Spammers apparently love Trac. After trying to fighting spam tickets and later installing the SpamFilter plugin, I’ve managed to control spam tickets in the Open Yahtzee Trac site.. But now spammers started spamming in the ticket comments. The bad news is that Trac (at least in version 0.11) doesn’t have built-in facilities to completely remove ticket comments.
Category: Tips
URL-Safe Timestamps using Base64
Passing around timestamps in URLs is a common task. We usually want our URLs to be as shortest as possible. I’ve found using Base64 to result in the shortest URL-safe representation, just 6 chars. This compares with the 12 chars of the naive way, and 8 chars when using hex representation.
The following Python functions allow you to build and read these 6 chars URL-safe timestamps:
Continue reading URL-Safe Timestamps using Base64
Using MusicBrainz when Ripping CDs in KDE
I guess this tip is Gentoo specific. By default KDE uses FreeDB for getting CD info when ripping CDs. If you want to use MusicBrainz native service (not via their FreeDB proxy), there are several steps you’ll need to take.
Continue reading Using MusicBrainz when Ripping CDs in KDE
Disable Touchpad Tapping in Kubuntu
In Ubuntu (gnome) there is an easy graphical way to disable tapping on the touchpad. However, KDE lacks such thing. But lacking graphical configuration doesn’t mean this should be difficult. All you need is the gsynaptics package. The package provides a small utility called synclient. Now you can disable tapping by doing
synclient TapButton1=0
To disable the tapping permanently you should use the following to run the command at the start of every KDE session.
echo "synclient TapButton1=0" > ~/.kde/env/disable-tapping.sh
Using Duplicity and Amazon S3 – Notes and Examples
Up until now I’ve been doing my backups to Amazon S3 using my s3backup script. While it’s simple and does what I needed at the time, I’ve decided to cut some of the costs by switching to incremental backups.
Continue reading Using Duplicity and Amazon S3 – Notes and Examples
Blocking IP Range using UFW
Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is one of the greatest frontends to IPTables I’ve encountered. It is very simple to use and I just wish it was also available for Gentoo. Up until recently everything went smoothly for me and ufw, but we hit some rough waters when I’ve tried to block an IP range.
To block an IP or IP range in ufw you should do
sudo ufw deny from 188.162.67.197/21
\lyxframeend Undefined when Using Beamer with Lyx
I’m using LyX for the first time with Beamer. Making the title page was smooth. But when I’ve tried adding a new frame (using BeginFrame) I was confronted with the following error
\lyxframeend
{}\lyxframe{Outline}
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never \def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `\hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `I\hbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.After comparing my document to example (working) beamer documents I’ve found out that you must have an EndFrame command after your last frame. Too bad it wasn’t documented anywhere I’ve found as this little thing drove me crazy.
Using Amarok Generated Playlists (m3u) on Sansa Clip
Few days ago, for the first time, I’ve created a playlist using Amarok for files on my Sansa Clip player. To my surprise (and disappointment) when I’ve unplugged my Sansa Clip and powered it, the playlist showed up empty, unlike playlists which originated in Windows. As I keep my music collection organized in Amarok, the situation seemed to be very uncomfortable.
I’ve decided to compare one of the working playlist files and the “empty” Amarok generated playlist. Two things were noticeable:
- Amarok uses forward slashes, like in a Linux environment, and the working playlist used backward slashes.
- The working playlist used relative paths without any prefix – directly beginning with the path. Amarok prefixed the relative paths with a dot-slash (./).
After noticing those things I’ve modified my Amarok generated playlist to look like the Windows generated one, and voila, it worked. I tried going through Amarok’s configuration dialogs to find some option controlling the format of generated m3u playlists, but couldn’t find any (I’m using Amarok 1.4.10). So with my newly found wits I’ve looked for a way to make using the playlists easier. I’ve came up with the following one-liner:
find -name "*.m3u" | xargs -I{} sed "s/^\.\///;s/\//\\\\/g" -i'' {}
The command should be run in the MUSIC directory of the Sansa Clip’s filesystem. It recursivey looks for m3u playlists and for each one strips any leading dot-slash and replaces forward slashes with backward ones. It can be used to easily convert all your playlists to the format understandable by Sansa Clip.
Emulating Kav-Mafrid (em-dash) for the David Font
The David font that is used in Culmus-LaTeX lacks support of Kav-Mafrid, the ligature that is created by two consecutive dashes, --. Because the regular Hebrew dash, Maqaf, is position near the top of the line, one can’t use it instead of the Kav-Mafrid and expect a graphically pleasant result (while Kav-Mafrid can replace Maqaf and the text would still look ok). To make things even more problematic, this ligature is supported by Culmus-LaTeX’s default font, Frank Ruehl, which means one can’t easily switch fonts without hurting the layout.
Continue reading Emulating Kav-Mafrid (em-dash) for the David Font
Algorithm Float Label for Hebrew Document
For a while now I’ve refrained from using the very nice Algorithm environment for LaTeX papers I wrote in Hebrew due to the way it’s label was displayed. The English label was displayed in reverse.
