Something Odd!

Disturbing news this morning. Last Monday night a group of protestors in Dublin were attacked by Gardai, seemingly unprovoked if the people who rang 2fm are to be believed. An RTE reporter at the scene said that Gardai had taken off their ID tags and refused to acknowledge questions about why they were removed.

The Irish Times has more on this story while the Minister For Justice warned there would be consequences for Gardai who exceeded “reasonable force”.

I don’t doubt that the Gardai were in a stressful situation and needed to act to protect themselves but the eye-witness accounts I heard this morning seem to paint a picture of alarmingly excessive force used on a peaceful protest.

Claire had a few things to say about browsers so I had to email her! Claire – you shall convert from the dark side! hehe

Alternative to the Big Bang – good reading, got it from Dangerous Meta, I think!

I think Owen was visiting this site when he popped over here. eh?

Linda has linked to me! Now, where’s your main page? Yes, I will mail you, sorry for not writing as often I used to!

Family Crests, O Keeffe and Munnelly. Thanks John for the link!

I just upgraded to the latest Galeon and Mozilla binaries at work. Nice. Feels snappier (and I would notice on this machine!). I asked Kate why he didn’t update http://developers.antefacto.net/download/anti_aliased_mozilla/ but he pointed out that you could add the following to prefs.js to get anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla (works in Galeon too!)

user_pref("font.FreeType2.enable", "true");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/usr/share/fonts/truetype");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.2", "/mnt/dosc/winnt/fonts");

Didn’t see that anywhere. oh well!

The new Mozilla is much nicer, and fixes the security bug that was publicized last week.

I’ve gone Free at work finally! Netscape was only started up this morning to export the addresses out of it. Imported into kmail now, and Netscape isn’t running! I even did rm -fr nsmail but only after tarring it up of course! I will have to run Netscape from time to time but not all the time. If only I could get kmail to launch urls in Galeon instead of Konueror, I’m sure there’s a way, I haven’t looked very hard.
Open Office works nicely thank you. I tried it on Linux and Windows and it’s much better than AbiWord, Kword, or Star Office. I haven’t had a chance to compare against Gnumeric yet and in fact I won’t use it much at all (thankfully!)

I read the in Irish Times this morning about the radio controlled rats. Imagine being stuck in a collapsed building – would you like to see a rat come scampering over to you?

Thanks to the top 40 I found out about Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About as well as other good stuff.

How to view uuencoded attachments in Kmail:

1. Download and install UUDeview.
2. In Kmail, click on Settings, Configure Filters and create a new filter.
3. Set up the filter to watch for a message that contains begin 664.
4. Under Filter Options, select pipe through and in the text box add
   tee temp/msg.txt; /usr/local/bin/xdeview temp/msg.txt ; rm -f temp/msg.txt
5. Under Advanced Options/Apply this filter unselect the option, to incoming messages, but make sure on manual filtering is on.
6. Click OK
7. Create a directory called temp in your home directory.

Anytime you get an email with uuencoded attachements simply select the message and press CTRL-J and a nice TCL dialog box will appear allowing you to save the attachements.

I might just use uudeview to automatically save the attached files to a directory and then open a file manager in that directory.

Helpful Links:

1. The Kmail FAQ.
2. Kmail thread on uuencoded attachements.
3. My ILUG posting about this.

I went looking through my list of referers this morning and found several hits from Google. It’s interesting to see that I’m the first link if someone searches for how to convert Netscape Mail folders to Kmail folders
I may as well post the small script I developed to do that:

#!/bin/sh
copydir()
{
    old=$1
    new=$2
    for i in $old/*
    do
        if [ -f $i ] ; then
        cp -va $i $new/
    fi
    done
}

for i in `find nsmail -iname "*sbd"`
do
        DIR=`echo $i | sed s/nsmail/Mail/`
        DIR=`echo "$DIR" | sed s/.sbd/.directory/g`
        DIR=`echo "$DIR" | sed "s/\//\/\./"g`
        mkdir -p $DIR
        copydir $i $DIR
done

This script goes through your nsmail directory and creates the same directory structure in your Kmail Mail directory. I did a recursive one too, but that would stop at about 3 or 4 levels of recursion. (I have a lot of mail!)
The one problem I had with Kmail was the fact that it didn’t understand the uuencoded attachements I got. That was a pain.

A lot of people seem to be looking for references to Bosco too! I wonder why? Is there going to be a revival? hehe.

Courtesy of Freshmeat:

Multi Gnome Terminal has been updated!

Scribus – DTP for Linux.

Ariadne – Open Source application server and CMS. Screenshot looks good!

Just upgraded to Galeon 1.2.1 and Mozilla 1.0RC1. Bookmarks and cookies were kept but fonts look terrible. Probably because I haven’t enabled TT fonts on this new install of RH7.2 yet. Hmm. Just noticed that the Publish button is gone. Must copy and paste this later.

TT Fonts look great!

I haven’t posted for a while. I’ve been very busy!

From Dangerousmeta, Five tips for tuning Apache – I only used the first tip and it’s amazing the difference it makes! Instead of using fnctl I set the server to use pthreads, restarted, wow!

I found out yesterday that you can’t do the following in PHP 4.1.2 (or above I presume)
$array[ $index ] ++;
It’s a fatal error, but it worked fine in PHP3!
PHP4 sessions are very fast, I’m trying to teach phplib to use ’em but the documentation isn’t great (expect an article from me somewhere, sometime on this)

Cringely tells of his son’s death – I’m sorry for your trouble, nobody should go through what you and your partner must be living now. He’s looking for help in preventing SIDS, maybe you can help?

I heard on the radio this morning there may have been another rape in Cork City, this time in Bishopstown. I didn’t hear it on the national radio stations at all though.