Computer related stuff

How to setup emails system for home-users of Linux

The work on this page has been discontinued as I am currently using Exim for sending my emails and either KMail (for me) or mutt and isync (for my wife) for reading emails.

BibTeX styles for sociology

Emulating AJS and ASR styles of bibliography.

Java policy for Data Ferret

Data Ferret is really useful for digging data from the United States Census databases. Although, it is plain Java application (so it works with my Linux), you need to get .java.policy file, which is available only hidden in complete multi-megabyte Windows installation program. In order to save my fellow Linux users of need to find a friendly Windows user willing to fiddle with this monster, I put the .java.policy file here. It should be copied to your $HOME directory .java.policy (or appended to already existing file; it is <dot>java<dot>policy).

Python scripts for archiving emails

I am using KMail for all my e-mail needs and I am pretty happy with it (especially, because it is one of the few civilized MUAs supporting Disconnected IMAP and it works with KDE, which is my environment of choice).

Unfortunately, it is missing an option how to archive older messages to my rather complicated structure of directories. In the far away times of dinosaurs and giant horsetails, like a year ago, when I was using mutt for my emails (and the reason why I switched is another long story, which I do not have a time to tell just now), I created aBash script for archiving messages, which used mutt for all parsing and cutting folders. Unfortunately, the latter versions of mutt are not working well without tty (i.e., they do not work well as parts of scripts), so I had to switch to something else. I tried to rewrite the script, so that it would use formail, but it never worked well.

After reading Dive into Python, I again got the passion for Python, and tried to rewrite whole script using it and standard email library. So here it is:

Backup with rsync

I know that this script is by far too simple to be published at all, there is really nothing to boast about it. I just really like it and rsync is so wonderful utility, that I wanted to share my joy with you.

Convert bibliography from the Web of Science (ISI Export Format) to BibTeX

This script is originally by Phil Austin (from the University of British Columbia), but I have substantially rewritten whole thing, made it more robust, shifted it towards OOP and cleaner Python. It still needs some love (formatting of the output is suboptimal), but it is very much useable.

Bogofilter proxy

I am very much fascinated with Bogofilter, because of its wonderful level of spam filtering and unbelievably low level of false postives (just three in the last two years!). However, I had some problems to make bfproxy work with qmail. I had to learn some Perl and to fix it. Some updates were accepted by upstream, but some were not. So this is my patched version.

RSS2Email fixed

This is another upgrade of program by somebody else. In this case of Aaron Schwartz's rss2email there are some fixes, which have not been accepted by Aaron yet, without which the script doesn't work for me. I really do not want to fork, so there is also a patch available against the Aaron's latest version.

Grass scripts

Grass is a huge GIS (Geographic Information System) project originally created by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and now open source. It is a dream of all Linux fanatics coming true, because it is actually just an environment for creating scripts working with mapping informations (and of course there are hundreds of such scripts already prepared, so you get complete system for working with geographical information). Creating new scripts is so simple, that even I was able to after couple of days of learning how to work with Grass create two Python scripts usefully extending abilities of Grass in working with vector maps:

v.to.label.area
This script exports area label points and category labels into labels file.
v.to.sites.area
This script exports area label points and category labels into site file.

Random tips

Really random bag of tips for Linux, KDE, and everything else.

OGG files

I like Vorbis (OGG) files for archiving music and sound generally. I would love to use it as my default audio format for all my CD-ripping etc. Unfortunately, Windows Media Player (which is the least common denominator expected on most computers of my friends) does not support it per default. Fortunately, there is a plugin, which seems to persuade WMP to understand OGG files. No guarantees whatsoever, and no questions about this plugin will be answered.