I don’t usually cover software releases on the blog, but some software is so good and well made that when it reaches a final release stage I can’t help shouting YaHoo and cracking a bottle of champers! Timo Sirainen has been working on Dovecot for nearly five years and has taken a perfectionist attitude towards the way it works. He’s spent the last six months refusing to release a final version and we’ve all watched as the release candidate numbering has crept up to hit rc23. A couple of weeks ago he chose Friday 13th to do the final release, and it has happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an updated version of KdeAm available. This is only a bug fix for situations where the audio is not playing correctly. This was due to a recent change in the sox utils, where the ‘play’ command expected a different style of paramater. Find it on the KdeAm page

Astute observers may note that the site has changed a little… well quite a lot really. All the articles and notes have been moved over to the Wordpress blogging software and the site slightly redesigned to accomodate that. Much of the site is based on the Kubrick set of templates.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently upgraded the kernel on my workstation to kernel 2.6.8 and, of course, some things didn’t work as they had previously. One of those things was the ISDN card (which was previously using the ISDN2Linux tools). So, I took the opportunity to switch over to using CAPI instead. Which required upgrading KdeAm (the KDE answering machine) to read the files produced by CapiSuite. CapiSuite of course doesn’t use the same format for the audio files as vbox, nor does it store them in the same place, so there are a few modifications to be done.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve set up the krefty project on Sourceforge, an experience in itself. I’ve gained a lot of admiration for people who go through the whole process of creating and distributing software in the Free Software world. Writing the code sometimes seems like the easy bit of the work. Writing documentation, creating and testing the distribution packets, setting up a home page, creating and uploading projects on places like freshmeat.net and sourceforge takes a fair bit of work in itself.

The project is here and locally here.

I had a need for a simple, basic, easy to install PHP script for some websites to allow visitors to subscribe/unsubscribe from a newsletter. I found plenty on HotScripts but they were all far too big, complex and hard to modify.
So, I wrote my own and called it “SubberZ”. In the end I called it “SubberZ[Lite]â€? as I have ideas for making it a bit more complicated and capable, but rather than create one big set of scripts, I’ve decided to create a family of scripts, the “SubberZâ€? family. So, there will be “SubberZ[Lite]â€? and “SubberZ”. And maybe even a “SubberZ+”…

Further details available on the SubberZ page.

Today saw the first release of Krefty, a Quick Reference Application written for KDE.

A quick reference sheet is a handy look up page of all the hot-keys, command parameters, options and so on for various programs. I’ve put together sheets for such things as GNU-Find, GNU Tar and so on, there is one for FlightGear, one for Vim. The data files are standard XML files, so the hope is that some of you will contribute a few more Krefty sheets to the pile, I can distribute them from here.

Source code, krefty files and some docs available on the Krefty pages.

The first KDE application has been put up for download. Its an answering machine front end for KDE, written using all standard KDE stuff. Its called KdeAm and its available on the KdeAm pages.
Its also up on Freshmeat and at KDE Apps.

Let me know if there are any troubles installing or running the application.
Note that it does need a functioning vboxgetty backend to handle the ISDN connection (part of the ISDN4LINUX packages, installed as standard) and the SOX audio utilities for playback, again, usually part of the standard install routine. (UPDATE: now also works with Capi4Linux messages).

I’ve spent the weekend installing and testing Subversion, a version management system from tigris.org (who use to be, or maybe still are, collab.net). And, so far, so good. I’ve converted a few projects from CVS to Subversion and, once I’d got used to the different way of working, all went smoothly.

Read the rest of this entry »