Today I spent about three hours to play with “extremely practical and user friendly” interface of WinXP. The problem was that Windows is too smart (at least for me). It tries to foresee your desires. But as result you wast your time to switch off next “intelligent” feature. In my case I heed to download CSV file from site supported IE only. But IE opens that file in browser window with Excel, corrupted its data. Finally I found solution:
- Open Control Panel
- Open Folder Options
- Click File Types
- Locate “CSV” and click the Advanced button
- Check the box that says “Confirm open after download”
- Do the same for “XLS Microsoft Excel Worksheet” as well
- Click Ok
It was amazing. I checked Alan Simpson’s Windows XP Bible and O’Reilly – Fixing Windows XP Annoyances but without luck. Maybe that issue so trivial that everybody knows how to solve it. Anyway, once again I saw that Windows is not my choice!
Recently I needed to send a script to one of my co-workers from the server. One way to do that is copy the script using scp to my PC and send it as usual. But there is a more efficient way to do that with mutt:
$ mutt -s “Subject” -a /tmp/file.tar.gz your@email.addr < /tmp/message-body.txt
I hope that all parameters are understandable. So, having mutt and using that command you can easily send email with attached file from command line.
Once Alexey suggested me to use online service Mobical to store info from my mobile phone. I didn’t start use it immediately. But recently I decided to try it. It’s really cool and useful service. Once registered there you can synchronize phone book, calendar, tasks and other stuff from your mobile phone with your online account. Moreover, it’s possible to export your contacts as vCard-file and calendar as vCard-file or iCalendar-file for backup or for some other reason.
Recently I faced with problem of printing from the Linux server to the printer connected to the Windows PC via USB. So, here is a brief how to do it using CUPS.
1. Type http://localhost:631/ in your browser to open CUPS web interface and go to “Add new printer” page.
2. For device choose “Windows Printer via SAMBA”. If this options isn’t presented in the drop down list run following command as root:
ln -s `which smbspool` /usr/lib/cups/backend/smb
3. Device URI type in following format:
smb://win_user:win_pass@win_domen/win_PC/printer_name
4. Choose appropriate driver for your printer. I didn’t find my model in the list. So, I chose one from Generic:
Generic -> Generic PCL 6/PCL XL Printer Foomatic/pxlmono
For more information, please refer to OpenPrinting database.
See also:
I like Perl and I use it every day. It’s cool to make a simple scripts in one line to do some routine work. For example, my first Perl oneliner formats Apache log to be easy readable. Here is another good example of Perl onliner (it isn’t my actually). It makes a recursive search and replacement:
Perl -p -i -e ’s/oldstring/newstring/g’ `grep -ril oldstring *`
[via About: Perl]
Recently I started to receive a lot of spam messages from contact form of my blog. It really makes me crazy! I hate spam and I hate spammers! Great plugin SpamKarma protects my posts but it doesn’t do anything with contact form. So, I googled it and found a patched version of Ryan Duff’s plugin. There is a customized question which helps to identify a human (2+2 by default). It can be changed easily via admin interface. Enjoy!
We use following approach to build print view of documents in our web-based application. At the begging the document template is filled by real data and HTML page is generated. After that this page is sent to HTMLDOC which converts it into PDF. The users open the document via Acrobat plugin installed in the web browser. This approach has worked fine for years.
But recently we decided to send PDF directly to the printer. I’ve added printer to the our server and implemented a simple function (we have a Xerox printer with PostScript support):
lp -d printer_name -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -o media=A4 -o portrait -o page-ranges=1-7 PDF_file
The strange thing appeared right after that. One type of documents couldn’t print anymore. No errors in the CUPS log or on the printer display. The job just disappeared from the queue and was marked as printed. After spending some time I found the way to solve this problem. I use acroread to convert PDF into PostScript and then send it to the printer:
acroread -toPostScript PDF_file
Acroread creates the PostScript file with the same name but with different extension (.ps) and stores it in the current directory. But you can pass desired directory name as second parameter:
acroread -toPostScript PDF_file /store-dir/
I use Acrobat 5 from DAG repository. It works fine even the server doesn’t have installed X. But if you want to use Acrobat 7 you should do additional work. It needs X and if try to run it from command line it give you an error:
(acroread:6488):
GTK-WARNING **: cannot open display:
To solve this just install Xvfb – X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices, and run following command:
xinit acroread -toPostScript PDF_file /store-dir/ — /usr/X11R6/bin/Xvfb :9 -ac
Recently I faced with problem to incorrect displaying none-latin characters on the HTML page generated by Embperl. This happened because Embperl escapes all output symbols by default. To avid it it’s needed to specify a parameter EMBPERL_OUTPUT_ESC_CHARSET = 0. For web application is works fine because Embperl check %ENV and changes its parameters according to it. But if you need to run Embperl script from command line it doesn’t work. The solution is following: add into %ENV desired parameter
$ENV{EMBPERL_OUTPUT_ESC_CHARSET} = 0;
and pass additional parameter to the Embperl::Execute – use_env
Embperl::Execute( { inputfile => my-test-file.epl,
param => [<some data>],
use_env => 1,
});
