ra`s fnord » Coding

Instant messaging file transfers just do not work

ra — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:34:49 +0000

A few days ago I wanted to quickly send a file through my instant messaging client which neither worked through xmpp nor icq. It came to my mind that I keep having this problem for years now and having to send files through email sucks.

So I decided to write a small script which is executed from the context menu of konqueror or dolphin (kde file browsers). It compresses a file or directory, sets a password and uploads it to filefactory.com .

project site on kde-apps.org

Kmail auto add address to addressbook

ra — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:45:22 +0000

I just figured out how to automatically add addresses I wrote an email to to my addressbook in kmail. Christian Schaarschmidt wrote a small patch which adds a filter you can define for your outgoing mails. Unfortunately it’s not available in vanilla kmail (yet?). I added an updated ebuild+patch to my gentoo repository so one can easily use it.

I think got used to that feature with the previous mail client I used: thunderbird and I am wondering if the mail client I used before thunderbird (mutt) has a similar feature.

Mindmachine

ra — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:39:45 +0000

I just created a new tumblelog/soup in which I will document the progress of creating a Sound&Light-Machine with EEG feedback loop (aka Mindmachine). The soup is currently empty but I will feed it within the next weeks with the current status of the project.

Gentoo overlay

ra — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:55:31 +0000

I finally put my local ebuilds online. Browse my Gentoo overlay.

Update:
New URL: git://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay.git
Browse online: http://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay/tree/master

Automatic renewing at libraries using the aleph software (tested with Vienna University of Technology and University of Vienna)

ra — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:12:33 +0000

Since I use the libraries of universities quite heavily I wrote a small perl script “alephrenew.pl” about two years ago which does the renewing of books for me.

The reason for writing it was that I gain an advantage (to other people using the library) when I renew every day (if there are reservations on the book one with the oldest renewing date has to bring it back – at least as far as I understand the behaviour of the Aleph software).

The help should be self explaining:

Usage: ./alephrenew.pl [-h] [-q] -b -u -p [-r ]

-h    : this help message
-q    : quiet (suppress success message)
-b    : baseurl without trailing slash (eg. http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at)
-u    : username (eg. $E123456) – you will probably need to escape the “$”
-p    : password – your date of birth in the form of YYYYMMDD (eg. 19730425)
if you did not change it
-r    : wait random time between 1 and “seconds” seconds (before starting and
1 to 30 seconds between the requests – so it does not look like a script)

Examples:
./alephrenew.pl -q -b http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at -u \$E123456 -p 19730425 -r 3600
./alephrenew.pl -b http://aleph.univie.ac.at -u \$E098765 -p 19851224

A crontab entry may look like this:
0 0 * * 2-6 /path/to/alephrenew.pl -q -b http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at -u \$E3862419 -p 0wN4g3 -r 7200

It’s tested with the libraries of the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna but should work with any other library using the Aleph software.

It is released under the terms of the GPLv2.

I do appreciate your feedback!

suspend/hibernate buttons in kde shutdown dialog

ra — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:05:59 +0000

I took a patch which implements the suspend/hibernate buttons within the shutdown dialog in kde from the kubuntu guys and made it work on gentoo.

If you have no clue what this is all about here are two screenshots [1] [2] (actually these do not represent the patch exactly, but you should get the idea).

The kde split ebuild for ksmserver: ebuild (I will do the update to the kde-all-in-one ebuild on request).

To make use of the feature emerge with USE=”dbus hal”. If you don’t see any icons next to the suspend/hibernate buttons, make sure you use an icon set that provides the files “suspend.png” and “hibernate.png”.

Kernel patches

ra — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:07:36 +0000

I updated some kernel patches:

disk-protection patch for hdaps which is used for hard disk head parking on ibm/lenovo notebooks if acceleration is measured: disk-protect-2623-rc8.patch
Source patch: 2.6.20
aggressive link power management (ALPM is a technique where the SATA AHCI controller will put the SATA link to the disk into a very low power mode when there’s no IO going on for some time)
aggressive_link_power_management-2622.patch
aggressive_link_power_management-2623-rc8.patch
Some more information on lesswatts.org
Source patches on kernel.org
e1000 fix on x60s which fixes the initialization of e1000 on ibm/lenovo thinkpad x60s if no cable is connected.

Kernel “Trusted Path Execution” patch (tpe)

ra — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:33:29 +0000

I just finished a patch to the Linux kernel which implements “trusted path execution”.

You can specifiy a trusted directory and a group as “trusted” or “untrusted”.
If the group is untrusted all users belonging to this group will only be able to execute files from the trusted directory. If the group is trusted all users will only be able to execute files from the trusted directory but users belonging to the group (and root of course).

Get it here: linux-2.6.18-tpe_restriction (patch, 5 KB)

The patch is based on grsecurity – so credits go to Brad Spengler.

Kernel Patches (proc & dmesg restriction)

ra — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:38:11 +0000

I updated two kernel patches to the Linux kernel.

linux-2.6.18-proc_restrictions.patch (patch, 12 KB) which basically restricts non-root users from viewing all processes (plus an option for some additional /proc restrictions). It is possible to define a GID which is not affected by the restrictions.
linux-2.6.18-dmesg_restriction.patch (patch, 1 KB) which restricts non-root users from viewing kernel log buffer messages.

Both patches are based on grsecurity – so credits go to Brad Spengler.

Java is free and open source now!

ra — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:51:31 +0000

Finally.. it´s released under the GPLv2.

Source: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/

Google code search

ra — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:59:00 +0000

Now google offers the possibility to search in public source code with regular expressions and limit the results depending on the license used.

http://www.google.com/codesearch

Linux kernel patches

ra — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:14:02 +0000

I put two patches online i put together some weeks ago:
A patch to build the driver for the rt2500 wireless chipset within the linux kernel (statically or as a module): linux-2.6.17-rt2500-1.diff (diff, 1,155 KB)
A patch to build the kqemu module within the linux kernel (statically or as a module): kqemu-2.6.17.diff (diff, 19 KB)

As you can see, I do prefer a kernel without modules. (: