As a pidgin user I am used at not expecting many fancy things but one of the features I’ve wished for some time is a plugin which updates the status automatically to the last entry in a RSS feed. As an example I’d like to update the status to the last post on my blog. So, even if I don’t like perl too much here is a simple plugin which does just that....

It seems that self-pings are bad for Google page ranking. Well, I have never spended too much time thinking about SEO but I find them a bit clutering and thus I’ve decided to remove them. There are some plugins which block new self-pings but none which deletes the existing ones. So here is a mysql command which does just that: Warning: don’t execute sql commands on your db if you don’t know anything about what sql is, it might ruin your base....

The goal of this tinkering was simple: to parse a KML file for further interpretation and use using python and libxml2. First test <pre lang="python">#!/usr/bin/env python import libxml2, sys doc = libxml2.parseFile(sys.argv[1]) ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext() ctxt.xpathRegisterNs('kml', "http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2") root = doc.getRootElement() res = ctxt.xpathEval("//kml:Placemark") for e in res: nodes = e.xpathEval('kml:name') if len(nodes) > 0: if nodes[0].content.strip().startswith('cp'): coord = e.xpathEval('kml:Point/kml:coordinates') if len(coord) > 0: print coord[0].content.split(',') doc.freeDoc() ctxt.xpathFreeContext() This sounded ok according to the scarce doc but resulted in the following error:...

Shooting a photo and the imediately seeing it on a large monitor is a feature I’ve always wished. I don’t say live view on a display but instant copy and display would suffice. And actually, as I found out, it’s quite easy to achieve on Ubuntu Linux (10.04) with a Canon D450. Required software Make sure gphoto2 and geeqie (former gqview) is installed. An apt will do the trick: sudo apt-get install gphoto2 geeqie Scripts I’ve written 2 scripts....

Not a great inspiration but a great result, home made pizza, perfect and warm for the “autumn in the middle of summer” days when it’s raining in the morning and in the afternoon. Pizza Ingredients dough: 1 cup flour, lukewarm water, yeast (1/2 sachet) filling: salami, cheese, olives, basil, tomato sauce, spices Method dough: mix flour with water and yeast until it has a bread like consistency. Let it rise for 30 mins in a warm place then make a sheet of dough....

Cherry season Pitted cherries Pitted cherries Pitted cherries

These last days it was cold and rainy and it seemed more like autumn end than middle summer. As such a warm, comforting soup seemed the most rewarding dish today. Noodles soup Ingredients 1 chicken breast vegetables: 2 green onions, 2 carrots, 2 large mushrooms, 2 medium potatoes, 1 bell pepper, 1 tomato Vegetables parsley rice noodles Method in 2l of water boil the chicken. Remove the foam from time to time until it’s clear....

As I said in the previous post related to koha search system things are a bit more complicated than you might assume as someone using sql queries to do a search. Everything is done in Zebra and Zebra is a matter of indices. So where is MARC? Actually there are 3 files which should interest you: koha/etc/zebradb/biblios/etc/bib1.att which defines the list of possible Z39.50 attributes. This is definition of names, it does not means all are used....

For people used to web searches and database oriented application Koha way of dealing with searches (since v.3) might seem a bit alien. This is a small set of notes related to some not very obvious questions which I had to answer in order to do some configurations which seemed trivial at the beginning. I am not saying this is wrong or ineffective, just different and different means time to learn....

I love seafood, I could replace almost everything else with it. And since the wonderfull fish market in Barcelona I’ve been dreaming of “pulpitos”. This very simple recipes consisting of fried little squids with lemon and parsley was prepared on spot there in the small restaurant. The trick is just to make sure you fry and not boil them in their own liquid so since my pan does not get too hot I drained them for a few times while leaving the pan to reheat....