Monday, February 28, 2011

Fink FAQ: installing a few "unstable" packages from "fink"

Fink FAQ: installing a few "unstable" packages from "fink"

I don't exactly remember, when I configured fink to also install "unstable" packages, but now I think, that created a terrible mess on my computer. I ran "fink configure" today, and disabled the installation of "unstable" packages there. I hope, fink will work much smoother from now on. No more md5sum mismatches …

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

No Gnus v0.13 is released

No Gnus v0.13 is released

It seems to depend on EIEIO ("Enhanced Implementation of Emacs Interpreted Objects"), a new CLOS implementation; apparently EIEIO must get installed manually.
EIEIO in turn is part of CEDET ("Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools").

Monday, February 21, 2011

movie: Unknown (2011) - IMDb

Unknown (2011) - IMDb

The location of the thriller is Berlin; the main characters are played by Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger.

The way from the Adlon hotel to the Tegel airport does not go through Oberbaumbrücke, where the car dumps into the rive – but then: who minds this?

RVM: Ruby Version Manager

http://rvm.io (!!! worth having a look there for the most up-to-date installation procedure !!!)

Allows you to work very well with more than one ruby installation, just like App::perlbrew for perl.

The rvm command is implemented through a lot of bash functions.

The PragProg ruby3 and the jruby book both talk about rvm, and it looks, as if rvm is really quite helpful, if  you deal with more than one ruby interpreter.

I installed rvm locally on an openSUSE-11.3 system and also remotely (git-based), and also on Mac OS X 10.6.6 (not git-based (yet)).

Update 2011-02-22:
Output from my $HOME/.bashrc disturbed the smooth execution of rvm, I had to remove that output (although I really liked that).

Update 2011-07-15 – how to upgrade:
$ rvm get stable
$ rvm reload
$ rvm list known
$ rvm list
$ rvm install jruby-1.6.99999
$ rvm install ruby-1.9.99999
rvm all do gem install xml-simple
$ …


Update 2012-01-… – trouble with "get head"!!!
$ rvm get head # looks broken, avoid it for the time being!
This really caused me a lot of grief and fear.

$ rvm get stable # better for me

Update 2013-09-30
(Nowadays) before running rvm, you need to run some initialisation code:
source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

installing Chromium snapshots

snapshots on build.chromium.org

Execute the provided $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR/chrome-wrapper instead of the binary executable, it will create necessary symlinks to system libraries.

After unpacking the zipped snapshot file on my openSUSE Linux system, privileges were wrong:
files and directories were only readable, writable, and executable for the owner, which was root;

As a very quick solution I made "myself" the owner :
$ chown -R myself $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR

Of course there are better solutions than this, e.g. like this one:
$ cd $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR
$ chmod -R a+r .
$ find . | while read f; do ! test -L "$f" && test -x "$f" && chmod --changes a+x "$f"; done

Thursday, February 10, 2011

xpdf: Error (...): Missing 'endstream'

There are a few PDF documents around here, that I can read with Acrobat Reader w/o problems, but xpdf and its companions moan. I guess, that's because they got modified and a little destroyed using Acrobat X Pro.

I used pdftk to get rid of that problem: first output/uncompress, than output/compress again:

$ pdftk x.pdf output \
    x.uncompressed.pdf uncompress
$ pdftk x.uncompressed.pdf output \
    x.recompressed.pdf compress

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

"pdftohtml" vs. DRM

A project of mine involves extracting strings and other details from PDF files using "pdftohtml -xml".

A plain "pdftohtml -xml" refuses to read PDF files with set copy-protection bits set. But if you add "-nodrm" on the command line, it reads them anyway, but it mentions the problem on STDERR.

Monday, February 7, 2011

XSLT Questions and Answers - FAQ.

XSLT Questions and Answers - FAQ.

very nice, very helpful!!

helped me to create "<![CDATA[…]]" into XML output, which isn't trivial to do.