List of tips and ideas

- Do you hate it that firefox simply opens a URL when you copy/paste data into a form and you hit accidently the body of the page rather the input field? Here is the solution:
Navigate to about:config
search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL
set it to false

ftff, ftwhich and whichman: fault tolerant search utilities

ftff, ftwhich and whichman are fault tolerant search utilities. whichman allows to search for man pages that match approximately the specified search key. ftff is a fault tolerant file find utility and ftwhich is a fault tolerant version for the 'which' command. The error tolerant approximate string match is based on the Levenshtein Distance between two strings. This is a measure for the number of replacements, insertions and deletions that are necessary to transform string A into string B.

Download:
whichman-2.4.tar.gz
Previous stable versions:
whichman-2.3.tar.gz
whichman-2.2.tar.gz
whichman-2.1.tar.gz
whichman-2.0.tar.gz
whichman-1.9.tar.gz
whichman-1.8.tar.gz

ethwireck -- check if the wire in the Ethernet port is live

Laptops which use dynamic IP address assignment via DHCP have the problem that the boot process is much longer when no wire is connected to the Ethernet card. This is because the startup scripts have to wait for the DHCP request to time out.

ethwireck can detect if the physical layer of the Ethernet is up. This can then be used in the init script for your network card to determine whether or not an interface should be brought up. In other words a timeout is avoided.

ethwireck is similar to mii-tool but it can handle more ethernet cards (not only drivers with an mii interface).

Note: I discovered recently that ethwireck does not work with all cards as expected. The problem seems to be that some cards support the interface but do not report the status as expected. I am currently invesitgating this problem. Wait for ethwireck-1.3.

Download:
ethwireck-1.2.tar.gz
Previous versions:
ethwireck-1.1.tar.gz
ethwireck-1.0.tar.gz

gpppwrap: a graphical user interface wrapper around the ppp-on/off scripts

gpppwrap is a graphical user interface to conveniently select a phone number and dial into your ISP. It's very convenient if you use different ISPs.
gpppwrap is only a wrapper around the ppp-on/ppp-off scripts and gives you therefore still the power and flexibility of these scripts. gpppwrap uses ppp-on/ppp-off perl scripts which are Set-UID root to give ordinary users the possibility to setup a ppp connection to the selected phone number. gpppwrap is based on the gtk GUI libraries.

gpppwrap is written for people who like the power and flexibility of shell and perl scripts and want at the same time an idiot proof way to connet to the internet when grandmother is using the computer.

From version 0.6 on a cgi-script called pppcontrol is included in the package. It provides the functionallity as gpppwrap and can run on a local webserver.

This package contains ready configured real "internet by call" ISPs for Germany. You can use them if you are in Germany. You just pay via your normal phone bill. No prior registration needed.
Please let me know if you have such "internet by call" ISPs also in other countries. I would like to add them.

Download:
gpppwrap-1.1.tar.gz (sources)
gpppwrap-1.0.tar.gz (sources)
Look at a screen shot of the gtk gui, gpppwrap:
gpppwrap1.gif
Look at a screen shot of the cgi-bin, pppcontrol:
pppcontrol.gif

Unicode::UTF8simple - Conversions to/from UTF8 from/to charactersets

Unicode::UTF8simple provides UTF-8 conversion for perl versions from 5.00 and up. It was mainly written for use with perl 5.00 to 5.6.0 because those perl versions do not support Unicode::MapUTF8 or Encode.

Unicode::UTF8simple is written in plain perl (no C code) and will work with any Perl 5 version. It is just slightly slower than Encode.
In the CPAN perl archive UTF8simple is available at: http://cpan.org/authors/id/G/GU/GUS/

Download:
Unicode-UTF8simple-1.06.tar.gz

Previous versions:
Unicode-UTF8simple-1.05.tar.gz

HTML::TagReader, perl extension to process html tags

HTML::TagReader is a perl extension module which allows you to read html/xml files by tag. That is: in a similar way as you can read textfiles by line with "while(<>)" you use HTML::TagReader::getbytoken to read a file by tag.



