January 31, 2009

Google VS the “elements of nature” or “This site may harm your computer”

Posted in Google tagged , at 4:50 pm by ilanco

While searching Google for some interesting articles to fill my Saturday afternoon, I stumbled on this. “This site may harm your computer” Google claims falsely. Seems Google doesn’t like nature, or at least it’s elements. In some further searches I noticed that it’s not only nature Google is after.

Looks more like a test/coding error, every web page on the internet is harmful.

Go Google!

March 1, 2008

Public agencies and support for open source projects?

Posted in Linux, Open Source tagged , , , , at 4:43 pm by ilanco

Open Source Pixels has an interesting post about why public agencies should support open source projects.

Read the entire article here.

February 24, 2008

wp-o-matic quick & dirty duplicate post fix

Posted in Open Source, wordpress tagged , , , , , , at 12:23 am by ilanco

I’m getting a lot of duplicate posts using wp-o-matic and if you are reading this, you probably have the same problem.

Instead of fixing wp-o-matic (that’s the developer’s job) I just changed my local wordpress to ignore posts with the same title.

Here is how it works :

  1. Open up wp-includes/post.php in your favorite editor
  2. at approx line 703 you will find the following line :
    if ($post_name_check || in_array($post_name, $wp_rewrite->feeds) ) {
  3. After this insert a new line of code :
    return 0;
  4. save (you did make a backup, right?).
  5. All done.

February 21, 2008

wp-o-matic cron install problem

Posted in Linux, Open Source, wordpress tagged , , , , , , at 2:57 am by ilanco

WP-o-Matic is a cool auto-blogging plugin for wordpress.

After installation you’ll have to change cron.php if you want to use automatic feed fetching via crontab.

  1. take note of the code wp-o-matic will give you on installation.
  2. open cron.php in your favorite editor
  3. add this piece of code after the <?php opening tag :
    if ($argc > 0)
    {
    for ($i=1;$i < $argc;$i++)
    {
    parse_str($argv[$i],$tmp);
    $_REQUEST = array_merge($_REQUEST, $tmp);
    }
    }
  4. fire up crontab -e and add something like the following line to it :
    */20 * * * * php /DIR_TO_WP/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cron.php code=YOURCODE
    change DIR_TO_WP with you path to wordpress and YOURCODE with the code you noted in step 1
  5. Save the file and cron will run your fetcher every 20 minutes.
  6. You’re done, go add some rss feeds.

February 20, 2008

What is Linux?

Posted in Linux, Open Source tagged , , at 9:07 pm by ilanco

This page will describe about Linux, the operating system, kernel, it’s creators and more.

February 4, 2008

Joomla! 1.5

Posted in Israel, Linux, Open Source tagged , , at 1:44 am by ilanco

Joomla! 1.5 is out.

Hebrew speaking users should read about Joomla! here.

There is also a demo available for the curious …

January 6, 2008

Postgresql lc_collate aggravation

Posted in Linux, Open Source tagged , , , , , at 11:14 pm by ilanco

Implementing tearch2 on an existing postgres database : not as simple as it seems.

When trying to install tsearch2 into an existing database I stumbled upon a problem. It seems that tsearch2 takes its default locale from the lc_collate setting of the postgres cluster.

In my setup this was set to “en_US.ISO-8859-1”.

You can check your collation by sending this query to postgres :
show lc_collate;

This database was upgraded to 8.2 from an older version and the collation was set a long time ago when the database was created. Because of this setting tsearch2 refused to accept any characters outside this encoding, which was very annoying since we have our data utf-8 encoded.

The only solution was to create a new cluster with a UTF-8 collation and import all the data.

I hope postgres will support more dynamic collation settings in the future.

January 4, 2008

Download Hebrew X fonts

Posted in Linux, Open Source tagged , , , , at 1:50 am by ilanco

To install Hebrew fonts for use in X (KDE, GNOME), follow the instructions below.

You can either download a free TTF font or install available fonts if you use Debian (or a Debian derived distribution).

A free TTF font that includes support for Hebrew glyphs.

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu however you can just try this command in a shell:

sudo apt-get install culmus xfonts-efont-unicode xfonts-efont-unicode-ib xfonts-intl-european msttcorefonts

Swatch multiple log files

Posted in Linux, Open Source tagged , , , , at 12:33 am by ilanco

To make swatch parse multiple log files at once from a central syslog server use the following command from any bash compatible shell:
swatch -c ~/.swatchrc --tail-args '-q -f -n 0' -t "`find . -name *.20080104 | xargs`"

Of course you can substitute ~/.swatchrc with your own swatch config and *.20080103 with your own search criteria.

Good luck.

January 3, 2008

Linux for all?

Posted in Israel, Linux, Open Source tagged , , , at 1:44 am by ilanco

People say Linux is for savvy people that like to take apart and put together their computer a lot. Well, not anymore. Linux can be used to do some real work. Advancing Linux and Open Source in Israel tries to bring Linux and Open Source products closer to the people. You will find information and guides.

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