Helpful Linux Tidbits

Hello Blogosphere.

Thank you for reading these last six months. Because of events in my life, I am not sure if I’ll be able to post again anytime soon, but I hope to do. For those that don’t know, I’ve been the subject of a culture that is trying (in their own words) to “assimilate” me into their beliefs and habits. Because they love this culture so much they will do anything to defend it including breaking the law (and not just a bit) and terrorism. I don’t mind this culture without these facets. I even see alot of benefit in it. But besides these reasons if they are not enough, here are a few more: personal experiences have taught me in this culture that force is more rewarded than “observation then action”, that taking chances without concern for the greater good is not only allowed but encouraged, that saying, “I don’t care” is vastly greater than saying, “I’d like to help”.

So here’s to choice, here’s to our own discretions, here’s to technology without terror. Here’s to the “1’s” and the “a’s”.

“…-Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.”

–John Lennon

“Maybe after another three years, I’ll get my freedom back.

The Great Escape

“They put female hormone in my drinking supply”

Real Genius

“Be GOOD to one another”

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Epiphany has a great feature and because of this and this and this alone, I might just return to it. No, really. This is just what got me into Epiphany in the first place – the bare bones, no frills, unix-like application. It’s best feature is the location bar that can double as a web search tool.

So I began playing in Firefox with a couple lookups. It is a process I didnt’ miss: click the search bar, type in the topic to search, click the search engine button, select the search engine, hit return, hit return.

Epiphany has the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar ticked “Smart Bookmarks“. In Epiphany the process goes: type the search in location bar, arrow key to the search engine, return.

Unfortunately, Firefox has no way of replicating this behavior of Epiphany, custom searches though can be built in Firefox without too much difficulty.

To add custom searches in Firefox a good method is to find whatever search engines that match Epiphany’s. One could look through Firefox 3’s terrific link for custom searchs but one may better look at the mozdev list.

For quick reference to Epiphany’s smart bookmarks use grep:

grep -B 2 smartlink ~/.gnome2/epiphany/bookmarks.rdf | less

For Epiphany where custom search engines where created and there are no equivalents already built, new custom searchs can be easily made. Mozilla has a guide to build custom search engines plugins and the basic rules for them. The Mozilla developer page is pretty thorough though and takes a bit to learn, a faster option is to look at the documentation links at botom of the page that point to a couple websites that can generate one. I personally tried searchplugins.net. Searchplugins.net just needs a URL string from a search with TEST as the term.

Thats it! This will be able to get all the custom searchs back into Firefox.

Tip:

I find myself using Googles site search alot, I find it a good way to look up answers on a website whos built-in search features are lacking. In google typing, “site:ubuntuforums.org echo tee” will, for example, search Ubuntu Forums for echo and tee. A URL for searchplugins with “site:TEST” in a Google search will generate a custom search engine where just typing “ubuntuforums.org echo tee” will lookup via google.

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Tomorrow I’ll be putting up a couple of my Gentoo scripts that I use on regular basis.

Awesome freakin’ week! Everything I put together worked, I guess it just works out that way sometimes. The big deal was updating the system which will be super important here in the near future. Generally people treated me real good this week – I’m unsure why but sometime it just seems people want me off. Bring it on ;). This may be sort of a wrap up for all this, hmmm sweet sorrow. Must not get weary eyed. Times will be better ahead, right? Maybe the hope will give me repreive, ama vitam.

Linux General

I found the Linux Distrobution Chooser a pretty thorough tool to test what distro may be best for the user. I took the test as if it was last year when I began using Linux. The distro it choose for me…?… mandriva, which definitely a good choice at that time.

Tom’s Hardware looks at the KPC the fabled hundred dollar PC. I’m pretty awed by the what looks to be a really good computer for the price.

The 7 Habits of Effective Linux Users make some very good points about using Linux effectively and is really well written.

Someone had to say it. Genbuntoo, lol.

Continuing from yesterdays tips I have a few tips that can help bloggers begin.

Purty Colors

Ok this is is more like for the coder blogger. Why have dull black text white back predefined html? Hmmm? Do your scripts just look plain dull? Well why not whip them into shape with TOhtml? What is that you say? TOhtml is a vim plugin that converts highlight syntaxing done in vim to HTML. Pretty cool you say? huh? How much? Well loyal listeners we’re dropping it’s average retail price for you and each new TOhtml you’ll get is ABSOLUTELY FREE!!! naw, you say! too good?! Where do I get it? Well faithful reader we’ll be glad to tell you that TOhtml comes bundled in every vim package.

