I bought a new computer, pretty cheap, pretty good. So I’m pretty happy with it. Its one weak point is that its 3D graphics card (which I do need) has no decent driver support under linux yet. So a good reason to leave windows 7 on it for a while, and find out how it works. I do miss linux, but I have no major complaints so far.
Something I brought over from linux, is wanting to use the command line, and I really needed it for playing around with Django. I guess the command line in windows is not really the same as in linux, and it doesn’t work as smoothly, but there is one. What I do hate, however, is typing in directory paths using the – for my finger less conveniently placed – “\”. So I wanted to start the command prompt in my Django directory. If you create a shortcut to the command prompt, you can set a directory where it has to start. If you run it as administrator, however, it still starts up in the system folder. Windows wouldn’t be Windows however, if there wasn’t a registry setting for this:
(start the registry editor with regedit in the start menu)
add to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor a new string value “Autorun” (if it’s not there yet) and set its value to “CD /d ” (E.g. CD /d C:\Users\User\Desktop)
And that works when you open cmd as administrator too…
(BEWARE, messing with windows registry can cripple your windows installation, so be careful and backup)

A while ago, I had a simple website, with a simple js script for calculating a price based on some user input. The script uses an updater function that, after all required choices have been made (radio buttons), calculates the final price and shows the price. It does this by adding html to a predefined ‘price div’ (price.innerHTML = “…”) and setting it’s height from 0 to ‘auto’. Nothing fancy, but worked quite nice.
Upon changing the website for a Drupal site, I was confronted with implementing the js within Drupal. And even though it wasn’t really hard, it took me a while to figure it out, so I thought I’d share my findings, hoping they would be useful to somebody.

First of all, I created a normal page within Drupal. The downside of the method (to some people) is that I had to enable PHP for the page input. But as I am the only person ever seeing an input form on this particular site, I didn’t care too much. For adding the required js (and some extra css for that page), I used:

And then I added an html form which calls the updater function on each click. This makes it possible to have the second choice customers have to make depend on the first choice they make.

Works like a charm for me...

Don’t really know whether it’s vpnc or network-manager-vpnc that is to be blamed for the standard settings.
My versions: Ununtu 9.10, vpnc 0.5.3-1 and network- manager-vpnc 0.8~a~git.20091008(…)-0ubuntu1


ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (805, 0))


ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (785, 0))


And then more blabla. Not very nice, I would say. Apparently, it is a conflict between certain versions of Sage and Maxima.

My solution: building Sage myself from source. Not hard to do, and you get the latest version fully installed. Disadvantage: it takes a couple of hours of compiling!

Without a doubt, the Views module is one of those Drupal modules without which Drupal wouldn’t be the same. With Drupal 6, Views got a major revision, and I must say I quite like the new interface. There was one thing that I couldn’t figure out immediately however: how to random sort the selection. I should have looked harder in the sort criteria – which is the most logical place to put it – but I was sort of expecting the possiblity to add randomness to any sort criterion I selected (e.g. node:type). Not so: in the list with all possible criteria, you have to select “global:random”.

Still not sure whether that is the most logical way of doing it. Personally, I would think adding “random” as a choice for each criterion (besides “ascending” and “descending”) would yield a much finer granularity and makes more sense. The fact that the random sort criterion is listed as “global:random asc” (asc for ascending) doesn’t really help changing this view either.

But probably there is a good reason for doing it this way. To paraphrase a French proverb: The programmer has his reasons that reason doesn’t know.

Turns out that on Arch, there’s a different path to follow. As root, do:

Followed by:

And you should be set! Still, if you’re not, please don’t hold me responsible. Everything you do as root is your own responsibility!

Solution: updating KMyMoney!

Something I miss in comparison with Arch, or even Ubuntu: the constant (rolling) updating of your total system. I know selecting all possible updates is possible somehow in Yast, but still…

Luckily, there are different ways to handle bots as well. If you’re using a .htacces file, for example, you can add a snippet to block the vermin based on their IP address. An idea I liked even better is to redirect the bots to a site that tries to reeducate the bots. You never know.

In stead of redirecting the bots to a governement site where they can take a seat and follow a hands-on course on cyber crimes, another good idea is to send the little bastards to a spam trap page. Gives me visions of all bots in the world swimming around in a pool of interlinked spam pages, never able to get out by them selves. Heaven…

So that’s what I do now, I redirect the bots to a spam trap. Typing in the IP’s in the required format for the .htaccess file, however, can be a PITA. Therefore, I wrote a little script to generate the .htaccess snippet based on a list of IP’s in their normal format. The .htaccess format itself comes from Am I Famous Now. Insert the URL where you want to send the bots to or leave the one I use, insert the IP’s of the bots and push the button:

Copy paste the snippet into your .htaccess file, and you’re all set. (WATCH OUT: if you don’t know what you’re doing, messing with .htaccess can wreck your site in a second. Don’t blame me. I told you.) This works fine, ofcourse, when you can easily keep track of the bots. When you have huge traffic on your site, you probably have a huge number of bots visiting it as well. In that case, you’re probably better of with a lean and mean, fully automated and integrated bot trapping/blocking device like this or this