Difference: MiscNotes (1 vs. 26)

Kindle Mass Delete

It's a drag having to delete old Instapaper articles from your kindle library one at a time, especially since Amazon's lame ajaxy implementation slows the process down. http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx2INMU6OCSGC2Z is a forum discussion that includes a bookmarklet that will bulk-delete all of the items on the page. Note: you need to be on the "Personal Documents" page for it to work.

GNUCash Balance Column Width

I had a "champagne problem" where the balance column in GNUCash was too narrow and I couldn't figure out how to make it wider. It turns out that there's no user interface gesture to do so, so you have to change a configuration parameter in a settings editor: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/width-of-Balance-column-is-too-small-td1459134.html

Mac

The computer for the 1%. The most annoying thing about macs is the keyboard - if you're used to a PC keyboard the "mac key" will drive you nuts.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/customizable-shortcuts/ - allows you to make the keyboard shortcuts more PC-like.

Locale

I had a problem that caused mutt to use strange characters to indicate message threads:

Turns out that newer Debian installs have UTF-8 enabled using the /etc/default/locale file whereas older installs don't. I set up my server using the etch-vintage installer whereas my workstations were installed years ago and have been incrementally updated since then. To fix the problem I just needed to set up a /etc/default/locale file for my workstations (the contents are just LANG=en_US.UTF-8). It appears that Fedora core 4 (and probably newer) also set their default locale to en_US.UTF-8.

Savane

Want to add a "gnu only" help wanted query page.

Project located at: https://gna.org/projects/savane

help wanted pages are in frontend/php/people. index.php is probably what we care about. It calls utils_get_content() which (apparently) gets the data from the database. It's defined in frontend/php/include/utils.php.

favicon.ico

I don't see the need for a site logo, but on the other hand my error logs were getting filled with requests for favicon.ico so I made a cheezy one. In the gimp, crop to 16x16, save as .ppm, it will ask you if you want to export, then raw or ascii (choose ascii). Then

$ ppmtowinicon favicon.ppm > $WEBHOME/favicon.ico

ALSA Problem

I had a problem where sound just stopped working one day. This is odd since this sort of thing rarely happens in GNU/Linux; my experience has been that it's hard to get things configured but once you do it's solid). I'm not sure how, but it looks as if the sound chips got into some strange configuration, and then that configuration gets saved and restored when you shut down and come back up. The saved state is in a file in /var/lib/alsa so I deleted the file, rebooted, and things worked OK.

Dynamic DNS

http://ipcheck.sourceforge.net/

run from ~/.ipcheck:

tobyc@phoenix:~/.ipcheck$ python ~/bin/ipcheck.py -l -8 {router_pw} -c tcabot {easydns_pw} www.caboteria.org

you can force an update using -f.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200304/msg01763.html

Windows

Windows is annying, but with Cygwin it looks enough like unix that I don't get an itchy rash when I use it. http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/PowerToys/Networking/NTTweakUI.asp is a nice little tool that can fix some annoying shortcomings such as lack of tab completion in cmd.exe.

ASP

I did some work with a MS deployment environment once. While the project was fun the platform was a PITA, but if I did another I might want to check out the Tamber Project which looks like the equivalent of phplib for ASP. On the other hand, Arrowhead aims to make ASP code run on Java platforms.

X Windows Fonts

I had to enable type1 fonts in order to get Abiword to work, but then fonts in other programs started to look like shit. It turns out that you need to make sure that the type1 fonts are loaded last (i.e. the FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/" line in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 should be after all of the other FontPath entries).

suEXEC

Debian GNU/Linux uses apache suEXEC by default, which means that cgi scripts in user's home directories will run as that user rather than the webserver user. suEXEC is very picky (which it should be) about things like file and directory permissions, but it emits really crappy diagnostics. If you get messages in the apache error.log about "premature end of script headers" when you run a cgi script it's worth it to look in the suexec.log to see if there's something more descriptive.

Global Search and Replace

I end up re-implementing this once every couple of years, so here's what I did last time:

#!/bin/sh

# run sed on a file in place.
# first arg is filename, second arg is sed script

if [ -f "$1" ]; then
		  cp "$1" "$1.bak"
		  sed --expression="$2" "$1.bak" > "$1"
fi

Then use find to run that script:

$ find . -type f -exec grep -q INDENTIFIER {} \; -exec gsed {} "s/INDENTIFIER/IDENTIFIER/g" \;

The -exec grep ensures that the script only runs on files that it needs to modify.

You can put it on a floppy or to add to lilo put memtest86 (the binary) in /boot and just add this to /etc/lilo.conf:

http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/

put memtest86 (the binary) in /boot and just add this to /etc/lilo.conf:

image=/boot/memtest86
label=memtest

It took a little bit of fiddling to get my Gateway computer's MS IntelliMouse 1.2A to work with both GPM and X, but in the end the config is pretty straigtforward. /etc/gpmdata looks like:

device=/dev/psaux
responsiveness=
type=imps2
repeat_type=raw
append=""

which ends up running gpm like so: /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/psaux -t imps2 -Rraw .

X's XF86Config "Pointer" section looks like:

Section "Pointer"
	Protocol		  "IMPS/2"
	Device			 "/dev/gpmdata"
	Buttons			3
	Emulate3Buttons
EndSection

NOTE: I don't have the mouse wheel working (yet).

RFC2945 - Secure Remote Password protocol

Jun  4 19:30:29 tobypc kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc664010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
Jun  4 19:31:04 tobypc last message repeated 7 times

Upgrading to version 0.92t seems to have fixed things.

NOTICE:  RegisterSharedInvalid: SI buffer overflow
NOTICE:  InvalidateSharedInvalid: cache state reset
NOTICE:  RegisterSharedInvalid: SI buffer overflow
NOTICE:  InvalidateSharedInvalid: cache state reset
NOTICE:  RegisterSharedInvalid: SI buffer overflow
NOTICE:  InvalidateSharedInvalid: cache state reset

A note on one of the mailing lists indicates that this can happen if someone has an open transaction. In my case bouncing tomcat did the trick.

The pass-through device for GPM is /dev/gpmdata.