After few years of using Gajim, the history of all messages, statuses, etc. can grow up to quite large size. In my case the logs.db file consumed 128MB of disk space.

Searching through the conversation history (in the Conversation History window) can take up to few seconds for each query. And after removing and adding various XMPP/Jabber (or Facebook Chat) accounts, there's a lot of unnecessary Jabber IDs left in the database.

So let's take a look at how to speed things up and remove unnecessary data form logs.db (but whether it will work for you or not, substantially depends on how you've been using Gajim and what you keep in Gajim's history).

Make a b...

If you're here, you probably want to know how to configure notifications for volume change actions, just like it is in most of current less-geeky GNU/Linux distributions and window managers.

So if you press the volume up/volume down button, you want to see some notification with a beautiful icon and current volume percentage, like this:

And if you press the mute button you are expecting something comparabl...

This is a little story about Play Framework, Google App Engine and Heroku. And it's also a story about this very web page, because it is written in Play, was hosted on GAE, and is now being hosted on Heroku.

A long, long time ago...

...this site was written in Ruby on Rails. But after I had been forced to change my old hosting to something new, I was looking for cheap hosting options and I decided to try out Google App Engine (which is basically for free and is a well-tested major platform).

The main problem was that it looked like a no-go for Ruby on Rails apps. There is JRuby, but [appeng...

Why the need of this?

Let's assume you want to write a script that would allow you to navigate faster between your most frequently used directories. And let's take my everyday problems as an example. I have a similar directory structure:

~/studies/
     semester1/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     semester2/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     ...

Every time I want to cd to one of these directories I have to write something like:

cd ~/studies/semester4/subject2

which is a little pain in the arse if I have to do this many times (and I have to). And no, using Nautilus or Thunar or D...

Configuring file associations is easy if you're using a full-featured desktop environment, such as KDE, Gnome or Xfce. In such case, xdg-open delegates the task of opening file to kde-open, gnome-open or exo-open, depending on the environment. But with Openbox and similar environments it's not that easy.

It's likely that when you click on a just downloaded PDF file, it opens in Firefox and not in Evince or Okular (or your any PDF-reader of choice), because xdg-open defaults to Firefox.

One possible solution is to install a part of KDE, Gnome or Xfce environment, and use one of the *-open family. But we'll try a more "pure" solution.

Creating list of default applicati...

Concatenation of multiple images can easily be done with tools such as GIMP, but easily doesn't always mean fast. So let's assume that we want to tile some images, e.g. to create an image sprite we will use on our webpage. And assume we want to do it fast.

So, instead of copy-pasting all images into the sprite, or opening them all as layers and moving them, and opening, and moving, and so on, we're going to use a command line tool, that will do all the work for us.

We will use an extremely powerful tool: Imagemagick, so if you don't have it installed yet, please do it now.

The simple way

The convert program with _ap...

Today I switched from xorg-server-1.6.5 to xorg-server-1.7.6, as it is now available in portage and considered as stable.

Paweł Hajdan's advice, I've found on Planet Gentoo, allowed me to avoid all the driver problems, such as broken keyboard or touchpad.

But major xorg-server update without any problems would be boring, wouldn't it? ;)

Awfully small fonts

After the update all fonts became smaller and much harder to read and didn't look much better after increasing font size in Openbox, GTK, etc... And changing font sizes everywhere is clearly the opposite of a go...

I spent much time lately seeking for a tool that would allow me to easily draw a histogram with a normal distribution curve on the same diagram. I could create the histogram in OOCalc, by using the FREQUENCY() function and creating a column chart, but I found no way to add a curve, so I gave up. I started searching for something more powerful than OpenOffice. Of course, no Windows applications were allowed.

I googled my problem up before trying to use Maxima or something similar, and I found R. I haven't heard about the R project earlier, but I decided to give it a try. And it was worth trying. Even if I were able to do the same i...

Have you ever run a script that should do some things you wanted it to do, but instead you ended up with your system partially messed up? Unfortunately, such things do happen.

I have no idea how simple setup.py script could destroy Python libraries, but Gentoo with messed up Python (and furthermore, with unusable Portage) didn't seem to be useful. So I had to find a solution.

The first attempt

It would be great, if I could just simply re-emerge dev-lang/python-2.6.*, but as I already said, portage was broken.

I tried to reinstall Python manually, but with no luck. Python 2.5, other portage versions, etc. - still no luck.

I decided not to use a LiveCD, because fixing it with...

...and there was a website.

So.. uhm..

It's intended to be, as the header says, my place on the web, and (as the header doesn't say) my little playground. A place to write about some topics that I have on my mind, and, by the way, a place to test some Ruby on Rails features in production environment.

Of course, current version of this site has some flaws and drawbacks. I'll try to improve it over time, because some features (such as RSS, better blog URLs, OpenID auto-registration, etc.) are still missing.

It's also possible that some of the features I'm going to implement, will be interesting enough to write a few words about them, and post them on this blog.

Time will tell, w...