Thought it was impossible?

Use these lines in your /usr/share/apache2/ssleay.cnf:

for requests:

[ req ]
req_extensions          = v3_req

[ v3_req ]
subjectAltName          = critical,DNS:site1.com,DNS:site2.net

for self signed:

[ req ]
x509_extensions         = v3_ca

[ v3_ca ]
subjectAltName          = critical,DNS:site1.com,DNS:site2.net

Then you can use apache2-ssl-certificate or openssl on that.

If you want to know more, google for subjectAltName ;)

Now I had /DETACHed my favourite IRC client BitchX http://www.bitchx.org/ like usual, and wanted to reattach.

So I sat there at my ^A:screen scr-bx and I could watch a window popping up and vanishing again.

Upon closer examination, it looked like this:

ailin@eleanor [3]% scr-bx                                                     ~
attempting to wakeup pts-7
error reconnecting to pts-7
zsh: exit 1     scr-bx
ailin@eleanor [4]% _                                                          ~

What followed was a rm -r .BitchX/screen* as well as a mv .BitchX .FukcX, and then an sudo aptitude purge bitchx; with some kill BitchX<Tab> inbetween -- everything without too much influence on above message of rejection.

Just a short note on Opera http://www.opera.com/

It has occured to me several times now that this website was missing the whole background colour in Opera (the background was all gray).

Effectively, the <div> that serves as the main container already ended at the header!

The cause of this has of course always been an error on the human side: me forgetting to escape < properly with &lt;.

So if you ever notice your background missing or a div ending earlier than it is supposed to, check your website for stray <!

I must say, Internet Explorer and Firefox cope much better with this.

Letztens stiess ich zufällig auf ein DVD Angebot von Amazon, welches um 50% reduziert war. Nun ist dies zugegebenermaßen nichts besonders spannendes, aber ich wollte wissen ob es vielleicht noch ein paar andere gute Angebote gibt.

Zunächst dachte ich daran, den Amazon E-Commerce Web Service zu verwenden, aber zu meiner Enttäuschung bietet dieser keinerlei Möglichkeit zur Abfrage von Preisen, und muss daher zur Schnäppchenjagd eine Nischenrolle zugewiesen bekommen.

Das Ergebnis sind also ein paar Skripte, die die Amazon Produkt Webseiten runterladen und parsen. Ziemlich hässlich das alles, aber was solls.

Obwohl das alles reichlich unschön ist und auch bei der nächsten kleinen Änderung von Seiten Amazons an ihren Webseiten nichtmehr tun wird, wollte ich es euch nicht vorenthalten.

My thoughts in regard to the flaws of IRC clients.

Goals

I have high demands on IRC, because I like to track many places.

So far it has been difficult to find efficient, elegant, easy, yet powerful clients to fulfill my every need.

Now, I don’t think it is possible to ever reach “100%”.

But all the time being dissatisfied, I’ve tried to order my thoughts about the reasons for this,
and the approaches that would be necessary.

I’ve also realised that it is a difficult thing; and it seems to require careful planning.

If your code gets messy early on, doing things would seem to become almost exponentially more difficult.

I’ve inspected Irssi for a ways to bend the notify features in reach of my needs
and it is frigging impossible without major alterations in the core.

I’ve found that while everyone probably has dreamt of writing her own irc client at least once,
it is surprisingly difficult to get it done right — despite the simplistic protocol.

The protocol is amazingly simple,
yet it gets bended beyond.
And many people writing IRC servers, only check with the most popular client in that process.

Deciding how to show incoming data is the problem.

(Update the download has been removed but I preserve the post for itself. Please install irssi from Cygwin’s setup.exe)

This has been in my static folder at least since the official release of that version, but I hadn’t posted it on the website yet.

Back in the days, when I was looking for a Windows version of this rather popular *nix IRC client, they did not have a single working link on their website/ download page http://irssi.org/!

Of course you can always tell the users to “just build it yourself”, but seriously, which average user is capable of doing that?

So after researching the Internet and not finding any suitable Windows build of Irssi, I decided to fix that gap myself. So I created above build.

When I checked back at the time of writing this entry, they now link to a build of Irssi 0.8.9 on their download page; I would claim that this is no official build (but maybe they’ve gotten the creators permission to hot-link (deep-link) it).

I believe I had already found this build at the time when I was looking for one, and the website didn’t have any; but not only is it outdated (version-wise), it also does not support Perl, Irssi’s premier scripting binding. Since I like to enhance my client with several scripts, that was no good.

Also, there is a new feature called “recode” in Irssi 0.8.10, which (although it ultimately sucks) enables you to chat in places where ISO-8859 and UTF8 charsets are in mixed use.

Given these two reasons, the 0.8.9 version of Irssi was not an option to me.

For those interested in making their own Irssi/Cygwin builds on Windows, I’ve written down the necessary steps. Hit the jump to read them.

Don’t get me wrong, please. I haven’t written these scripts — I was
merely using them.

Because I’ve got them lying ‘round in my so called “Web Dump”
for a long time now, I thought I’d write a slightly more comprehensive
introduction to what made my life easier just a little while ago.

I hope this can be of interest to some of you, and maybe I have a lucky
hand with keywords so that even more people can benefit from these nice
scripts when a search engine spider picks them up.

