Software

Hmm could this be the solution to my problems ?

sshfs -o uid=MyLocalUID -o gid=MyLocalGID $USER@$VECTRA: /tmp/mnt

$VECTRA is an environment variable that expands to the address of my file server.

I was able to access my remote users home directory (the one on $VECTRA) through the /tmp/mnt folder on my laptop ($DIXIE)

My local User ID and Group ID #’s on this system are the defaults setup when I installed PC-BSD, don’t recall if I had an option to set them. On my file server where I used adduser my UID/GID reflect my DOB so they needed to be remapped. Once I did that I was able to work on the files through a mount point I own, and

as expected the trusty umount command worked (of course you can’t be using the files while trying to un mount them)

fusefs-smbnetfs in ports is another thing I want to look at, because SMB is suitable for the windows clients just as much as sshfs is for my lapto… Only I care more about my laptop having *good* integration 🙂

On windows I don’t have a problem with SMB shares because it’s fairly integrated with the system, and I use a file manager for manipulating files… The cmd.exe is just to wasteful, it is the worst terminal emulator slash shell I have ever seen! Heck I’d rather confine my self to /bin/sh lol.

On my laptop, I usually do file management through my shell. I don’t use an external mouse, just the touch pad so you could say it’s in my best interests to make use of keyboard friendly designs ;-). I spend most of my time using a shell and utils for file management… So KDE’s integration with SMB Shares (almost as good as Windows and without the lockups).

mount_smbfs requires running as root because of what it has to do, that’s not acceptible to me although possibly I could rig my laptop for a passwordless sudo mount_smbfs but I don’t consider that an acceptable method whether it would work or not.

I’d like to be able to move parts of my home directories to the server. That way I can offload the current versions of my Music, Video, and Image files. I could even move my Documents and code directories which would be nice, right now I’ve been in a bit of a pesky situation.

tar -cf /tmp/foo.tar foo && scp /tmp/foo.tar $USER@$VECTRA:/srv/smb/Files/

So I can work on files from my windows machine, and just tar them back up and scp them over on the laptop later. A poor work around…

I need to test the fusefs-smbnetfs port, either way I know what I want. And to be honest I don’t have a problem with using sshfs for my laptop and smb for my desktop as long as I can get every thing working properly. Using sshfs on the laptop instead would also mean no need to change my laptops firewall configuration.

I just need to see how they handle a network failure….

My file server is usually online but not always, so I’d be hesitant to put my entire home directory on it. And even then, because of my shitty internet connection I often have to do a power cycle on the modem and some times the router every few weeks… So that is a factor that needs to be considered.

And actually, that might be a good way to _test_ it out !

Just not on my laptops home directory xD

So far the updates to my old Vi User how-to are going quite nicely, all things considered.

I’ve come to using GNU Make for automation work, to be honest if I had to use make features that are not standardized. GNU Make is the best bet to learn extensions any way because it is the most available set of extensions.

I’m not partial to BSD or GNU Make in the least, I only care about a working tool.

BSD Make failed to accept the makefile I setup for TeX documents, GNU Make accepted it without problem while BSD Make seems to barf at it. As long as the document gets build without me having to abuse my shells history features I don’t care lol.

The main problem is all of my projects are on a snails creep right now, courtesy of my family.

You know, I think I would love to take a pot & ladle from the kitchen. Then go pace back and forth in front of them banging the ladle on the pot; shouting “How do you like it” until I’m blue in the face — let them experience rest on their days off like *my* days off are spent doing things!

Oh what fun it could be to just be a cruel bastard for a change…

And how peaceful life could be if any one could head my words instead of [as good as] spiting at them.

I’ve now mostly completed my transition to Google Mail, the issues I’ve been having with POP3 Fetch mail on Ippimail seem to be a bit derailing of late… So I’ve got every thing set up to the GMail account now including my primary address (ippimail). If it ever can be fixed I can always transition back over.

I rather like the Squirrel Mail software that is used at Ippimail because I’ve worked with it before and they have a very nice theme. But I’ve got to admit, GMail is quite nice… I do however miss the ease of opening like 3 or 4 E-Mails in different tabs simultaneously with Ippimail though but I love the labels system in GMails software.

The spam folder is also about 5 to 8 orders of magnitude more full then Ippimails!!! But so far the filtering system works excellently just like googles search engine. I’ve had nothing put there that wasn’t spam yet and I’ve yet to see any thing penetrate the standard filters. I remember years ago I once tried Hotmail and felt like it was being placed on the world wide spam r us list :. I guess that’s impossible to avoid with any common services (hotmail, aol, yahoo, gmail, mail.com, etc) but hotmail back then at least was totally ridicules. At least GMail is doing a good job with the filters hehe.

