC_URI="http://download.gna.org/colorscheme/0.3/${P}.tar.bz2"

LICENSE="LGPL-2"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~x86"
IUSE=""

RDEPEND="=dev-cpp/gtkmm-2.6*
         >=gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.0.0
         >=dev-cpp/gnome-vfsmm-2.6.0
         dev-libs/boost"

DEPEND="${RDEPEND}
        dev-util/pkgconfig"

DOCS="AUTHORS ChangeLog NEWS README TODO"
USE_DESTDIR="1"

gtkmm-2.6.* needs to be unmasked in /etc/portage/package.unmask. If you simply unmask gtkmm in /etc/portage/package.keywords, then portage wants to update to the very latest gtk+. This was not, what I wanted to do.

die Boys sind wieder zu Hause abgeliefert. Steffen hat sich direkt ins Bett begeben, um den nicht genossenen Schlaf nachzuholen, damit er dann auch um 18:00 Uhr am Jugendgottesdienst teilnehmen kann. Im Prinzip ist alles cool verlaufen. Ich musste nur um 3:00 Uhr morgens einmal ins Wohnzimmer telefonieren, um für etwas mehr Ruhe zu sorgen.

Eine weitere Geburtstags(nach)feier ist am Start, mit Übernachtung der Gäste. Heute feiert Steffen seinen 14. Geburtstag mit seinen Freunden nach. Wie letztes Jahr ist eXtreme Video Gucking angesagt. 5 DVD’s aus dem Verleih stehen zur Verfügung.

I’m currently in the process of fixing up some photos, I took during the somewhat belated celebration of the birthday of my 11 year old daughter with her friends. For some shots I used a flashlight and even though the flashlight is quite a bit off the axis of the lens under normal circumstances, this time due to the usage of a tele zoom and quite a distance to photographic object I still had plenty of red eye. I tried a couple of methods to remove the red eye, but I mostly found them awkward to.

After some search on the Internet, I found these two links: “Remove Red Eye — Red Eye Reduction Done Right” and “Red-Eye Elimination“. They both work according to similar principles. I like them both since they both allow for very easy corrections once you painted a bit to far. You only paint in the layer mask with either black or white. And another good thing is, that the method can be used for “The Gimp“.

“How To Remove Red Eye in Photoshop (any Version)” also works quite well.

Heute habe wir Jara’s 11 Geburtstag nach gefeiert. Insgesamt wurden 11 Girlies von einer Animateurin des Ahorn Sportparks für 2 Stunden sportlich unterhalten.

Jedenfalls haben wir schon mal einen Vorgeschmack davon bekommen, wenn die Mädchen, wenn sie noch etwas älter sind, kreischend beim Anblick von z.B. Tokio Hotel dahin schmelzen. Ich dachte, nur meine beiden Mädchen würden sich mit entsprechenden Lauten äußern, aber da muss wohl in der Natur der Mädchen liegen.

The award for the best software of the week goes again to Knoppix and to the included ntfstools suite without whose assistance the process of changing two disks wouldn’t have been so easy and successful.

Since I recently invested in a Hauppauge WinPVR 150 card and my Windows PC was still running on an old Maxtor 30Gb disk, some new additional disk space was required. Additionally I wanted to move from the Reiser file system to the SGI XFS file system on my Linux box (the reason being, that I experienced some performance problems in the past with very large multi media files on ReiserFS, at least with pre 4.0). So I wanted to give XFS a try.

Anyway, I bought a nice 200Gb disk drive (SP2014N) from Samsung and installed it as the second drive in my Linux box. Then I booted the Knoppix CD, partitioned the new drive, made XFS file systems and moved the Linux data over with one large find / -mount | cpio -pdumv /path to drive. After seeing the slow progess I aborted the first copy process and looked at the IDE parameter settings with the hdparm command. I noticed, that the DMA transfer mode wasn’t activated. So, remember activating the disk DMA transfer modes, when doing some intensive disk I/O under Knoppix. After that, the performance was as expected. Then I copied the Windows Home Edition NTFS file system to the new partition with ntfsclone. This also went well, except that I did the mistake to not start the Windows partition at the very same cylinder as the originating partition (the old partition started a cyl. 6, while the new began at 1). The new Window partition wouldn’t boot unless I moved the start of the partition also to cyl. 6. BTW, I used install-mbr as the new master boot record. So another lesson learned: be carefully to start the Windows boot partition at the same location as the old partition. In the end, the switch from the 160Gb to the 200Gb Samsung on my Linux box went very smoothly.

Then I installed the 160MB drive as the second drive in the Windows box and again booted into Knoppix. The move from the 30Gb Maxtor drive to the 160Gb would have went just as smoothly, if I hadn’t forgotten to activate the boot flag for the Windows partition. So here some additional reboots were required until I remembered to set the boot flag. After fixing this, this switch of drives was also quickly completed.

Now you can understand, why I have so warm feeling towards Knoppix and the Ntfstools.