This is just a quick notice that during the last five days there was a problem with the website feeds. The web server returned a 500 Internal Server Error to almost all requests for /feed/ URLs. Also, there was a big increase of the server’s CPU load behind the scenes, which was caused by php-cgi…
Today, I noticed that it is no longer required to escape the backslash (\), known as the “escape character” on *nix systems, inside the pre HTML tag in order not to be removed by WordPress’ HTML filters. This bug has lived long enough to be considered as a WordPress feature, but the devs have suddenly…
I consider ditionaries, either in printed or electronic form, as one of the most useful sources of valuable information and an indispensable companion when reading. Lately, I’ve been reading lots of stuff, which involved scientific terminology in the English language, so it was very often required to lookup words on various online dictionaries. I did…
Midnight Commander (MC) is a lean, but powerful, two-panel file manager that, admittedly, promotes productivity while working from a console. Among other features, it implements a user menu with pre-defined actions that can be performed on the selected files or directories. This menu can be further customized by the user on a directory-, user- or…
I am nowhere near being an authority on software licensing. However, the recent release of GPLv3 with all the online discussions, all the attempts to exploit statements of the old version 2 of the license in order to achieve automatic license renewal for all the projects that were released under GPLv2 made me re-evaluate, not…
I should clarify from the beginning that this is not a technical article containing any kind of debugging information – I don’t have the knowledge anyway – or any other type of proof that indicates that some commonly used applications have bugs. This is just about some observations, or better an unofficial user report, of…
Usually, when writing or modifying a CSS file, the author adds comments and excessive indentation to the code in order to preserve its readability and to simplify maintenance. Although this might be a good habit, all those extra bits stored into the CSS file increase its filesize, often resulting in unnecessary waste of bandwidth, especially…
pdf2email is a CUPS backend that uses GhostScript to print a document to PDF and sends the final file to the user that requested the print via email. This software is written in Python. I had written this backend a few months ago, it has worked fine for me, so I decided to release it.…
Sometimes, things are not that straightforward as one might think. Yesterday, I spent over two hours on the Epiphany Python Console checking almost all of the available functions in order to find a way to store the displayed page’s HTML data in a variable. Before quitting, I decided to get some help over at the…
I always wanted to learn how to set up a version control system, especially SVN since everybody tend to move to that system. This howto will illustrate a way to install and configure Subversion and websvn on a Debian server with the following features: multiple repository Subversion access to the repositories via WebDAV (https, https)…