Now that my Webmail problem is sorted out I guess it’s just the instant messengering one to fix. It would be so awesome if I could get a decent multi-protocol instant messenger that I didn’t dislike; I consider Pidgin and Kopte both cases of “foo sucks less”.

I have an XFire, an M$N, an AIM, an YIM, an ICQ, and even LiveJournals Jabber/GTalk features but I’m usually unreachable via XFire on my laptop and normally only on the others on my laptop. It would be awesome to be able to use each ! All the better without having to run Windows XP in the process or hack up FreeBSD’s Linux ABI to much to run the software.

Kopete and Pidgin both suck horribly for IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as well and I’m usually on several channels off irc.freenode.net. Which is why I’ve got Konversation on my laptop and X-Chat on my XP machine… Most of my friends use either AIM, MSN, or both. Still running 2-3 programs (xfire, irc, rest) is a total pain in the butt. I suppose it beats the 7 I would need if it wasn’t for applications like Kopete….

Oh wellz, back to the code.

With PC-BSD 1.5 on the horizon, think 1.5RC2 is out last I checked the mailing lists.

I’ve been working on compiling a list of software. Largley because I can remember an update some time in the past that essentially removed /usr/local/*, it said it would remove all the ports but not the entire directory tree!!!

So needless to say, just in case I prep before hand hehe.

Here is my list so far

Development
 /bin/sh and friends
 C Compiler
 C++ Compiler
 Java Compiler+JRE
 Perl
 Python
 Ruby
 Scheme
 Qt (as many bindings as possible)
 GTK+ (as many bindings as possible)
Games
 solitaire (kpat)
 battle for wesnoth
 xgalaga or chromium b.s.u.
 doom / quake
Graphics
 GIMP
 Inkscape
 xv or kview # i.e. any thing light and fast for many formats
Internet
 Flock
 Lynx
 Thunderbird or KMail or Sylpheed
 Mutt (optional)
 KNode
 Konversation
 Kopete or Pigen or *better* program of same genre.
 Download manager, command line + gui (kget/wxdfast?)
 ftp (command line client)
 TeamSpeak (client)
Misc
 Vim
 Emacs
 MicroEMACS
Multimedia
 MPlayer
 Mencoder
 cdrtools + k3b
Office
 Omni-Purpose file viewer would be nice! -- Okular (and a few more fmts)
 Full LaTeX suite of tools and outputs utilities
 Spreadsheet (no preference other then xls/ods support + fair speed)
Personal
 zsh
 Window Maker (currently) + Docker + WMClock
 Decent terminal emulator that supports transparency on any WM.

My laptop is really the one computer that I have that is special to me. My darling Dixie has arguably been a live saver without it I’d never get any work done in this place :

It’s bad enough I’m usually awake until 0400-0500 local, at least work doesn’t start until the afternoon on Mondays…

The list is fairly short considering that my laptop functions as my central system. Just programs for working with data really, text processing, images, etc. A few programs for audio/video and a couple of games to kill time. Most of the stuff filed under Internet is communications based, konvi for IRC and a decent multi-protocol instant messenger so I can be on AIM & M$N simultaneously, not to mention the YIM and ICQ accounts I have should I ever find a use for it.

I’m 100% Webmail based so I don’t really need a local MUA but I like to have one handy for the sake of emegency. After the flash drive snapped in two I gave up on Netscape mail based stuff (like Thunderbird) and had to switch to webmail. The only other decent alternative is to run it off my file server and I tried that. It kind of sucks to deal with multimedia attachments and html e-mail via ssh !

Hmm, time to see what work needs to be done for the night.

Thank GOD work doesn’t start at the crack of dawn… hehe

Finally a good day of sort.

slept in till 1400, nice considering the rest of the weekdays I have/will be getting up early :

Been toying around with Getopt::Long in Perl for a little ‘toy’ that I’ve had on the brain, worked on it a bit in my spare time. I’m used to working with tar, even gzip/bzip2 directly but occasionally have to work with zip/rar files and I find that I always need to look up the switches to use. So I was thinking about a script that would apply a uniform usage-style accross a varied set of such programs (tar inspired of course). I thought about using pax as a standard program, because for most stuff that I use I’ll generally leave it at TApe aRchives and skip the compression but I find generally speaking that using the pax utility is *annoying compared to the alternatives (when they work of course). KDE has an archiver program called Ark but I find it works poorly with /large/ archive files several hundred megs thick and there is no command line utility that I know of that has built in support for every format and runs both on NT and *Nix, the best I found in a short look require the Bourne Again Shell.

Enjoyed a few rounds on TG#1 with Jonsi and Rct Spawn. It’s good to get back into action again, I havn’t really played or trained much this week because of work. And I’m really looking forward to doing a training session on observation and marksmanship skills this weekend. I also managed to pop in to TG#3 and join Duke, Dallers, Chester, and the gang for a few before the DSL dropped out as usual.

