nion's blog - software

Opera 9.01 is out

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:15:41 +0200

Opera 9.01 was realeased, also for the Linux platform. Get your distribution package on:
http://www.opera.com/download/?platform=linux

Static precompiled debian packages are not in the List on the opera website but can be found on every mirror.
For example on: http://opera.osmirror.nl/linux/901/final/en/i386/static/opera-static_9.01-20060728.1-qt_en_i386.deb.

Referring to the Changelogs this release mainly is about
fixing the bugs from the 9.0 release. No new features were introduced.

Iptables is strange

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:19:40 +0200

Iptables is strange. Today I made a mistake by adding an IP two times to a DROP chain.

Example:

$ iptables -I FOO -s 192.168.0.7 -j DROP
$ iptables -I FOO -s 192.168.0.7 -j DROP
$ iptables -L
target prot opt source destination
DROP all -- 192.168.0.7 anywhere
DROP all -- 192.168.0.7 anywhere

This is strange, seems like iptables is not checking double entries.
I also noticed that iptables -L will become very slow with double information.

What made me really perplex is:
$ iptables -D FOO -s 192.168.0.7 -j DROP
$ iptables -L
target prot opt source destination
DROP all -- 192.168.0.7 anywhere

So iptables deleted one of the IPs in comparison to my expectation that this will delete both entries.
Bug or Feature?

Updated to S9Y 1.0

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:35:44 +0200

Two days ago the blogging engine s9y version 1.0 has been released. I did the upgrade now.
Works very nice, just copy the files from the tarball into your blog directory and go to your adminstration interface.

Ethereal->Wireshark

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 12:52:12 +0200

Its really sad that the Etherial project will no longer be available under this name. I think it was a much better name than Wireshark.

What we really need..

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:40:03 +0200

... Is a website to collect information about software. Not like freshmeat is doing already.
We have lots of talented people knowing different programming languages available and on the other side alot of people
needing a specific kind of software.

I don't have as much spare time and money as it would need to found such a project. But please if someone has (and I think there are people who have got),
found this project, list needed projects with description and give those os/fs programmers a new hobby.

yacpi 2.0.1 released

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 24 May 2006 22:02:57 +0200

I released version 2.0.1 of yacpi.
It doesn't have new features but some minor bugfixes etc.

Get it: http://www.ngolde.de/download/yacpi-2.0.1.tar.gz

yacpi (yet another configuration and power interface) is an ncurses based ACPI monitoring program for notebooks. There is also a text-only output so it is possible to include it in scripts.
It displays various ACPI information like battery status, temperature, charging circuits and AC status.
Additionally it displays CPU govenor and current frequency

exget script

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 03 May 2006 10:58:36 +0200

I really hate it to download a snapshot of a project and then copy the name of the tarball to extract it,

especially if its named like foo-20060118.tar.gz and I have other snapshots in a directory too.

Thats why I died the following quick hack (yes its not perfect especially because of error checking but WFM ; )

#!/bin/sh

URL=$1
FILE=`echo $URL | sed -e 's/.\+\/\(.\+\.tar\.\(gz|bz2\)\)$/\1/' `
wget $URL
TYPE=`file $FILE | cut -f 2 -d " "`
if [ "$TYPE" = "bzip2" ]; then
    tar xvfj $FILE
else
    tar xvfz $FILE
fi

Its really a quick hack, but maybe someoneelse think its useful too.

ii movement

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 20:34:38 +0200

Its nice to see that some people like the idea ii.
Christian Dietrich started hacking on si, its a Silc client based on ii. Get the source here: http://brokenpipe.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/si/.

Folding in VIM

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:18:31 +0200

Alot of people I know don't know vims folding feature.

Remember this will not work with original vi, only if compiled with folding support and
version higher or equal than 6.0.

With folding it is possible to summarize a block of code or other information to a folder
which fits in one line.
To use folding for example mark a few lines in vims visual mode (Esc-shift-V).

Before using folding:

#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}

Now press z+f to summ up the marked lines in a folder.

After using folding:

#include <stdio.h>

-- 4 Zeilen: int main (void) {----------------------------

To open the folder press z+o. If you want to open all folders in a file press z+O.
To delete a folder press z+e to delete all folders press z+E.
The folders will not be written to the file, if you open the file with cat or less the
code will be displayed without any folder.
You can also write files using folders manually.

A folder is just a tag which tells vim to display something as a folder. So it is also possible to write a file with folders.
To mark the start of a folder just use {{{ (for example in a comment of a source file)
and }}} to mark the end of the folder.

