The new balance - Technology

Cryptographic Hash Functions UNO Component for OpenOffice.org

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:13:46 +0100

You, like me, might be wanting to create MD5 hashes in OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets. You, like me, might be wondering why the OpenOffice repository for Extensions is unusable.

If this is true then like me, you might want a link to the Cryptographic Hash Functions UNO Component for OpenOffice.org, because the extensions site is not working very well at the moment.

I did what anyone would have done and filched the link from Google's cache of the page.

Redshift to reduce eyestrain at night

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:28:59 +0000

If your monitor, like mine, is a little bright and on the blue side, you might appreciate Redshift available on Linux and Windows (with caveats). It takes your location and the time of day and alters your monitor settings to make the colours match daylight during the day and tungsten during the night. You can tweak the settings quite a lot. I don't like the screen getting so red during the night - it's a cheap laptop screen so the colours are bad enough as it is without too much more messing around.

Here's the command I'm using on Linux, using Medmenham as my geographical location. You can easily get latitude and longitude for any place using Google maps: find the place, and the lat/lng is after &ll= in the URL when you click Link.



gtk-redshift -l 51.556459:-0.834851 -t 5700:4900 -g 0.8 -m vidmode

Setting up phpm for offline use - parsing the PHP docbook manual

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:45:22 +0000

If you want to create an up-to-date function list for use with phpm, you'll need to update the manualparser.php recommended in the original article to work on PHP5. I'll tell you for free that this is going to be difficult: for starters the original article is no longer properly online (there's a cached version on the Wayback Machine) and the code is broken as it relies on a deprecated method of the DirectoryIterator class.

You'll also need to get hold of the PHP manual docbook source. All the instructions for doing so refer to old CVS users: SVN is used these days. This is what you need to know:



$ svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/phpdoc/modules/doc-en ./phpdoc-en

So, to save you time, I've suffered all the pitfalls and mended the code myself - it runs cleanly. You'll find it on my GitHub along with more explanation in the README. Fetch the lot down, put it in the same directory as you download phpdoc-en and run parseit.php.

Here are some links to the resources I used: I'm mainly putting them here in the hopes that they will trackback to the various blogs and that people might actually find this...:

- Håvard Eide's phpm post. Did he write the original version of this parser? I'm not sure, but he certainly wrote phpm
- http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11663

MXToolbox SuperTool - great for domain and DNS checking

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:09:39 +0000

I've written my first search plugin on MyCroft, for the excellent SuperTool. I can't believe that out of 22,000 plugins, mine is the first for such a brilliant tool. Take a look and try it out - you won't regret it. Better than a lot of pay-for ones, in my view, but there's a special place in my heart for the free, oddly named and somewhat spartan dnscolos. My web hosts often use intoDNS which I rather like as well, and gets new tests and features periodically.

(How do I manage to sound like I'm advertising, even when I've nothing to gain? Must be that boundless enthusiasm...)

ttytter extension for posting to Instapaper

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:20:38 +0000

I have forked reuteras' extension for posting twitter URLs to del.icio.us and make it post to Instapaper instead. You can find my efforts in my GitHub repo.

It isn't as clever as I would like it to be:
- only accounts without a password are working at the moment
- I'm not using HTTP basic auth as I just can't get it to work

To try it you need to do the following:
Continue reading "ttytter extension for posting to Instapaper"

Checking credit on a Vodafone dongle

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:06:55 +0000

More a less a note to self, if you're using a Vodafone TopUp and Go dongle on Linux, you'll quickly find there's no nice way to check your remaining credit. On Windows, you can use the button so labelled in the Vodafone connect software. On Linux, that's not really an option!

The answer is to pop open your trusty copy of minicom so proceed thusly:



minicom -s

In the resulting settings menu, change the serial port configuration so that your device is set up. The most likely choice is /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 rather than /dev/ttyS8 or whatever the default on your system is. Then go to 'exit' in the menu, which should take you into minicom.

What we do now is to simulate pressing that button, so, paste in (so that it happens quickly), and follow with Enter:



AT+CUSD=1,"*&1345;",15

You may have to have a few goes. What you get back should look like this:



+CUSD: 0,"#14.66.",0

Which is your dongle's way of saying £14.66 remaining.

I don't know how up-to-date this figure is, and for the record, I think £15/GB is extortionate (I'm paying £15 for 5GB for my own 3 dongle with a rolling one-month contract by Direct Debit).

This will only work for Vodafone dongles (and TopUp and Go mobiles, I suppose if you've hooked yours up by USB). The approach might work for other setups, though.

If you need a fresh proxy, here's the list I use

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:39:31 +0000

I remember when the days of finding a fresh, fast, geographically local anonymous proxy to surf behind were fraught with difficulties. Some Russians ran a list I used, but it was often out-of-date and the proxies on it didn't work for long.

I now go here for a fresh proxy when I need one:
http://www.ip-adress.com/proxy_list/

That site also allows you to test a proxy for Reverse DNS, actual location and so on, right from the list.

These are HTTP proxies mainly, rather than SOCKS5 ones which you might want if you need a full range of ports from Windows, but they suit my needs, getting me out of corporate networks and around restrictive ISPs, etc. I expect I will use them heavily whilst travelling when I come across certain states which are somewhat restrictive about where their citizens might surf. Like Western news websites.

To avoid Adobe's Download Manager (DLM), try FTP!

nospam@example.com (James Valentine) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:38:28 +0000

Fed up with having to download a download manager in order to fetch a little piece of proprietary software, I'm recommending people use the FTP site which Adobe runs. Head over to:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/

You'll find the version you need quite quickly, and a choice of MSI or EXE installer.