Backup-syncing tool

Ever wanted to automatically sync your home directory to an USB-plugged external volume? How about whenever you just plug your drive in? With no interaction required whatsoever? You got it.

No installer, sorry. Just unpack it someplace and care to edit the first few lines of a sync.py file, to meet your needs (especially give it the right volume label -- it will sync your backup only to a drive with an appropriate label, plus point it to the two boundled png files if you like to see some fancy stuff in your notification area). Other parameters should work ok, but feel free to modify them as you like as well.

Finally, to get yourself up and running you need to create /backup/current directories on your external volume, that you want your backups to be synced to and put sync.py into a starting sequence of your window manager (it needs to have a display to present its super-duper-status-indicating icons in your notification area).

After all this you will be rewarded with an overwhelming peace of mind ;-) Enjoy!

Gajim status messages patch

Lately I got the latest version of Gajim (0.8.2) into my hands and tweaked it a little bit to my needs. Here is a patch. It is published as-is, which basically means that the effect is not guaranteed to turn out really appealing to you ;-) so please make a backup of the /usr/share/gajim/src directory before patching.

Changes:

• status messages show up in the roster,
• status messages in the roster tooltips are dropped a line down instead of being separated from the status by hyphen,
• if no status message is specified, you don't get the stupid "I'm available" kind of message.

Applying the patch

Having the patch downloaded into the /usr/share/gajim directory you should login as root, backup the original src directory and patch the sources tree from within the /usr/share/gajim directory (assuming you have a distribution installation, or some similar location, if not):

$ su
# cd /usr/share/gajim
# cp src src-orig
# patch -p0 < ./gajim-0.8.2-ms.diff

Then you should delete precompiled versions of patched files (src/tooltips.pyo, src/roster_window.pyo, src/common/connection.pyo) and you're ready to go. Enjoy!

Important: to apply correctly, a particular patch needs all the previous patches to be applied before.

Update

There's yet another patch available. This one lets you see your own multiline status message in the notification area tooltip and unifies a bit the way of displaying status messages.

Additionally, the first patch has been already merged with the current tree of the Gajim and changes made by the second one made it's way to the main tree earlier, so if you use the svn version of the Gajim, you don't need to patch, just grab the latest version from the repository. Also the next release should have the functionality included.

Update

(2005-11-14) Yet another patch out there. It brings you a little bit more compact roster view.

Quod Libet remote control with Logitech Cordless Presenter 2.4 patch

If you use Quod Libet as your primary music player and happen to have a spare Logitech Presenter lying around it would be quite nice, if you could use it as a simple remote control, wouldn't it? Here's a patch for the version 0.13.1, which let's you do it. It binds the keycodes generated by the Presenter to basic Quod Libet's actions, unless they conflict with default actions of the focused widget (e.g. "b" key, which is bound to the play/pause action, won't trigger this action if the search input field is focused — it will produce a b letter in the input field, instead).

So, in order to use your remote, the Quod Libet's main window has to be active and the focus shouldn't be in the input field (play/pause won't work) nor in neither of the treeview widgets, like songs list (previous and next won't work).

Changes:

• backwords (PageUp) and forwards (PageDown) keys work as previous and next,
• button meant for blackening the screen (b) works as play/pause,
• F5/esc button maximizes and unmaximizes the main window.

Applying the patch

Download the patch into the /tmp directory and then proceed as shown below (assuming, Quod Libet is installed in /usr/lib/quodlibet/).

$ su
# mkdir /tmp/orig
# cd /tmp/orig
# unzip /usr/lib/quodlibet/quodlibet.zip
# cd /tmp
# patch -p0 < ./quodlibet-0.13.1-ms.diff
# cd orig
# zip -r ../quodlibet.zip *
# mv /usr/lib/quodlibet/quodlibet.zip /usr/lib/quodlibet/quodlibet.zip-orig
# mv /tmp/quodlibet.zip /usr/lib/quodlibet/

Enjoy!

Securityinfo

Securityinfo is the place where one can read about IT security. Articles about practical security and available technologies, comments on what's going on in the security world, our thoughts on how the security is, how it should be and what to do to make it better, and a lot more. All this is what we write about at Securityinfo. Sadly, for now articles are available only in Polish, but poke us, so we knew there is a publicity, and English publications will appear.

YDPdict

YDPdict is a dictionary engine (available dictionaries that I am aware of are PL-EN and PL-DE) made by Young Digital Poland. The purpose of the project was to port the engine to the Palm environment thus enabling beforementioned dictionaries to be usable on Palm-powered handhelds. The project has been frozen in the stage of final testing of the candidate for the first stable release. The source code is available on terms of the newest version of the GPL.