If you open the file now in vim again it will not display the folder because you

have to specify the folder method in the file.

As folder methods you can use:
manual manually define folds
indent more indent means a higher fold level
expr specify an expression to define folds
syntax folds defined by syntax highlighting
diff folds for unchanged text
marker folds defined by markers in the text

So in my example I will add vim:foldmethod=marker somewhere in the file and the file will have
all folders when opening it. Vim will add the first line of the folder for the folder description
(int main (void) in the first example).

Important keys (imho) when working with folding:
zf create folder
zd delete folder under cursor
zD delete folder recursive
zE delete all folders in file
zo open folder under curso
zO open folder recursive
zc close folder under cursor
zC same as zc recursive
za open folder if closed, close folder if opened

Vims folding has got many more features which would bloat this blog entry here. I hope
I described the features I am using most, if you want to have an overview about what
is also possible with folding don't hesitate to type :help fold in vim.

Merge mp3 files

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:51:14 +0100

I have a bunch of ??? mp3 files where each episode is splitted into two files and my girlfriend definetly wanted to listen to them with audio cds.

Merging them with cat will not work because the id3 tags will be broken.

So I found mp3wrap, did a quick

for i in *; do mp3wrap /tmp/wrap/"$i".mp3 "$i"/*; done

any my girlfriend smiled

Privoxy image tuning

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:48:57 +0100

Most of the people who use privoxy will se a white/grey picture instead of the picture privoxy blocked on the website. This is not really better than original images i think.

Abe said that he uses 1x1 pixel images instead of these white/grey picture.
And its really pretty easy to achieve this, just add to your user.action file the followinig setting:

+set-image-blocker{http://nion.modprobe.de/trans.gif}

trans.gif is a transparent 1x1 pixel gif file and voila you will see nothing at the place of blocked images.

GET/POST vs dog

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:43:43 +0100

Qbi wrote about Dog which is also able to fetch http and ftp content. Here I want to point you also to libwww-perl (on debian) which includes a GET command which does pretty much the same.

But the cool thing is that there also a POST command which allows you to use the POST method of http.

UPDATE: dog site seems to be unavailable, use google cache version.

Game of Life

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 22:23:01 +0100

During the congress AK told me about the Game of Life
which imho is pretty interresting and makes alot of fun to watch the shapes that will arise in such a cellular automate.

A friend of him implemented a very complex software to do such simmulations in which you can create your own rules etc.
But the basic rules are just that the bit (animal or whatever) will die if less than 2 bits are in the environment because of lonelyness, more than 3 bits because of crowding
and a dead bit will come to life if exactly 3 bits are in the environment.
What I didn't know and I think most of the people don't know is that the famous hacker emblem

is a so-called glider which is just one example of a form of life which can be simulated in the game of life. The glider is special because of its
construction it will glide from one corner to the other.

So here is my small implementation for the glider (you have to edit source if you want to see something else):
http://nion.modprobe.de/gameoflife.c

ii rules!

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:51:59 +0100

ii becomes more and more popular, people realize how flexible this program can be. Of course others hate it

Matthias Kopferman gave me the hint to write to the in-files with vim and now I use it with multitail to track the out-files and vim to write to the in-files.
The hint Matthias gave was to define mappings to write to different channels.
So I start my vim in the server directory and use mappings like:
map w1 :.w >> #ii/in
map w2 :.w >> #wmii/in

to write to the channels. Very cool.
There is also some guy who is creating a php based irc "client" which uses ii in the background.

http://yogan.meinungsverstaerker.de/phpii/index.php

And this is exactly what I mean with flexibility, you can nearly do everything which is IRC related with ii.
So if people say its not usable cause its too minimalistic they don't realize that it wouldn't be very difficult to write
for example a GTK-frontend. It only has to handle 2 sorts of files.

videodb manage your films online

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:05:55 +0100

Today I installed videodb its a nice PHP written software which manages your film collection in a webinterface and a MySQL database.

The cool thing is that you have not to edit this all manual because it supports lookups for different sites like for example
the Internet Movie Database so you just have to click on the film and it will be added
with length, title, year, producer, content and as cool addon a picture of the film bill.
You also have the possibility to manage users, mark films as borrowed an search for movies.

This is a really nice peace of software by the author of the Dokuwiki wiki engine and its easy to install.

This image is copied from the videodb website of course I don't run my web browser under WIndows.