It’s been several months since the last time I had done any coding on Drupal. Although many people might find it trivial, here is a PHP snippet to enter in a custom block, so that the taxonomy terms of the currently displayed node are printed as an unordered list inside that block. Also, each list…
Having set up automatic incremental backups for my home directory, I need to follow some simple rules in order not to poison the backups with temporary files (sometimes huge ones) I usually place on my desktop for later viewing. One of those rules is to stop downloading stuff directly to the desktop, but use a…
Normally, such pieces of information as the maximum length of a URL are completely useless. The developers of HTTP server and client software take good care of such details, so that they do not interfere with the user’s browsing experience. Yesterday, while trying to create a CGI version of a script, I realized that the…
Sizing text for the screen using ems in your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) can be a problem, if you are not a web designer and have never spent any time reading about the differences between the various units that can be used to measure text size, especially pixels (px) and ems (em) which are the…
In my opinion, the biggest problem of the tar format (‘ustar‘) is that it does not store the checksums of the files it contains. So, in order to be able to verify the contents of the tar archive, you either need to keep the original data on the hard drive and compare the archive contents…
One of the things in which I never reached a decent level of knowledge is IRC. I mean I know the basic stuff in order to connect to servers, join channels, send/receive files etc. What I know nothing of is actually IRC server or channel administration… I am not going to learn or write more…
Inspired by Aggelos greek to greeklish text converter implementation, I decided to write such a text converter in Python. It accepts text either from the stdin or by reading a file specified in the command line. It also auto-detects UTF-8 and ISO8859-7 encodings. Two sample text files are provided in the distribution for testing.
Usually, when writing or modifying a CSS file, the author adds comments and excessive indentation to the code in order to preserve its readability and to simplify maintenance. Although this might be a good habit, all those extra bits stored into the CSS file increase its filesize, often resulting in unnecessary waste of bandwidth, especially…
Sometimes, things are not that straightforward as one might think. Yesterday, I spent over two hours on the Epiphany Python Console checking almost all of the available functions in order to find a way to store the displayed page’s HTML data in a variable. Before quitting, I decided to get some help over at the…
I always wanted to learn how to set up a version control system, especially SVN since everybody tend to move to that system. This howto will illustrate a way to install and configure Subversion and websvn on a Debian server with the following features: multiple repository Subversion access to the repositories via WebDAV (https, https)…