I really wish I could tell Bellsouth to go suck an egg.

I think if I can find a day to do it and some time to print out the Gez Admin Mods command reference I might be able to setup a quick live op. I remember we have a hunt missing MI5 Programmer and a Russian Terrorist Cell on our Live Operations board that are still waiting for the green light. You know, the government should pay me for ideas lol, some of the live ops I concoct for our training are first rate !

For tonight, hmm on the basis of what hits me first. I need to get some stuff done that I told Gerard I’d take care of him on the documentation front. There’s the Perl script I’ve been toying with, and the age old issue of organizing my music collection +S

Every time I organize the damn thing I break my playlists, every time I update my playlists I usually spend more time either rebuilding them or s/search/replace/’in’g the entries instead of listing. What I really think would be best is if I just find or write a quick tag editor, use that to organize stuff. Then combine a script and a library to organize files according to the tags and regenerate my playlists when ever it is run.

I’m also thinking about switching to either MPlayer or VLC as a dedicated omni-purpose media player. The advantage of course being that they both run on any OS I’m likely to need them and can play darn near any thing ;-).

The only problem is I am used to Amaroks collection browser and playlist interface lol. I don’t really need much more then the basic features but aside from a handful (xmms/winamp, mplayer, vlc, amarok, kaffine) I’ve never really found a single Media Player that I am universally happy with but I suppose that is just the natural. One thing that I do like very much about MPlayer is there is a command line interface (very powerful one at that) and you can basically choose from any of several GUI Frontends, which I do really prefer to use for video operations but to be honest I’ve generally had better luck with VLC for DVD playback.

Hopefully work will get done before I loose concentration…

Installed Flock 0.9.0.2 on my laptop today, quick and easy as root:

Dixie# pkg_add -r linux-flock
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/Latest/linux-flock.tbz... Done.
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/All/linux-hicolor-icon-theme-0.5_1.tbz... Done.

And it is installed as linux-flock in my search path, very useful. I have used Mozilla based browsers for a long time. Years ago I started with Firefox 1.x, it was a great improvement over IE5 and 6, tabbed browsing – I was hooked instantly xD

As I got to spend a lot more time on the computer, I soon came to find Firefox less then perfect. The big bonus to using it had become greater portability between websites and OSes, some thing that is a bit of a must for me. I alos use Konqueror and Opera a lot among other browsers.

I tested Flock 0.7.x on my windows box awhile back and was rather impressed, while not perfect it was still pretty great. With a bit of that ‘surfer’ feel to it 🙂 I did not think though that it would scale to my laptops hardware quite well though. On a Pentium D 930 with 2GB of RAM, to a Sempron 3300+ with 512MB of RAM… But so far it has actually scalled a lot better then Seamonkey or Firefox 3.0 snap shots !

The main reason I discontinued working with Seamonkey and (Netscape) Navigator (9) was because while I liked them quite a lot, Navigator is actually a nice set up IMHO. The lack of responsfulness, particularly while editing text in fields like this and on forums made it less them ideal on my hardware. Even on the faster Desktop I occasionally noticed slow downs during text editing. On my laptop, even Firefox 2.0.0.x and 3.0a builds had the same issue on my laptop.

So far, Flocks Linux version does not, and it is starting faster then Netscape or Seamonkey ever did. And the funky font issues of using Linux Firefox and friends on PC-BSD no longer seem to apply to PC-BSD v1.4.x systems:-)

The thing I enjoy the most about Flock is the web clipboard and services support, especially for ma.gnolia. Being based on Firefox, Flock is still pretty easy to use but I find most of its shortcomings are inherited from Firefox! All of which seem to relate to configuration options…. But it does add enough other capabilities to be a bit of an improvement over Firefox 2 and 3a imho. And like Netscape Navigator 9, should work fine on Google Doc’s and friends hehe.

I think most of the Firefox extensions and add ons should work with Flock, doubt most themes would but Flock has a very nice default theme unlike Firefox. I have never really used much in the way of Firefox Extensions and Add Ons, although I keep several installed in my Desktop; I usually don’t use them ^_^.

Now if only Flock didn’t use the same crappy Spell Checking technology that Firefox does……… *sighs* I really wish Vim or Google would create a portable spell checking library based on their code, because they offer the best spell checking I’ve ever found =/

Testing a new web browser…..

Dang this thing is interesting ! Now if it could hold up better then Firefox 3.0a on my laptop… We’ve got a nice match hehehe.

Blogged with Flock

www.ippimail.com offers a free webmail service, the catch?