I have lsted these works in no particular order:

• default.theme: Default theme for light background colour terminals
• niq.pl: BitchX like tab completion, fixed version
• ircuwhois.pl: Format additional whois output from Undernet IRCd (ircu)
• messages_bottom.pl: Make chat start at the bottom of the window (by printing many newlines on window creation)
• trackbar.pl: Draw a line at the position where you last left the window
• dccrelay.pl: Redirect DCC sends
• mouse_soliton.pl: Script which can read xterm mouse sequences
• question.pl: Fake a dialog like question near the prompt

If you want to convert from MySQL to PostgreSQL, use the following command to have mysqldump spit out sane SQL:

% mysqldump $DATABASE_NAME -v -nt --compatible=ansi,postgresql --complete-insert=TRUE --extended-insert=FALSE --compact --default-character-set=UTF8 -u $DATABASE_USER -p -r $OUTPUT_FILE

You should then hoopefully be able to load this dump into your PostgreSQL database using

=> \i $OUTPUT_FILE

from within psql.

This piece of information is hidden deeply within the net! It is not clearly written in the mysqldump docs. There are lots of Google results for “MySQL to PostgreSQL” but most of them are needlessly silly and of doubting quality. Spread this info!

Converting the database schema cannot be handled by witty mysqldump switches and is left as an exercise to the reader.

For some reason it seems to be non-trivial to get Unicode to work in console apps, so I decided to make an illustrated guide about Irssi, PuTTY and GNU screen. Hope it helps.

Note: you needn’t be using GNU screen to follow this guide.

Since this is screenshot-heavy, the images are hidden after the jump.

Lately I was looking into the Google Mail Messenger being able to sign you in to AIM (and thus ICQ) accounts.

The strange thing is that it said my credentials to be wrong.

As you probably know, ICQ can only use the first 8 characters of the password. For some reason I had stored a 9 character password, which gets trimmed to 8 characters by every popular software (including the original clients).

However, not so for Google Mail which tries to sign you in with all you typed and thus fails. So, if you want to sign into ICQ using Google Mail and it complains, remember to only type the first 8 characters of your password.

If you are using nonoh to manage international IP calls with acceptable rates, I can recommend taking a look at this command line dialer script.

It is much more convenient to use than the website (no need for the ugly select box country code), and you can easily set up aliases or another front end for it. Besides, it doesn’t need a big web browser so you it is also good to use over SSH. Furthermore, you can easily see the rates (which are setup charge; tariff; and billing interval for caller and callee, in €-¢t/10000) before even accepting the call.

To use it, you need a working Perl installation. Then just type cpan followed by install WebService::Nonoh. Obviously, the script might break when the website changes.

An older script was based on the script found on voip-info.org with added fee and error code output.

A small usage summary:

# check balance:
nonoh SERVICE USER PASS
 
# connect call
nonoh SERVICE USER PASS FROM TO
 
# send SMS
nonoh SERVICE USER PASS FROM TO MESSAGE

Do you know the difference between 郎 (láng) and 郎 (láng)? One is the Chinese character for fiancé and the other one is a so-called compatibility form, which is used in Korea. There is a slight difference in the appearance of the characters, but depending on your font they might look exactly the same.

Why would one care? Not usually, but if you want to copy (Chinese) text from a web page and turn it into a PDF file using pdflatex with the CJK package, and get an error about missing glyphs in the font and metafont errors — and finally track this down to these characters, which GTK “helpfully” both turns into the same 郎 when pasting…… (luckily XEmacs did not, use C-u C-x = to see information about character)

How to fix? Either get a font with all those compatibility glyphs, but as I can’t tell the difference anyway or even might not properly recognize the character, just normalize them back to their “typical” characters. For the latter, Perl can do the job quick and nice: just run s/\p{Han}*/NFKD($&)/ge to replace all the Han characters with their “compatibility decomposition”. See man Unicode::Normalize for details.

Android is open source, at least the core android is.

However, the whole ecosystem is still closed by Google. The hardware isn’t open either, and if you just want to use “stock” Android devices that you can buy, then a lot of the built-in Apps require a Google account.

Not everything has to be free or open source, so if you want to buy or sell Android apps, your only real choice is Google Play. If you want to buy Google devices like the Nexus, you also have to use Google Play. And your only payment method? Google Wallet. (Which only supports credit cards as payment)

So what happens if Google closes down your account and warns you in bold letters to not try and open a new one? You’re on your own. Submit all the identity documents they request, like passport and utility bill? No response. Write an email to any of their support addresses? No response. Fill out dozens of web contact forms in their help? No response. Call them after you have found a US phone number only visible when the help language is set to US? “We apologize for any inconvenience…”

Want to give your hard-earned money to google for one of their devices but they don’t want it? Running after them trying to get your account unlocked? How silly is this.

Maybe it is comforting then that you are not alone

Looking for an Android drawing app for our little one, there is a lot of crap on the Play Market. It either sucks, is ad-ware, costs money, and finally it doesn’t even do multi touch. The only fine drawing app is Markers which is just a tiny little bit too complicated for her.

Luckily, it is open source so I could remove all the features and make the colours rotate in an automated fashion (rather) easily. So if you need it, please enjoy:

MarkersMagic

Lately I see a lot of repositories where the description reads “Unofficial fork of … Disclaimer: I am NOT the author…”

Do services such as GitHub also have a negative impact on the workings-together of software authors or is it just the new way of doing things?

The forkers try to cast off responsibility by adding such disclaimers, but:

• Why don’t people even bother to contact the original author?
• Or is it the author’s fault for not being reachable?
• Or should we just fork and forget?

/grumpy old man