Category Archives: software

Timezones with Procmail

I use procmail to manage my incoming email and mutt to read it. Unfortunately mutt doesn’t handle dates from different timezones very well, so I came up with this procmail recipe using Ruby’s Time#parse method to convert the Date header to the current timezone:

DATE_=`formail -xDate: \
| expand | sed -e ’s/^[ ]*//g’ -e [...]

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boxee

I was recently invited to the boxee (Flash warning) alpha test. Currently the only free platform they support is Ubuntu GNU/Linux, but they do offer unsupported source code download. Unfortunately attached to the download page was a license agreement which, among other things, prevented redistribution and modification of the code. Normally this isn’t really a [...]

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Top-posting

Top posting is the bane of internet mailing lists, the horrors of which are made clear in this example:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Luckily GNU Emacs provides tools to combat top-posting and [...]

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Get out of jail

I recently switched my server to NetBSD for a
number of reasons. Mainly it was the challenge of having a new system,
and the brief experience I had with NetBSD was positive (except screen
on x86_64 failed to detect my terminfo properly). Another deciding
factor was the heightened security available on most BSD systems, Net‐
and OpenBSD in particular. An [...]

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Prettifying URLs

Whenever I am writing web apps I always find myself thinking that the filenames in URLs detract from the whole experience. Is there really any need for .html, or .php to be seen by the browser so long as the server knows what it needs to do?
I am always writing the same bits of code [...]

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New Digs

I now share a VM with teenlug.com on a wonderful bytemark for a very reasonable price. I now have decent loading times of images.

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Searching for the Perfect Distro

Since my previous post where I said I would be keeping the default Xandros installation on my EeePC I have installed Eeebuntu. I have been using it for about 2 days now, and after using paludis for a few months it is quite clear how catastrophically abysmal apt really is. I was trying to install [...]

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Theeeming

The default theme for IceWM on the EeePC is an ugly Luna (Windows XP) clone. So I am mashing together the AsusBlue (for the taskbar) and eiskristall for window decorations.
At the moment it looks like this:

Get the latest source from my darcs repository and put the directory in /usr/share/icewm/themes and change /etc/X11/icewm/theme to read:
Theme=”eeeiskristall/default.theme”

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Amarok in dzen

I use this little script with dzen and dmplex to show the current song info in a little bar at the top of my right-hand screen. You need to make sure you have dcop up and running.
#!/bin/zsh
while true; do
ARTIST=$(dcop amarok player artist)
ALBUM=$(dcop amarok player album)
TITLE=$(dcop amarok player title)
[...]

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Interesting Things

Things that have piqued my interest as of late:
Exherbo
“Gentoo done right”.
Exherbo is an upcoming distritrbution based on
some of the ideas of Gentoo to create a more focused distribution
honed to the needs of the small development team.
According to the site these are the main
problems with Gentoo as it stands.

Portage. The code can’t deliver the changes we [...]

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