Using TOhtml is as simple just typing “:TOhtml” at the vim prompt. TOhtml doesn’t print the best html though and often I find that I don’t want the TOhtml to create a separate page but rather as a segment in this blog so I created script that does this:

#!/bin/bash

# vm2html-segment
#
# Create HTML formatted text suitable for displaying syntax highlighting
# in a blog post, or possibly some forums.

FILENAME=$1

#vim -f +"syn on" +"let html_no_pre = 1" +'let html_use_encoding = "utf8"' +"let use_xhtml = 1" +"let html_number_lines = 0" +"so \$VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim" +"wq" +"q" $FILENAME

vim -f  +"syntax on" \
        +"colorscheme simple256" \
        +"let html_no_pre = 1" \
        +"let html_number_lines = 0" \
        +"TOhtml" \
        +"x" \
        +"q" $FILENAME

# Just need the colored syntax, deleting the HTML page information.
sed -i '1,/body bgcolor=/d' $FILENAME.html

# Adding preformatting first <pre> tag
sed -i '1 i <pre>' $FILENAME.html

# Line breaks no longer need to be defined with preformatted text.
sed -i 's|<br>||g' $FILENAME.html

# Remove the closing HTML tags.
sed -i 's~</body[^>]*>~~g' $FILENAME.html
sed -i 's~</html[^>]*>~~g' $FILENAME.html

# Add the closing preformatting tag
sed -i '$ a </pre>' $FILENAME.html

Post Ownership

Being blog-rolled is when a post the owner has written appears to belong to someone else because it has been reprinted. I use the creative commons attribution license here so my content is free distributable as long as there is reference to the original work but I have discovered that search engines can misinterpret the original owner of the post. Google has a fail-safe that can tell ownership of a post by that post linking to itself. I have created a script that can makes this simple:

#!/bin/bash

# vm2html-segment
#
# Create HTML formatted text suitable for displaying syntax highlighting
# in a blog post, or possibly some forums.

FILENAME=$1

#vim -f +"syn on" +"let html_no_pre = 1" +'let html_use_encoding = "utf8"' +"let use_xhtml = 1" +"let html_number_lines = 0" +"so \$VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim" +"wq" +"q" $FILENAME

vim -f  +"syntax on" \
        +"colorscheme simple256" \
        +"let html_no_pre = 1" \
        +"let html_number_lines = 0" \
        +"TOhtml" \
        +"x" \
        +"q" $FILENAME

# Just need the colored syntax, deleting the HTML page information.
sed -i '1,/body bgcolor=/d' $FILENAME.html

# Adding preformatting first <pre> tag
sed -i '1 i <pre>' $FILENAME.html

# Line breaks no longer need to be defined with preformatted text.
sed -i 's|<br>||g' $FILENAME.html

# Remove the closing HTML tags.
sed -i 's~</body[^>]*>~~g' $FILENAME.html
sed -i 's~</html[^>]*>~~g' $FILENAME.html

# Add the closing preformatting tag
sed -i '$ a </pre>' $FILENAME.html

Type “wordpress-link title of post” and paste in blog. This creates an invisible link and will not be seen.

Style Sheet

Commercial wordpress users will need to pay a few dollars to be able to create a custom style sheet. Some style sheet attributes can be added though within the html tags. For instance, I like padding around images:

<img src="http://linuxtidbits.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/link-saturday.png" style="margin:0 10px 5px 0;" align="left" alt="Links Saturday" /     >

WordPress RSS Feeds

A final note on WordPress RSS feeds. WordPress RSS feeds do the odd behavior of subsituting the username for the title of the feed. Changing to an ATOM feed can fix this but if you’re stuck with a news aggregator site that refuses feed changes the title can be changed by defining the name (alt tag) of the last image of the post:

<img src="http://linuxtidbits.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/wordpress-icon-128.jpg" style="border-width:0;" align="left" alt="WordPress Tips 2" />

Hope this makes blogging better! :)

Typing this blog for the last six months has been a tremendous honor to me. It is something I have learned to love and loved to do. First, I want to thank the tremendous folk as WordPress that made this happen. From the very first few times I used wordpress, I knew that it was top notch software and I humbly thank all of them for letting me be a part of it. Thank you. I wish many good wishes and fortune for a folk who envisioned software that provides beautiful collboration and ease of use.

WordPress 2.5 was released a couple weeks ago and carries on the good work. I’d like to provide a few tips I’ve learned over this time to all wordpress users and blogging in general.

