New ideas shine!

These days great ideas are coming to my mind to make the things around my work better, and bring back fun!

PPTP Client on Linux

I was trying to install PPTP client on a CentOS 5.3 to initiate a PPTP VPN session but it was not as easy as I did before! I had this experience on a Fedora Core 10 which could be accomplished only by a single yum install command! This resulted in installation of the pptp client itself and a tool called pptpsetup which is a text based wizard to generate the required configuration file.
On CentOS its a different story!
First, the PPTP client is not included in the default repositories! So Arrfab repository must be first added to /etc/yum/repos.d/.
Second, there is no "pptpsetup" included and the replacement is an GUI tool called "pptpconfig" which requires to be installed independently also available in arrfab. During the pptpconfig installation from arrfab repository you will run into another problem; some library dependencies are required that can not be founded in the default CentOS repository and to solve this you have to install the RPMForge repository and you are done!
I am still looking for the pptpsetup on CentOS which is apparently gone missing!

Picasa Face Recognition Feature

I am a fan of digital photography and my favorite photo management software has been Picasa for a long time. Google has recently released the latest version which is 3.5 and it means new improvements and new features are offered. Among all of them the new "Named Tags" feature is the greatest! What it does is:
First:
Once installed, it will start scanning all your photos for "face detection" and this might take a very very long time! for me it took about 24 hours as I have an archive of 20GB pictures! The result of this is a large collection of face thumbnails it has detected in all your photos.
Second:
Now its your turn to tell the software "who" is every thumbnail by naming them.
Third:
Picasa will categorize your pictures by person but you will notice a "Question Mark" on some of your pictures which means Picasa has categorized that picture but it is not sure whether he is the right person! So this is the tuning part which we are teaching Picasa about its face recognition skills!
For those with a large collection it will take a pretty much time to fix everything!

Picasa download page: http://picasa.google.com/