The HTML::TagReader package contains some applicaition programs which are very useful for web-masters. All programs start with the prefix "tr_" to make it easier to remember their names.

tr_blck is a utility to check for broken links in web-pages. blck is very fast and checks only relative links but together with tr_httpcheck it can also check for dead absolute links of protocol type http.

tr_httpcheck is a perl script that checks for the existence of a web-page by issuing a HEAD request to the web-server. httpcheck can also do requests via a proxy server.

tr_llnk is a utility to build tar archives from a number of html pages. It helps you to include all images, textfiles etc.. into the tar archive. It can also be used to list all linke included in a html page.

tr_xlnk can process html files and expand links on directories. This is useful if you want to click through html files without a web-server.

tr_mvlnk modify links in html files with perl commands

tr_staticssi expand SSI directives #include virtual and #exec cmd

tr_tagcontentgrep grep for a tag e.g "img src"

tr_delfont delete font tags that hardcode the size or font face

tr_imgaddsize add width and height to <img src=...>

In the CPAN perl archive HTML-TagReader is available at: http://cpan.org/authors/id/G/GU/GUS/

Download:
HTML-TagReader-1.10.tar.gz

Previous versions:
HTML-TagReader-1.09.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.08.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.07.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.06.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.05.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.04.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.03.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.02.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-1.01.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-1.00.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.53.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.52.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.51.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.50.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.14.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.13.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.12.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.11.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.10.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.09.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.08.tar.gz
HTML-TagReader-0.07.tar.gz HTML-TagReader-0.06.tar.gz

Perl 5 Quick Reference Guide

The cpan.org documentation tree used to contain a very good Perl Quick Reference Guide written by Johan Vromans. This this small booklet is now also available as a Pocket Reference from O'Reilly ("http://www.ora.com). Since the move of documentation out of the cpan.org directory tree this Quick Reference Guide is no longer part of the perl documentation.

I provide it therefore here for download. In addition you find also links to a HTML version made by Rex Swain (originally from http://www.rexswain.com/perl5.html) and a pdf version.

Download:
perlref-5.004.1.tar.gz(complete booklet)
Instructions on how to print this as booklet are included in the tar file

perlref-5.004.1.pdf (pdf version)

perlref-5.004.html (HTML version)
This HTML version identical to the HTML version by Rex Swain but I corrected a number of HTML syntax faults.

lfwmail -- a light weight but full featured webmail program

lfwmail is a light weight web mail program written in perl. It will run with acceptable speed even on a Pentium 100Mhz Linux mailserver. It has just basic features and no calendar or folders but it is fully mime compatible and can handle attachments.

The code is clean and structured. The installation is straight forward and you don't need a lot of non standard modules.

Download:
lfwmail-2.6.tar.gz (new layout: one line per mail in the summary page)
lfwmail-2.5.tar.gz

Previous versions:
lfwmail-2.4.tar.gz
lfwmail-2.3.tar.gz
lfwmail-2.2.tar.gz
lfwmail-2.1.tar.gz
lfwmail-2.0.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.9.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.8.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.7.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.6.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.5.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.4.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.3.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.2.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.1.tar.gz
lfwmail-1.0.tar.gz
lfwmail-0.9.tar.gz
lfwmail-0.8.tar.gz
lfwmail-0.7.tar.gz
lfwmail-0.6.tar.gz

eximspamy -- a light weight spam filter system

eximspamy is a low maintenance, light weight spam filter system. It compares all mail against mail caught by spamtraps.

eximspamy uses exim's perl filter extensions. It is therefore just a few perl scripts and you can also learn from it how to write your own exim filters in perl. .

Download:
eximspamy-0.2.tar.gz

Previous versions:
eximspamy-0.1.tar.gz

webgrep, web-page search and check utilities

Note:webgrep will not be developed further. It is now replaced by Tagreader (see above).

webgrep is a set of small programs for the web-master. blnkcheck is a utility to check for broken links in web-pages. blnkcheck is very fast and checks only relative links but together with httpcheck it can also check for dead absolute links of protocol type http. httpcheck is a perl script that checks for the existence of a web-page by issuing a HEAD request to the web-server. httpcheck can also do requests via a proxy server. srcgrep is quite useful to quickly check which images are included in a web-page and to see where they come from. It searches for the <... src="..." or < ... background="..." in a web page. hrefgrep works basically like srcgrep except that it searches for < ... href=...>. taggrep is a generic grep utility to search for a given html tag. E.g to list the document title of a number of web-pages. webfgrep is a poor man's web search engine. lshtmlref is a utility to build tar archives from a number of html pages. It helps you to include all images, textfiles etc.. into the tar archive.

