Stefaan Lippens' webface

Some years ago, when I solely worked in Windows, I happily used Irfanview as image viewer. Under Linux I didn't found a real replacement for it, yet. I already tried Gwenview, Kuickshow, Kview, ImageMagick's display, xv and maybe some others, but all have their little quirks and annoyances concerning speed or usability.

Here's a new candidate for my image viewer list: Feh (available for Ubuntu in the universe repository). Linux.com has a short overview of feh. It's a command line application, so it has it shortcomings on the usability front, but it quite fast and has nice features (hot keys, different view modes, mouse control, directory traversal, ...).

I had some difficulties in Ubuntu with installing a new spell check dictionary for my mail client Thunderbird. My native language is Dutch (Nederlands) and writing Dutch with a English spell checker active is not very interesting. I tried the methods explained at http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/dictionaries.html , but that didn't work. I got some message that the dictionary "has been succesfully installed", but that message did not reflect the truth.

I messed a bit with the installation script inside the spell-nl.xpi file, and found out that the dictionary would/should be installed to /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/components/myspell, a directory that is only writable by the root user. Apparently the installation procedure did not detect the write failure. I could put the Dutch dictionary there as root user, but I looked a bit further and found out that installing the appropriate MySpell package (myspell-nl for me) is a much cleaner/safer solution. MySpell is the spell checker of OpenOffice.org, which is also used in Thunderbird.

On friday 23 june 2006 I decided to upgrade my kubuntu powered laptop (Acer Travelmate 4002WLMi) from Breezy (aka 5.10) to Dapper Drake (aka 6.06). Here is a list (under construction) of my experiences with the upgrade so far. The merits/blames are not all addressed to (k)ubuntu, some are related to the fact that the software is upgraded too (KDE 3.5.3 instead of 3.4 for example). Moreover, some things might be related to stupid faults/wrong expectations of my own.

All in all, I'm not so satisfied with this Ubuntu upgrade as I expected to be, after all those "Ubuntu Dapper is the best" vibes in the linux community.

Thanks to Planet Ubuntu NL I found a blog entry by Pascal de Bruijn with a hack to extract fonts from a PDF, using pdftops and FontForge. When I have some time, I definitely should try this.

This is mainly a remainder to myself, because I always forget it and spend to much time to find it again. It's so simple/basic that it is almost embarrassing.
To get the current working directory of in a python script, like you have pwd (print working directory) on a Linux/Unix command line:

import os
print os.getcwd()

I'm a happy Amarok user, using it for playing/browsing/querying my music collection, but this weekend I encountered a problem: Amarok didn't start anymore. When I launched Amarok (version 1.3.1, that is) from the command line I got the following error:

$> amarok
amaroK: [Loader] Starting amarokapp..
amaroK: [Loader] Don't run gdb, valgrind, etc. against this binary! Use amarokapp.
QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow
kio (Scheduler): FATAL: BUG! _ScheduleJob(): No extraJobData for job!

I experimented with changing/deleting my Amarok settings in ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok and it became clear that there was some problem with collection.db. Deleting (after a backup of course) that file would solve the problem, but I did not want to lose the statistical information about my music collection in that file.

Ough, my blog just got infected with Blog.Worm.

Apparently it spreads just by visiting http://www.moox.nl/blogworm/. Any browser will do (even lynx, links or internet explorer)

The logs of my (drupal powered) website show a lot of referer spam. Some time ago I had this statistics page which contained a listing of the last 10 pages my site's visitors came from (aka referers). Soon spambots found out and spammed this list. I made the list invisible for anonymous visitors, but nevertheless spambots stil target my site (less frequent than when the list was visible, however), polute my stats, use bandwidth, use processing power and kill those cute little puppies. Now I went a bit further to block those dirty spambots ...

When you point your Mozilla or Firefox browser to a malformed url, for example http//www.google.com (no : after the http) or http://http://www.google.com (two times http://), you don't end up where you would expect. English google users would get served with Micrfooosobarfts website, while I (a Belgian/Dutch google user) end up at Elsefoovier.nl. This page explains what is happening here. And to follow the proposed solution, I'll put here a link to information about http.

This weekend I encountered a weird problem during programming C extension modules for Python. For some obscure reason floats from my C extension modules were formatted with a comma as separater (e.g. 123,456) instead of with the more familiar point (e.g. 123.456). Obviously some locale related problem. Most of my desktop and applications are set up for Dutch (my native language), but when I'm programming/working I use English and scientific conventions (e.g. a point as decimal separator). After isolating the problem I found out it was related to importing the pylab (aka Matplotlib) module (which I started using for plotting graphs and figures from Python). The following situation illustrates the problem.