Marios Braindump » tech

A Reload-Button in Adobe Acrobat

Mario — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:08:27 +0000

Read this post about how to reload your pdf document. This is particularly useful when you are creating a new document with LaTeX. Sweet, I was waiting for that functionality.

Use the new Emacs Daemon!

Mario — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:33:22 +0000

Emacs usually takes quite some time to fully start up. However, as described in the great blog Emacs-Fu, Emacs 23 can now be started in the background as a daemon. This allows to fire up a new Emacs instance really fast. Thanks djcb!

Print Particular Lines of a File Using SED

Mario — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:32:56 +0000

Say you want to print the lines 3 and 7, and all lines from 11 to 15 of a text-file. The following SED one-liner will do for you

sed -n -e '3p' -e '5p' -e '11,15p' textfile.txt

Anycom Bluetooth USB Adapter on Windows 7

Mario — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:50:17 +0000

For the first time I could personally sense the effects of the economic crisis. The manufacturer of my Bluetooth device ANYCOM USB-200, the Germany-based ITM Technology AG is insolvent. Immediate effect for customers like me: No more driver updates and their general unavailability on the homepage.

Here is the good news for everybody who wants to use an ANYCOM Bluetooth USB adapter (200, 250, 500) on Windows 7. The Vista driver runs just fine under Windows 7. And I got the driver ( “anycom-bluetooth-usb200-250-500-vista-v6-1-0-4700.exe”). If anybody needs it, feel free to send me an email (see About). It may be worth noting that Windows 7 complains about not being able to correctly install Bluetooth devices like a headset (Plantronics Voyager 510 for me), while in fact you you only need the correct driver for the adapter.

Update: After brisk demand I decided to allow you to download the driver directly from this website. Of course, no warranty whatsoever provided.

Working with a List of Tuples in Shell Scripting

Mario — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:08:17 +0000

Several people have recently asked me whether or not it is possible to use tuples in their shell script. One example is running a program with a varying set of parameters. Since they often did not find a good solution, they began to formulate their problem in a higher-level scripting language like Ruby. Surprisingly, you can accomplish the same task easily with simple shell scripting (supported by bash, zsh,..). Consider the following (semi-stupid) example

#!/bin/bash paramset="foo.txt 1 --with-graphics bar.txt 8 --no-graphics flock.txt 4 --with-graphics"

echo "$du" | while read file p1 p2 ; do ./myProgram $file -t $p1 --verbose $p2 done

We here run the program myProgram three times (for each line in the multi-line string). Every line contains three white-space separated values (words), to which we assign the variable names file, p1, p2 in the loop header. Note that the last variable (in this case p2) always contains all remaining words of a given line if there are more words then variables.

The set of parameters can also be stored in a file. In that case, replace the loop header with cat params.txt | while read file p1 p2 ; do. If the script is not working properly, examine the Input-Field-Separator (IFS) variable, which should be set to IFS=" ".

Activate extended globbing!

Mario — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:11:18 +0000

This one is for zsh users. As you read this, open your editor at once an add the following line to your .zshrc

setopt extendedglob

This will activate extended globbing and allow you to do even more zsh commandline candy. Here some examples

rm ^important.txt # remove all files in the current dir but important.txt rm *.log~apache.log # remove all .log-files except apache.log ls (#a1)blu.dat # shows all files with one type error distance to blu.dat, e.g. bla.dat, blu.dot, bl.dat, ...

More possibilities are shown at man zshexpn | less -p 'Glob Qualifiers' or at the Zsh Lovers Page.

Moving or Renaming Multiple Files – The Easy (zsh) Way

Mario — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:26:43 +0000

Linux workers like you and me often need to move a bunch of files. For example, you want to rename all *.dat files into *.dat_save, or you want to rename all files foo.* into something like bar.*. This, however, is not easy to do using the move command as 1) “mv” only supports a single destination file or directory and 2) the shell tries to expand patterns like “*.dat” into e.g. “a.dat b.dat c.dat” before executing the command. The typical workaround is to write a for loop like “for f in *.dat; do mv $f ${f/dat/dat_save}; done“. But it goes much easier if you use the power of zsh, which is the superior shell anyway.

Insert the following two lines into your .zshrc

autoload -U zmv alias mmv='noglob zmv -W'

The first line activates the zmv command, an extended move command provided by the zsh. The second line creates an alias for a simplified invocation of that command. All of a sudden, you can write something like “mmv *.dat *.dat_old” or “mmv foo.* bar.*” into a newly opened terminal and it will do as you expect! You can even invoke “mmv **/*2008.mp3 **/*2009.mp3” and all matching files residing in any subdirectory are renamed according to the pattern as well.

ICE – A Super-Easy Photo Stitching Tool

Mario — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:47:32 +0000

Well, I never thought that the following could possibly happen: I hereby recommend a great and free piece of software manufactured by Microsoft! I’ve been looking for a photo stitching tool that does the job fast and does not require for much marking nor readjusting by hand. Microsoft has the Image Composite Editor (ICE), a relatively new program that relies on the advanced panoramic stitching algorithms that Microsoft Research developed and that are used, for example, in the famous Photosynth. ICE is really easy to use and produces panorama images of very good quality (see this example). So if you happen to run Windows, try out this free software.

Wordpress Image Uploader is incompatible with Flash 10

Mario — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:00:24 +0000

It took me a while to figure out why my Image Uploader of Wordpress does not work anymore. When trying to upload new images to Wordpress, the Flash Uploader would not open at all. That is, clicking on “Choose Files to Upload” has no effect, while it worked perfectly before. I have updated Wordpress from Version 2.5. to 2.6.2. as well as Adobe Flash. Trying to solve that problem, I realized that the Flash Uploader has dozens of problems and hacks solving them. I tried some of them and finally found the following quote in the depths of the Wordpress support forums:

Update your Adobe Flash to the latest version (esp you Linux users!): Flash.
NOTE: NOT TO VERSION 10. The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want.

So if you encounter a similar problem and image upload is so important to you that you can do without the newest version of Flash, apply the Flash Uninstaller and install Flash 9 from Adobe’s software archive.

Setting up subversion for multiple repositories on a Plesk/Ubuntu VServer

Mario — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:11:04 +0000

Setting up a SVN server on an Ubuntu Vserver running Plesk is smooth like butter. Mmmh, butter… Just for future reference, i’m going to explain it here.

Update: Configuration of basic authentication is included now.

First, install subversion and the Apache library with the command

sudo apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn

Next, enter the Subversion/Apache configuration into the vhost.conf file of the respective domain, e.g. /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/conf/vhost.conf. This file contains all the important Apache stuff for the subdomain.

DAV svn SVNParentPath /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn # The following three lines allow anonymous read, but make # committers authenticate themselves. AuthType Basic AuthName "SVN Authorization Realm" AuthUserFile /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/svnUsers.passwd Require valid-user

What is left is to create an example repository, restart Apache

cd /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME] mkdir svn svnadmin create svn/test chown -R www-data:www-data svn/ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and to test it from your home computer

svn co http://www.[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/test

To allow you – and only you – to commit new files, authentication has to be configured. Run the following command on the the server, using your local user name for convenience:

htpasswd -c /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/svnUsers.passwd [USERNAME]

You will be prompted for a password. Commiting new files and directories should work now as well. And that’s pretty much it!

To allow only authenticated users to checkout the repository, remove both lines containing the “LimitExcept” from the vhost.conf file. Another excellent explanation of the setup process is to be found here.