Tales From The Geek Side

At work I administer a few Linux servers. I’m a long time Debian user who has rarely been disappointed by the distribution. As such I have Debian on the machines I administer. The company has chosen to use Symantec’s Backup Exec software. They “support” Linux but, in my experience with their software, it’s terrible. Memory leaks, crashes, and the most convoluted install scripts I’ve ever seen. If it were my choice I wouldn’t use their crapware at all but I have to use it.

Long ago I found this set of instructions for installing “RALUS” on Debian. Since their install scripts were so terrible I was happy to find good alternative. I’m reproducing the instructions here for my own reference. These instructions are based off of installing version 11d.7170. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’m embarrassed! I let some embarrassing bugs make their way into the 0.8 and 0.8.1 release of tcl-dox. This release fixes a crash related to an uninitialized variable as well as the handling of namespaces. The latest release is 0.8.2. If you have trouble with 0.8.2 please use 0.7 and send along bug reports.

A new version of tcl-dox has been released. This version fixes a number of issues and has a few enhancements. Code was contributed for handling arrays. A bug where identifiers with underscores weren’t handled correctly has been fixed. Tcl code outside of procedures and classes is ignored now (but not global variables). Tcl code inside class declarations that isn’t explicitly translated by tcl-dox is now ignored as it was causing problems with Doxygen.

Thanks go to everyone that contributed code.

The latest version is 0.8.1.

Sync Kolab is an add-on for Thunderbird that synchronizes your address book as well as calendar data. The calendar features are optional and only available if you use the Lightning add-on (I do not). You can store your address book data in an IMAP folder or on a Kolab server. I’ve long been an IMAP user and I do not wish to administer a Kolab server so I’ve opted for the IMAP backend.

I’ve been using Sync Kolab for months now but I’ve always been disappointed. Thunderbird has an option to choose the format of messages, either plain text or HTML, for each contact. This is great because I like the richer formatting available in HTML but HTML isn’t appropriate for many situations. Mailing lists are a prime example of when to use plain text. I’d finally grown annoyed enough that I started peering into the source code to add the feature myself.

What I found in the code was that the feature was already supported — if you are using the VCARD backend. Now that I’ve switched to the VCARD backend all is well!

A new version of tcl-dox has been released. It fixes a bug in the handling of comments inside proc bodies. Special thanks to Michele Joyce for reporting the bug. The latest version is 0.7.

I don’t update this blog often enough.  I should because it’s really not that hard to write a post (Wordpress is excellent) but it still seems to be inconvenient enough that I don’t post when I have something worthwhile to say.  I’m not saying that I have something worthwhile to say very often (this sentence is proof of itself). 

This week I came across a post on digg showcasing a number of blog editors.  I had looked into off-line blog editors on Linux and Windows not too long ago but I was not very impressed with what I saw.  This time I saw ScribeFire which is a firefox add-on.

I’m not usually wild about software that is implemented as add-ons or plugins for other software but in this case I think I’m ok with it.  Blogging is web oriented so embedding a blog editor in firefox could be justified.  Still I think I’d prefer it to be a standalone app especially since ScribeFire has add-ons of its own as well as themes. 

Time will tell if I continue to use this software or not but it looks very promising.

Today I installed WebSVN 2.0. I’m pretty impressed. It’s a very fast and useful web based tool for browsing subversion repositories. It’s so fast that I’m questioning why Tortoise is as slow as it is.

This is the first version that I was able to install due to security reasons. Previous versions effectively bypassed authorization settings because WebSVN would run as the web server user account. This version of WebSVN reads and honors authz files. All you need to do is configure Apache to authenticate users the same way as you would for SVN and tell WebSVN where your authz file is. This version also has a lot of usability improvements (no more tedious scrolling!) as well as a much improved look.

The stuff I like the most (so far):

• New look
• Honors authorization file
• No more scrolling when digging in a deep directory tree!
• Web based blame
• Web based diff
• Syntax highlighting via enscript

In the fall of 2005 a server that I operated was broken into. The perpetrators defaced every index.* file on the system including those in the archives of a mailing list that I’ve run since December of 2005. Recently it came to my attention that those files were overlooked in the cleanup process. I checked my backup CDs from 2005 and found that I did not have any backups that could be used to restore the defaced archives. So I did what anyone would do, I searched for ways to regenerate the archive. Mailman includes tools to regenerate archives but there are some issues.

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