Download:
webgrep-2.12.tar.gz
Previous stable versions:
webgrep-2.11.tar.gz
webgrep-2.10.tar.gz
webgrep-2.9b.tar.gz
webgrep-2.9.tar.gz
webgrep-2.8.tar.gz
webgrep-2.7.tar.gz
webgrep-2.6.tar.gz
webgrep-2.5.tar.gz
webgrep-2.4.tar.gz
webgrep-2.3.tar.gz

ftdibb, a BitBang mode library for the ft232 and ft245 chips from ftdichip.com

Bitbang mode is a special mode of the ftdi serial IO chips which allows you to use all 8 IO-pins either as input or output. You can query the state of each pin at any time (function ftdibb_getBitMode) An output pin can be set to 1 (=+5V) or 0 (=0V). It will stay in this state until you change it again.

This is a simple and easy to use library for linux. Examples are included.

Download:
ftdibb-0.5.tar.gz
ftdibb-0.4.tar.gz

sled, a shutdown button for your server

A real server machine does normally not need any keyboard, monitor or mouse. It needs a good operating system, like Linux, and a network card. External devices like mouse and keyboard disturb only. With Linux running on the machine, remote administration is the best and most convenient solution. However sometimes you would like to have a little button to properly shutdown the server: sled is the solution.

sled is the driver software for a little push button to connect to your server on the serial line. You can use it to shut the machine down when needed. It has as well 2 LEDs to monitor the state of the server.

Download:
sled-0.1.tar.gz
sled-0.3.tar.gz

I have written an article in LinuxFocus about sled. The article describes the circuit and its functionality in detail:
http://linuxfocus.org/English/January2001/article186.shtml

plhtml -- server side scripting in perl

plhtml is a preprocessor for html documents. Its purpose is to simplify the work of writing large numbers of HTML documents. It acts like a compiler, i.e. you provide an input source text and plhtml produces the HTML documents. Unlike many other programs of this type plhtml does actually report the line number in the html input file if it comes across a syntax error. This makes it very easy to find faults.

Download:
plhtml-0.2.tar.gz

cdspeed -- decrease the speed of you cdrom

Modern cdrom drives are too fast. It can take several seconds on a 60x speed cdrom drive to spin it up and read data from the drive. The result is that these drives are just a lot slower than a 8x or 24x drive. This is especially true if you are only occasionally (e.g every 5 seconds) reading a small file. This utility limits the speed, makes the drive less noisy and the access time faster. cdspeed is also very good if you prefer to listen to the musik on your mp3 CDs rather then the noise of your CD drive.

Note: recent versions of the eject command include the functionallity of cdspeed (via the -x option).

Download:
cdspeed-0.4.tar.gz
cdspeed-0.3.tar.gz
cdspeed-0.2.tar.gz
cdspeed-0.1.tar.gz

blkcrypt, three block encryption algorithms

The link below goes to a page from which you can download three programs that implement the block encryption algorithms des, blowfish and idea.
Please note that there are different legal regulations in different counties. Check first if you are allowed to download cryptographic software from that page and use it in your country.
Idea is patented in the US and can be used freely only for non-commercial purposes. THEREFORE DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.

Go to the download page:
blkcrypt.html

amr2wav -- A linux shell script to convert amr files from Ericsson or Nokia phones to wav

This is a simple script based on http://xa.bi/mms/. To use it do the following:

1. Download the amr coded C-code from http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/2003-09/Rel-5/26_series/26104-520.zip. Note that this is a double zip-ed file and unpacks into the current directory. Make a sub-directory before you unzip it.
2. cp makefile.gcc Makefile
3. Edit Makefile and remove "-DETSI"
4. Edit decoder.c and add at the beginning: #include "sp_dec.h"
5. Type make to compile (this will generate the executable called decoder)
6. cp decoder /usr/local/bin/amr_decoder
7. Download the amr2wav shell script
8. Save amr2wav in /usr/local/bin and make it executable (chmod 755 amr2wav)
9. You can use the program lame to convert the .wav file then to .mp3 if you want

LinuxFocus.org , an international Linux Magazine

Linux Focus is the multi lingual magazine about the Linux operating system. Linux Focus is managed and produced by Linux volunteers, fans and developers. There is no subscription necessary to read LF, it is freely available on the web all over the world. Support Linux Focus by adding a link to:
  www.linuxfocus.org on your web-page.

