Reseting Mailman Password

Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more. For more info about it, take a look at its homepage.

I had not the mailman "system-wide administrator-password". So I restarted its password by running "mmsitepass" as root. It asked me a new password. Once this password is known by the overall Mailman-admin, they can log into the list's admin-pages and set a new list-specific admin-password. Thanks Markus Amersdorfer for its great article.

Downloading Clips From YouTube Without Any Tool

As you know, YouTube is a movie sharing service on the web. Lots of people upload their clips on it. I think its a two-sided knif: It can be harmful or useful. (like other web services!)

Here I'm going to tell how to download movies from YouTube to you hard disk and keep it forever for yourselves.

Assume this URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYy6fIk3A20

Open this URL by your favorite web browser. Wait until the page (not movie) loaded. Then go to "Page Source". Search for "video_id". You'll find something like this: (Don't pay attention to other search results, you need only the fullscreenUrl):

var fullscreenUrl = '/watch_fullscreen?fs=1&vq=None&video_id=QYy6fIk3A20&l=35&sk=nx42RolSOgvEwZkzlA1RKeus1v19_fNMC&fmt_map=&t=OEgsToPDskLlRMjJ2joW3LqApGKpwLcY&hl=en&plid=AARNovEMmwHAvd6yAAAAgAAAAAA&title=a beginning for my FPGA studies, part 2';

Just copy the front term of video_id:

QYy6fIk3A20&l=35&sk=nx42RolSOgvEwZkzlA1RKeus1v19_fNMC&fmt_map=&t=OEgsToPDskLlRMjJ2joW3LqApGKpwLcY&hl=en&plid=AARNovEMmwHAvd6yAAAAgAAAAAA&title=a beginning for my FPGA studies, part 2

At last make your final downloadable URL as below:

"http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=QYy6fIk3A20&l=35&sk=nx42RolSOgvEwZkzlA1RKeus1v19_fNMC&fmt_map=&t=OEgsToPDskLlRMjJ2joW3LqApGKpwLcY&hl=en&plid=AARNovEMmwHAvd6yAAAAgAAAAAA&title=a beginning for my FPGA studies, part 2"

The name of your file would be the name becomes in front of title (in the video_id):
a beginning for my FPGA studies, part 2.flv

You can also download your movie with "DownloadHelper" extension of Firefox. This extension works exactly with the above method!

Thanks to ggarron for its article.

The Merciful Google!!!

Do you remember the history of Gmail? At first, you must had an invitation to subscribe to it. I was searching a lot those days and at last one of my friends (that had a Gmail account) invited me to the Gmail. About 1 year ago, Gmail opened its subscription for the public and skipped its beta stage.

Google always claimed that its income source was the "Text Ads". But some days ago, I found a new setting in my Gmail account: Web Clips.
You can freely turn off the "Web Clips" to disable showing ads!!! Now the question is: What is the Google's revenue for hosting Gmail?! Is Google love us and doesn't like to bother us by even "Text Ads"?! I hope the Google's revenue wasn't and isn't our "Personal Information".

Free Download from MegaUpload as a Premuim User

Yesterday I found two files which was on the megaupload server. These files are so big (about 150MB & 250MB) and I couldn't download them as a free user with my home dial-up connection. After lots of investigation, I found two "Megaupload Premium Link Generators". So I entered my links in them and got 2 direct links.

At last I entered them in my university shell account to being downloaded by wget. These are that sites:

• MegaFast
• FreeMU (you must disable any adblock program in this site)
  

Customizing the Separator Line for Your Word 2007 Document's Footnotes

Sometimes you want to change the footnote size, direction (e.g. in right to left languages such as Farsi), etc. Follow this technique to reach the settings for footnotes:

1. Goto "View" tab (menu) and select "Draft" in "Document Views".
2. Goto "Reference" tab and select "Show Notes" in "Footnotes".
3. A window appears on the bottom of the screen. Select "Footnote Separator" from the drop-down menu on this screen.
4. Micro$oft word shows you the line and now you can customize it according to your need.
   

Thanks to TechRepublic for its tip about Word 2003!

JAVA Difficulties (Java Sound)

For our JAVA course project we must write a media player which supports WAV and MP3. The WAV support is straight forward but MP3 need lots of struggling. The most important constraint is that we must only used javax.sound API not more. This API's documentation is very poor and provide a low level access to sound card. I found 3 resources that help me to finish my project after about 20 days:

Java Sound Resources: This site has lots of valuable examples. Also it has some great FAQs.

Tritonus: Open Source Java Sound Tritonus implemented its own JAVA sound. But it works only on linux (poor windows!). Also it offers some plug-ins that add some SPI (Service Provider Interface) to Sun Java Sound. E.g. adding MP3 support. But unfortunately it lacks supporting of professional MP3s. (I.e. it can't play tagged MP3s) But it was a good start for me!

Java News - JavaZOOM: It offers a great MP3 SPI and has some good examples.

At last I used the JavaZoom plug-ins to play MP3 sounds. But if you've not under any restriction, I suggest to use JMF (Java Media Framework). This framework was written by Sun, Intel and Silicon Graphics and was really easy to use and bug-free (As far as I tested)

LDAP Problem or Debian Problem

Yesterday, I opened a "screen" and try to update and upgrade the distro via "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade". I left it open, and when I opened the detached screen, I see a window that told me to reboot the system as soon as possible. Imagine that if it was an important server, this reboot was a horrible work. But hopefully, this was only a Computer Engineering Department shell server ;)

I restarted it, but when it booted, the LDAP users couldn't login any more. After lots of investigation, I found that I must change the /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/libnss-ldap.conf and /etc/ldap/ldap.conf to their previous settings! I don't know why Debian change my configuration file. I didn't expect this work from Debian security team.

Fortunately , the server is now OK. I've an I idea about upgrading the old FreeBSD machine in the Department to a new one (FreeBSD 6.3). I think FreeBSD is great. Debian is for lazy administrators and I don't wanna be a lazy admin ;)