swaks – Swiff army nife for SMTP

If you are having issues with the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/simple_mail_transfer_protocol" title="Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol">SMTP Server, then sometimes you just wish you had a swiss army knife to test the same and then you would not have to spend your precious time on some silly mistake that you may have made. Your wish is now fulfilled.

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/military_of_switzerland" title="Military of Switzerland" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Switzerland">Swiss Army Knife SMTP: A <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/command_line_interface" title="Command-line interface" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface">command line SMTP tester.  Swaks can test various aspects of your SMTP <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/server" title="Server (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29">server, including <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/transport_layer_security" title="Transport Layer Security" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security">TLS and AUTH.

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Email web statistics from the hosted website using awstats page.

I want to see the stats for my websites mailed to me directly like Google analytics does. Sure enough I can see them on the hosting cpanel page on awstats, but I dont want to check that everyday. An easier solution would be to have that mailed to my email address everyday using cron. Let&#8217;s try to do that today:

First we would need to get the address of the page for the statistics, which would look like this:

New GTK and metacity themes from Ian

Here are two themes from Ian.. Link: http://ardchoille42.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-gtk2-and-metacity-themes.html

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/GTK-DarkTurrican.tar.gz">GTK-DarkTurrican.tar

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/GTK-LightTurrican.tar.gz">GTK-LightTurrican.tar

FVWM window manager.

<a href="http://www.fvwm.org/" target="_blank">Home Page of fvwm.

So Now I am trying different window managers. My requirement is simple, alt+tab should allow me to swicht the windows and the window manager should be light but configurable and should show the programs/applications that are installed on my system. The last requirement comes from the fact that I am quite forgetful person and keep forgetting about the application to use for the particular purpose. So Window Manager should not be CPU and Memory hogging like Gnome or KDE but still should be decent and not like &#8221;X&#8221; or hackedbox.

Minimize the download size for updates.

Fedora has rolled out presto repositories. What this means to the users is that the download size for the updates would be greatly reduced. To use the feature, first install the yum plugin:

sudo yum install yum-presto.noarch

Presto uses delta rpms. These delta rpms are quite small in size (eg few kbs instead of 15 MB for firefox 3.5). These delta rpms are used to re-create the original rpm and this is completely transparent to the end user. So, next time when you update with the plugin installed you will see the difference in the download size.

Openoffice.org and/or Excel useful tips.

Today I was working on Excel sheets and had to do quite a lot of manipulations. Here are some of those:

1. Find the value of the cell whose number is stored in another cell.

You can use the indirect function.

Here is example:

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/screenshot_0022.jpe"><img class="size-full wp-image-959" title="indirect" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/screenshot_0022.jpe" alt="indirect" width="354" height="98" />

That&#8217;s cool and easy.

2. Indirect reference with some constant values.

You can add constant and cell id with &#8221;&&#8221;

Annotating the photograph with comments.

There is a nice Linux command called convert. This command can be used in various ways to do image manipulation. One of them is to embark your image with some text. Here is how to do it.

**echo &#8221;Annotating the image &#8221;$2&#8221; with $1&#8221;
convert -font  Verdana -pointsize 40 -fill red -draw &#8221;text 100,100 &#8221;$1&#8221;&#8221; &#8221;$2&#8221; &#8221;$2&#8221;
**

It will be good idea to save this as &#8221;annotate&#8221; as we will use this later too.