RSS Feeds

WordPress by default only shows summary feeds. This is all good if wanting to get people to come to the website and comment but if just wanting to get the word out consider a full feed. In the Dashboard go to Settings > Reading to choose.

Linking to Other Articles

It took me forever to figure this out but there is a right way to link internal posts. I kept linking to previous articles and having tracebacks put in comments. Tracebacks are used so the owner of the blog knows who is linking to the article. A good idea but tracebacks from within the blog are unecessary. To prevent this use the relative link “<a href="/2008/04/04/random-thoughts/">Random Thoughts</a>”

Code to HTML Entities

HTML code doesn’t like key characters like < and &. Web browsers interpret such characters as HTML code and won’t print them. Therefore there’s a special syntax for writing the entities like < and & they will need to be encoded as &lt; and &amp;. Theres a good number of characters that require conversion. I found this script for perl on cspan that can encode to html but I don’t know a lick of perl so I prefer to encode with a website encoder.

WordPress Themes

No theme is perfect and even the best wordpress themes have minor bugs. For instance, the Ocean Mist theme I used prior wouldn’t give a proper return after emoticons. So after each I had to break <br>. Well the Ocean theme was fixed and I ended up editing a number of my posts. Generally it’s best to format correctly and either wait for the theme to be fixed or better yet tell the author about the bug. Many authors update their themes as necessary. The authors name can usually be found at the bottom of the page.

I’ll have a couple more tips tomorrow.

For the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to build a personal news aggregator using Gregarius on a lighttpd web server. Unfortunately, I just don’t know enough about databases to be able to pull it off. I wrote about it though :) and it should be pretty feature complete. Anybody that has worked with databases might wanna take a look, I put it on the Gentoo Wiki:

• Gregarius on Lighty (Lighttpd)

Rough week for me this week. At times we’re the trout, at time we’re the worm. :) So it goes. I can’t fix the world, some people I’ve decided have committed too many crimes, told too many lies, and are above the law – hiding! So, though this weeks “Links Saturday” may be just a bit, but I hope it lets us remember to “Be good to one another”.

Linux General

Abiword Returns:

In an amazing magical act, the less know Linux processor that could makes a magical re-appearance two years later. Abi-Word contains a bunch bug fixes plus a good number of added features like multi-language support. I’ll be taking a look at it soon too myself.

• Abiword Returns

Building a Daemon:

Building a daemon may sound scary, it’s written in C after all, well ok, it is, but I discovered this author does a really good job describing the initial steps to do so.

• Linux Daemon Howto

Rant – Perfect instance of careless media:

I fired off on this one. I’ve seen alot of careless blogs writen off by corporate computer webzines. Alot of the are designed to be provocative but I thought this hit below the belt.

• Open source will not save education

Harris: Hey… life is pretty stupid; with lots of hubbub to keep you busy, but really not amounting to much.”

• L.A. Story

Gnome is edgin’ to be innkeeper to two rendering engines. What was once thought set was drastically changed week prior. Never thought one view beyond one qualified contender soon another will be bending under the rope.

Unsure if there is a Ebert way to qualitize this. “Dog bites on masters and flea marks on kittens…” What do you say the borders around input boxes?” So this blue book is idiosyncratic and should be put in the atomitizer as quickly as possible. So it is. So so. But a few gloves can be mashed to jutting bone a little roiling sweat splashed. ThhhhhuuuunNk. Chhhchhh! Chhchh !! !

With a little tinker and tack an svn webkitgtk emerges and I go on my filthy dirge. Load times aren’t particularly quicker.

As of yet many tailorings have yet to be made in. Give one a true experience of what the web really appears, it does. As well as open in new tabs and such others.

Performance of a beta product isn’t such an honest contest over it’s gecko brethren but the Romans are calling for blood…

Webpapers flipped faster and it occurred less a where page resettings occurred during mid scrolls.

Take it easy though, save it for fight night..

—

In a completely unrelated note:

Can I Have My Atom Feed Yet?

In a valiant attempt to aroose our web domainers attention Steve’s spamassassin remains unperturbed. Three emails through two separate email accounts over the last four weeks, “echo… .. .” Here’s the nitty:

[http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/atom]
name = Dirk R. Gently
email = dirkrgently@excite.com
province* = Wisconsin
country* = USA

Oh, and the hatchi:

wget http://linuxtidbits.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/dirk-r-gently-e1-hack.png