withouthat.org

For ages I'm using Xplanet as an animated background on my desktop, displaying a nice view of the earth.

Xplanet has a nice feature: You can download a (nearly) up to date map of the clouds and use it with Xplanet (see this screenshot). Two download scripts are listed here, but I wasn't too happy with them (although I did use the one written in Python for a long time). What nagged me about them was their irritating behaviour to download even the "file not found" page if there was no cloudmap available. So I wrote my own download script which checks if it has really downloaded a cloudmap before replacing the one in use.

That means that you may end up with an old one, but you have always nice clouds for xplanet.

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I've updated a new version of sm_watch. The update is just addressing one glitch: When too many messages have to be processed (say you inserted a scratched CD), ccze is driven crazy. Can't help it, but at least I can start it with the highest possible nice value.

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This is my favorite hack, in daily use here on my box. I copied the following passage from the script:

Shell program to display changes to "/var/log/messages", "/var/log/mail" and the "From:" and "Subject" lines of new mail to root and his normal user account via "root-tail" windowless on root window of your desktop and/or in a terminal via "tail" colorized with "ccze".

You will need root-tail and ccze for the script to work.

Here is a screenshot from the terminal window:



The next one shows what root-tail is doing. The text is displayed in the lower right corner.



The following is an enlarged view of the text.



This link shows what sm_watch and xsnow are doing together.

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Over here at withouthat.org, we have access to a ftp server for storing data. I wrote a simple bash script for doing backups of our webpages. I copied the following out of the script:

Shell program to backup specified directories as gzip'ed tar archives on certain days on a ftp server, keeping a number of older archives of the directories there (max is 10) and removing superfluous ones. Additionally, the list of packages on a Debian system is archived.

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Among the scripts at LinuxCommand.org I found the "new_script" script which can be called to create a new script skeleton/template interactively. After using it for a while, I wrote my own skeleton, based on the output of new_script.

I like it and all my newer scripts are based on it. It has one nifty feature: If you do your editing with Emacs, it supports the "outline-minor-mode" which creates a menu for jumping to functions defined in your script. I created the following screenshot:



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There was a search on for "mc.el" by Kevin A. Burton on comp.emacs and nobody besides me was able to find a copy. Since the original link is dead, I put the file up here. I contacted the author, no reply yet.

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Soooo, this is my blog. I'm not into blogs---I just needed a place for my stuff. Since I dislike writing HTML and working with a CMS even more than writing in blogs, I use what I found here on withouthat.org. See if it works...

My stuff, that means up to now: (bash) shell scripts I wrote, (X)Emacs hacks in elisp and things I need when using LaTeX.