It has become common nowadays that Python projects provide their documentation in “source form“. The documentation is split into multiple files, written in restructured text, and is shipped together with some other configuration and media files for Sphinx. The user is meant to use the provided Makefile to export the documentation in various formats. This [...]

It was brought to my attention by a message in our forums that the download methods described in the “Use wget or curl to download from RapidShare Premium” article are no longer valid. Rapidshare has introduced a new API for account and file management. After a quick read of the Rapidshare API documentation, it was [...]

I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

I’ve been looking for a pure python implementation of the ping command. Now that I found one, I am not sure if I want to use it, as it has a restriction: only privileged users can ping other hosts. I’ve used the ping command successfully as a normal user on all operating systems I have [...]

If you check the file where gftp keeps its bookmarks, you will notice that passwords are not stored in clear text. Instead, gftp has used an algorithm to scramble them. I cannot recall if it was one or two years ago when I had decided to write a script to convert the bookmarks from the [...]

I’ve been using the mod_dav_svn module for Apache, part of the subversion distribution package, in order to make several SVN repositories available over the HTTP protocol for quite some time now. More specifically, I use a multi-repository setup under the same virtualhost by using the SVNParentPath directive of mod_dav_svn. Also, the authorization policy is enforced [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I finally made the decision to upgrade WordPress to the latest 2.3.1 version. I skipped the initial v2.3 release as I had read that there was a lengthy list of bugs about that release, which eventually have been fixed in 2.3.1. Everything seems to run smoothly. I intend to spend some time browsing around my [...]

This is a notice that I have updated the tab-session-management extension for Epiphany, so to make it work in environments that use Python version 2.5. This mainly involves the newest Fedora and Ubuntu distributions – at the time of writing. The plugin makes use of the cElementTree module, which has been moved into Python’s Standard [...]