The Technical Bits

A new bb4win style is available here or on the boxshots web site. This uses Red Hat’s open source Liberation Sans font.

My default .bashrc file. This is taken from cygwin.# base-files version 3.7-1

# To pick up the latest recommended .bashrc content,
# look in /etc/defaults/etc/skel/.bashrc

# Modifying /etc/skel/.bashrc directly will prevent
# setup from updating it.

# The copy in your home directory (~/.bashrc) is yours, please
# feel free to customise it to create a shell
# environment to your liking. If you feel a change
# would be benificial to all, please feel free to send
# a patch to the cygwin mailing list.

# User dependent .bashrc file
# Shell Options
# #############

# See man bash for more options…

# Don’t wait for job termination notification
# set -o notify

# Don’t use ^D to exit
# set -o ignoreeof

# Use case-insensitive filename globbing
shopt -s nocaseglob

# Make bash append rather than overwrite the history on disk
# shopt -s histappend

# When changing directory small typos can be ignored by bash
# for example, cd /vr/lgo/apaache would find /var/log/apache
# shopt -s cdspell
# Completion options
# ##################

# These completion tuning parameters change the default behavior of bash_completion:

# Define to access remotely checked-out files over passwordless ssh for CVS
# COMP_CVS_REMOTE=1

# Define to avoid stripping description in –option=description of ‘./configure –help’
# COMP_CONFIGURE_HINTS=1

# Define to avoid flattening internal contents of tar files
# COMP_TAR_INTERNAL_PATHS=1

# If this shell is interactive, turn on programmable completion enhancements.
# Any completions you add in ~/.bash_completion are sourced last.
# case $- in
# *i*) [[ -f /etc/bash_completion ]] && . /etc/bash_completion ;;
# esac
# History Options
# ###############

# Don’t put duplicate lines in the history.
export HISTCONTROL=”ignoredups”

# Ignore some controlling instructions
# export HISTIGNORE=”[ ]*:&:bg:fg:exit”

# Whenever displaying the prompt, write the previous line to disk
# export PROMPT_COMMAND=”history -a”
# Aliases
# #######

# Some example alias instructions
# If these are enabled they will be used instead of any instructions
# they may mask. For example, alias rm=’rm -i’ will mask the rm
# application. To override the alias instruction use a \ before, ie
# \rm will call the real rm not the alias.

# Interactive operation…
alias rm=’rm -i’
alias cp=’cp -i’
# alias mv=’mv -i’

# Default to human readable figures
# alias df=’df -h’
# alias du=’du -h’

# Misc 🙂
alias less=’less -r’ # raw control characters
alias whence=’type -a’ # where, of a sort
alias grep=’grep -n –color’ # show differences in colour

# Some shortcuts for different directory listings
alias ls=’ls -hF –color=tty’ # classify files in colour
alias dir=’ls –color=auto –format=vertical’
alias vdir=’ls –color=auto –format=long’
alias ll=’ls -l’ # long list
alias la=’ls -A’ # all but . and ..
alias l=’ls -CF’ #
alias lr=’ls -ltr’ # reverse list

alias h=’history 10′
alias j=’jobs’

alias fa=’fortune -a’
alias fo=’fortune -o’

# Functions
# #########

# Some example functions
# function settitle() { echo -ne “\e]2;$@\a\e]1;$@\a”; }
fortune

ssh -C2qTnN -D 4567 user@somehost.com

Options used:

• C – requests compression of all data.
• 2 – forces ssh to try protocol version 2 only.
• q – quiet mode; suppresses all warning and diagnostic messages.
• T – disables pseudo-tty allocation.
• n – redirects stdin from /dev/null, i.e., prevent reading from stdin. Must be used when ssh is run in the background.
• N – means do not execute a remote command.
• D – specifies the local application-level port.

ntsd -p [pid] -c "q"

-Duser.dir="e:\jboss-4.2.1.GA\efp" -Xms384m -Xmx512m

Firefox seems to want to visit www.localhost.com if my local web server is not running. To alter this behaviour set the keyword.enabled value to false in about:config.

Python appears to be a language worth learning. As well as the standard tutorial, there’s also a “10-minute” potted version on Poromenos’ site.

There a number of websites that cover how to do simple navigational tabs
using only CSS and HTML. One of the top hits in a Google search is Joshua Kaufman‘s excellent CSS Tabs 2.0. There is also Adam Kalsey’s implementation, although this has problems if the user changes the font size on the page.

I thought I would share my implementation as well. The fully working example is here. Clicking on each tab will load the appropriate page. Rather than having separate files for each tab, some JavaScript could be used to show/hide the content as appropriate.

The HTML Markup

The basis of this example is a fairly simple HTML file (tabsrc1.html).

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Tab Test Page</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="tabs.css" type="text/css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="tabbar">
      <a href="#" title="Tab 1" class="first current">Tab 1</a>
      <a href="tabsrc2.html" title="Tab 2">Tab 2</a>
      <a href="tabsrc3.html" title="Tab 3">Tab 3</a>
      <a href="tabsrc4.html" title="Tab 4">Tab 4</a>
    </div>
    <div id="tabcontent">
      <p>This is the first tab.</p>
    <div>
  </body>
</html>

This basically contains two divs: one for the tab bar and one for the
content. The tab bar contains the tab anchor markup.
For the purposes of this exercise, this page is cloned (and adjusted accordingly) for each tab anchor.

The import thing to note is that the currently selected tab has a CSS
class assigned to it.

The CSS

First, turn off the underlining of the anchors.

a {
  text-decoration: none;
}

Then, style the tab bar div to have a border at the bottom.

#tabbar {
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
  border-bottom: 1px solid;
}

For every anchor in the tab bar, give it a border, but omit the bottom border as that is taken care of with the tab bar border.

#tabbar a {
  border: 1px solid #778899;
  border-bottom: 0px;
  margin: 0px 0px 0.2em 0.2em;
  padding: 0.2em 0.2em 0em 0.2em;
  font-size: 80%;
}

For stylistic purposes, the first tab in the tab list is indented.

 
#tabbar a.first {
  margin-left: 1em;
}

This is the styling for the currently selected tab. It is positioned
relatively so that the bottom overlaps the tab bar.

 
#tabbar a.current {
  position: relative;
  top: 0.1em;
  color: #0066FF;
  background-color: #FFFFFF;
  font-weight: bold;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #FFFFFF;
  border-top: 2px solid #0066FF;
}

Finally, some minimal styling for the tab content.

 
#tabcontent {
  margin-left: 0.5em;
  padding: 1em;
}

A fairly simple tabbed interface with a minimal amount of CSS. The example directory containing all the files is here.

Nuked Gallery has an excellent integration module for interfacing phpBB, et al., with the gallery2 image software. It was fairly straightforward to do this, but I had some trouble getting the phpBB header link bar working correctly when the gallery was being displayed. This forum post describes the problem and the solution.

For reference, the solution is to comment out this code in the gallery2.php file:

/*
$template->assign_block_vars('switch_phpbb_base', array(
'PHPBB_BASE' => strtolower(substr($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'], 0,
strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'], '/'))) . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] .
substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], 0, strrpos($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], '/') + 1)) );
*/

My printer is connected via my router and the URI is lpd://router IP/lp.

The CUPS admin URL is http://localhost:631/.