==>Click here to get to my developer page for linuxfocus.org


==>Click here to download GDM and Grub background screens with a linuxfocus.org logo

Wedding of Katja Korn and Guido Socher

Here is a picture of our wedding (16 July 1999). More information about my wife can be found on her homepage.

Our daugther Jessica

This is my daughter Jessica (born 15 Jan 2003). She is a real fan of Tux the Linux penguin. The photo was taken when she was 5 days old.

With a baby at home it is a lot more convenient to go shopping online and stay at home than waling arround all day in town. Here some links to good Baby shops in Germany. I list these shops here because the do actually work. (It is incredible how many other sites on the internet don't work at all):

• bahnhof-apotheke.de, They have a lot of very good products but you deinitly need Beinwellsalbe and Ringelblumensalbe
• jako-o.de, Cloth and other things, pages are very slow
• babytraeume.de, ecologic cloth, pages load fast
• didimos.de, Babytragetuch, you need this

Making your own Linux T-shirt

Many modern print shops take digital images and can print them on all kind of things. Here you can download large images of TUX and save them on a couple of DOS formatted floppy disks in order to take them to next print shop in your town.
The images have the right size for printing them on a T-shirt. You can also ask your print shop to enlarge the image optically by 10-30% if you want even bigger images. Enlarging the images optically gives better results than enlarging them digitally with a image program. The result will look as shown on the photos:

Download T-shirt images as gif:
First Image for the back
Second Image for the back
Image for the front
An alternative image for the front
Download T-shirt images as jpg:
First Image for the back
Second Image for the back
Image for the front
An alternative image for the front

Update: There are now vector graphics images of Tux available. Those you can scale to any size without loss of quality. You can get them at http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/penguin/. To edit and print them from Linux you can use sketch. I would recomment to use those .sk files now for making a T-shirt. Here is also a local copy of those files: penguin-2.0.tar.gz.

ssync -- a minimalistic but fast filesystem sync/mirror tool

Blender treemaker (L System) for linux

This is the treemaker L-System originally written by Armagan (www.geocities.com/blenderdungeon/lsystem) adapted for use under linux. The package includes installation instructions and documentaion. See the included README for details.

Treemaker is a python script for the 3D progam Blender (www.blender.org) to generate trees.

Download:
treemaker-0.2.tar.gz (636k)
Previous versions:
treemaker-0.1.tar.bz2 (600k)

A collection of useful Shell and Perl scripts

This is a collection of some Shell and Perl scripts that are convenient utilities for the daily work with Unix/Linux. The scripts are most of the time plain text files. Therefore DO NOT try to download them under Windows. Windows will change the character set and some scripts will not work any longer:

• Kill, kill a number of processes by name
• Rotate a file, e.g your outgoing mailfolder, from file to file.1, file.1 to file.2 ...
• base64decode, a Perl script to do decode base64 mail attachments
• cn, a Perl script to convert numbers between different bases (e.g dec<->hex)
• grepfind, search files by content
• ispell-filter, run ispell from VI-editor
• lsperl, list the content of a directory tree in a nice way
• ren, rename multiple files
• rename, a Perl script to rename multiple files
• unix2dos, a Perl script to convert Unix NL to dos CR/NL
• dos2unix, a Perl script to convert dos CR/NL to Unix NL
• xtitelbar, change the string in the titelbar of a xterm window
• tux, print a ANSI-color ASCII picture of the linux pinguin
• ansicol-1.1.tar.gz A package to use colors in your terminal. Includes a program to show available colors; .tcshrc and .profile example files to change the colors
• htmlview, send a given url or a file to the already running netscape program
• showbook, search your netscape bookmarks
• iso8859_htmltools-0.1.tar.gz, two perl scripts, to convert language specific Latin I chracters (Umlaute) to html characters and vice versa.
• imgsrcline, a shell script, that prints a html <img src=... tag with the right image size, needs ImageMagick
• htmlpictures, make a nice set of webpages (with overview pages and thumbnails), ideal to include with your holiday photos on CD, needs ImageMagick
• rotatefile: rename a file from file_name to file_name.1, filename.2 ... and keep permission/owner of the original file