You get a few advertisements in the webmail interface, to be honest I barely notice them unless I’m looking for them. Many peoples sig-blocks on internet forums are more obtrusive. A single line appended to out going E-Mails as well. Just a sig-block consisting of a one or two lines of message I think.

--

 Email and shopping with the feelgood factor!
 55% of income to good causes. http://www.ippimail.com

Compared to some mail I’ve received with a yahoo html ad a page long at the end of the E-Mail!! This is no problem for me.

The money they get from it, goes to them and a good portion of it to several charities which is a very good thing IMHO. Plus like 10% to supporting Open Source Projects, a very nice thing considering that they use a lot of FOSS.

The Webmail is essentially a Squirrel Mail setup with a number of plug ins and customizations. Including a theme thats much nicer then any of the ones I’ve seen come with Ippimail, which are not provided ^_^. The usual set of style sheets and features of course.

I’ve come to enjoy using Squirrel Mail and when I learned about Ippimail it was from reading about Squirrel Mail on Wikipedia, so I knew I’d probably get a good Web mail interface. What I was worried about was the ads and possibility of spam. I remember when I had registered for a free Hotmail account some years back, it was like being placed in the worlds biggest Please_Spam_Me_List loool.

With ippimail I registered for the account and filled out even the extra questionnaire, which is for targeting the ads better and what not. So far I have gotten _0_ spam E-Mails !!! Heck, I get more then that from my ISP’s account. The data involved not really a major security risk ether. The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy is compatible with my views, and I can be quite pissy about agreeing to such things too.

I’ve only had two issues with Ippimail and I’ve found excellent service if thats what you want to call it. The average response time has been within 24 hours. And very friendly support for issues, unlike a call to an ISP. No need to call 3 freaking times to get some one competent, an issue on ippimail gets some ones attention, that actually can tell the difference between a file and a folder. I’ve been very satisfied with Ippimail in every thing I’ve seen and I’m a rather picky bastard :/

Maybe that’s the difference between the people at Ippimail and those at an ISP, they ain’t doing it just for $$$$.

One thing that I really love about the Squirrel Mail software they chose for the actual webmail interface. Is because it’s output is all HTML (with Javascript optional) and the people creating it had a nice brain. You can customize a lot of the User Interface, a very nice feature for people like me (Yes I am a KDE user not a Gnome user :-P).

We have the ability to have mail forwarded to another account, e.g. Ippimail to your Primary E-Mail. To have Ippimail fetch messages from another account (via POP3) and to set up Mail and Spam filters. It can filter messages into different folders based on the filter rules. And even provides a Spam/Anti-virus filter option. I’ve never needed them but my Ippimail account is basically my personal E-Mail address, so I’m not prone to signing up for accounts with it (I use my ISP’s SpamMeAlot address for that).

The address book used while composing mail is crappy IMHO but if one enables the Javascript version you get a quite nice one. It’s also never tripped my popup blocker or slowed down my browser ether. If Konquerors (annoying) Javascript engine can handle it fine I’d be even happier with it. Unfortunately while Ippimail seems to use the import/export address book plugin (hooah!). It can only handle CVS files, one thing I like about this; especially since you can customise the output. Is it means it’s not to hard to use other tools (sed, awk, perl, e.t.c) to process the file into a format more suitable for other things of Unix nature. But it means no real support for Outlook Express or Thunderbird address books 🙁

E-Mail storage is roughly 250MB right now, not as big as some (like gmail) but it’s more then enough for most people I think. Unless you’re prone to storing a lot of junk mail with attachments :/ Even with a real mother load of messages piling up, I’ve never surpassed 30-50mb before. If I really wanted to keep a few 100MB of mail in storage, I’d download it and archive+compress it %_%

The UI is fairly intruitive as any you’ll find and easy to change in options. It’s also very easy on the eyes, in addition to a simple E-Mail system. It comes with fairly simple Calendar, To-do list, and notes system. They even will provide a Blog with the account if wanted. Since I use Live Journal, I’ve never investigated it. I rarly use it for more then E-Mail but I’m interested in the To-Do and Notes plugins they have installed.

As a Web based Mail User Agent of sorts, I’ve found Squirrel Mail top notch and Ippimail to be a great provider. I’ve used many programs but never really been happy with any for E-Mail. Especially for dealing with mail in _volume_ and from multiple PC’s. So far, ippimails usage of squirrel mail has proven to be one arrangement I really like.

The website is quite compact and down to business, I like it even if it’s not very flashy. Theres links for site news, blogs, shopping, and google-searching. The thing Ippimail does best is E-Mail and thats what I use it most for 🙂

I almost went with a gmail account but didn’t quite like Googles policy, when I found out about ippimail I probed for awhile and thought about it. Then I dove in head first and I’m glad I did. I don’t like software that gets in my way, I like software that helps me get my work done, efficiently!