alsa and HDA Intel SigmaTel STAC9227
August 19th, 2008After upgrading my Linux, I’ve got sound lost. Everything looked ok — all the modules are loaded, all the special devices are created, no complaints in logs, — but no sound.
if I were writing an XML editor
July 10th, 2008There is a number of XML-editors, but there are no user-friendly ones (except FraemMaker). A standard XML editor is a tool for programmers, to play with XML. But technical writers need an user-centric XML editor, to play with a document, not with XML.
Exeter Chess Club
July 8th, 2008I’ve impressed by the site Exeter Chess Club, and especially Coaching page. A lot of useful resources.
Quicklinks for myself:
* Playing Black after 1.e4
* Playing Black after 1.d4
* The Italian Game for beginners
ripping a dvd
June 16th, 2008In the most cases, people use mplayer and mencoder (under Linux). For my goals, ffmpeg is enough.
be carefull with libxml2 in python
May 27th, 2008Unpleasant surprise from libxml2 bindings for Python: one must care for encoding conversion.
TeXML is alive and well
April 10th, 2008Due to a long period of inactivity in TeXML project, I’ve just been asked if the project is still supported. The answer is yes!
I use TeXML in production, it’s an important part of our new publishing process.
Why the project is inactive? Because no bugs are reported for the version 2.0.1, released on 19 July 2006 (today is 10 April 2008). If it works well, why bother to change anything?
DocBook XML publishing service
February 4th, 2008I’m not the only one who works on a publishing server. Steve Whitlatch announced recently Mr. XML Publisher for DocBook, a free online publishing server. You feed a DocBook to the service, and the service returns back the corresponding PDF.
workaround for mac os x lost wifi connection
January 30th, 2008Update from 10.4 to 10.5 introduced a pain. After sleep and wake up, Mac losts connection to the wireless network. To reconnect, I have to specify SID and the WEP key manually. I hate it.
As a temporary solution, I found how to re-connect from a command line, thanks to the blog article “airport - the Little Known Command Line Wireless Utility”. I’ve created the file reconnect.sh and run it when required:
sudo airport -ASID –password=’$WEP_key‘
symbolic and hard links under win32
January 25th, 2008To my surprise, symbolic and hard links are partially supported even by windows 2000. Here is a small summary:
printing djvu books under Linux
January 24th, 2008When I print books, I prefer to have two pages per sheet. With PostScript or PDF books it’s easy, I just use psnup2.pl. But for djvu format, the procedure is complicated.
subscribe to comments
January 16th, 2008Wordpress plugin “Subscribe to Comments 2.1” allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. I think it improves usability and encourages commenting.
decline and fall of the trackbacks; rise and resurrection of the trackbacks
January 15th, 2008Trackbacks have built the blogosphere. The automatic backlinking was a great idea. The both parties — the original and the linking blogger — were making benefit out of a trackback link.
Unfortunately, the trackbacks are extremely vulnerable to spamming. Indeed, trackbacks must work without human intervention (by design). Automatic filters doesn’t work well for blogs. And adding manual force breaks the design of trackbacks.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution.
how to analyze FICS games
December 16th, 2007I play chess on freechess.org. Sometmes I like how I play. But the sad truth is that my good play is illusion. Thanks computers to reveal me a lot of mistakes.
Here is how I feed the games to the computer.
russian (any) language in wordpress
November 25th, 2007I tried to setup a new wordpress blog. To my unpleasant surprise, I got a problem with cyrillic letters. They just didn’t work, being displayed as junk or as question marks. I spent some time to find out how to correctly setup WordPress for the utf8 environment. Actually, it’s very easy:
feeding 128-bit wep hex key to Mac
November 14th, 2007For historical reasons, my home wifi router uses a WEP 128-bit HEX key. It caused troubles while installing a Mac. The setup program accepted only 40-bit keys. Fortunately, the workaround is simple. Specify to use WEP with password, and as the password set “$0123…012345” — the character $ (dollar) followed by the key.
recording audio under Linux
November 11th, 2007The blog is the place to remember what I always forget. Here is a note how to record a mp3 on my system.
reversing a string in python
October 15th, 2007This beautiful construction was not obvious for me.
>>> 'foo'[::-1]
'oof'LaTeX to EPS
October 9th, 2007I’m a bit furious. I spent a lot of time on getting EPS from LaTeX. Portability of PostScript and PDF is a great myth. This idea works only in theory. But in practice, one has to struggle with buggy software.
Finally, I’ve found a working sequence of conversion commands.
inplace, a new xslt-based CMS
October 4th, 2007I’ve released a content management system for static pages:
InPlace CMS
http://inplace.sourceforge.net/Use InPlace CMS to maintain a bundle of HTML pages in an uniform appearance. Adopt the light and agile approach to document a product or to create a mini-site. Target users are the developers of open source projects.
mass-upload to picasaweb from Linux
September 28th, 2007Picasaweb is a Google’s service for publishing web photo albums. The mainA drawback of this service is that under Linux you have to upload each image manually. The evil empire (not microsoft) knows about the problem, but has’t released even a temporary solution. Fortunately, I managed to find a workaround:
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