Ralph’s TechBlog

There is a great SMTP/POP server list in case you need to configure around some of them:

http://www.patshaping.de/hilfen_ta/pop3_smtp.htm

I finalized my DIY-Planner for 2010. You can download the new calendar here (created with my personal fix for DIY Dynamic Templates).

I use a PDF Printer on my professional Windows notebook. It enables me to create PDF documents from whatever application. So, how about Linux then. Thanks God, there is cups-pdf. A German tutorial can be found here. If you find a English HowTo, just post the link here.

[-A-Z0-9._%+]+@[-A-Z0-9.]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}

Dan White wrote a wonderful Qt4 application for creating a personal D*I*Y planner. I like it a lot and it saves my job every single day since I use it. However, there is one flaw in his templates. The week numbers are missing in calendars. Luckily, he published his source code so I could make some fixes. And of course, I publish it to you for personal use as well.

The files you can download below are based on version 2.04. Following adjustments were made:

• Added week numbers to day, week, month and year templates
• Adjusted default page setting to European ISO style A4
• Adjusted default zoom to 9 (instead of 25)

Download

Windows Executable 2.04 plus Fixes

Source Code 2.04 inkl. Fixes

Screenshots

Please excuse the German wording. I hope this will vanish on English PCs

Old version at the left, new version at the right…

You propably got already used to Firefox’ zoom feature. Firefox 3 introduced a new setting that enables it to remember the zoom value when you visit a website. Whenever you re-visit the domain, the previously used zoom level will be re-applied.

If you don’t like this feature, open the about:config page and toggle the boolean setting browser.zoom.siteSpecific to false.

Of course, you can always use Strg-0 to reset the zoom to the default value.

Another list from my daily work. All IATA and ICAO airline codes along with the official airline’s name can be found in this CSV list.

By default, Firefox has disabled local links in websites. So no network site can link a file on your local filesystem. However, sometimes you want to enable that cause files are shared among project groups on shared folders mounted on your local PC. Here is how you enable these links to open.

Go to your Firefox profile directory. Usually this is at

Documents and Settings\myloginname\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\somehash

and open user.js. You might need to create this file. Append or change the following lines accordingly:

1
2
3

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://webaddress1.com http://webaddress2.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

Line 1 defines a name for the policy. You can actually set any name you want. localfilelinks is a good choice though.

Line 2 defines the websites that you want to enable to have local links enabled. Be careful to include only sites that you really trust. Multiple sites are separated by spaces.

Line 3 is the actual policy setting that allows these sites to load all URIs.

I usually get annoyed by spam robots. They are able nowadays to even bypass captchas. So what helps? I recently read an article saying that scientists work on a new kind of spam filters that can identify spam by the way the actual text looks like. That raised an idea in my head. Why not just count the number of links that a new guestbook entry contains? Usually this is what they do at my guestbook. They leave dozens of links. So I added a simple count in my guestbook plugin. Whenever there are too many links, I just ignore the entry.

My current job often challenge me with various country codes and timezones. So I prepared two lists providing you with this information. country_codes.csv list all country codes (ICAO, ISO 2-letter, ISO 3-letter, ISO 3-digit), country names and continents. timezones.csv will list the ISO 2-letter code together with country name and Unix Timezone. Both lists might not be complete. So if you find errors or omissions, just let me know.

Country Code List (CSV)

Unix Timezones (CSV)