ditoinfo in english

Well, I have to share this one:

It’s damn simple, so of course I couldn’t find it. It was my girlfriend, Lívia, who doesn’t use computers more than the strictly necessary. She was on a Cyber Cafe and had to type her CPF (Something like USA Social Security Number) on a form. Then she found that her number was saved on the autocompletion “feature” of IE. She did the first thing she thought of: select the number and pressed DELETE. Yes, delete on the keyboard, or DEL in some.

Just too simple for someone who works with computers find out. I was wondering things like check the registry or clear all items through the Options Dialog. But no. Just press DELETE.

Thanks, Livia!

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This guy has made a fine selection of plugins for gedit (yes, gedit) to make it look like TextMate, the dream of every Rails developer not working on a Mac. So, take a look. I have installed everything and will try out today.

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Everyone who build software (like me) hates this, but every system is going to be used by people. By humans. So, we have to deal with the human factor. I came upon Phira’s Blog, where phiras presents us with a great algorithm to measure password strength. He gives points to certains characteristics of the password. Here’s the link. Worth a look.

OK, no flame wars, please, but fact is: I like VIM. So, I wanted one of these days, to send e-mails through it, since I read on Richard Stallman’s website that he uses e-macs to read and send e-mails. Well, can’t vim do that?

In fact it can. But I don’t use normal e-mail providers, so no POP3 or IMAP for me (you can use this plugin if you have a SMTP, IMAP/POP3 account).

For GMail, I came upon this wonderfull piece of code on DJCraven blog. It allows me to send the content of the current buffer as an e-mail to the person you specify on the GMSend vim command. The first line is treated as the Subject. So, you type your message, :GMSend someone@somewhere.com and voilá!

That’s what the e-mail was ment to be!

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So, you are on our lovely (GNU/)Linux OS right? And, you, being a smart guy (or girl), uses the best ever made torrent client: Azureus, right? Well, I was just like you, untill I found (well, I didn’t find it, actually, I was told of it’s existence on a  web-forum…) RTORRENT!

I don’t know why, but I like to keep things light. rtorrent is just that: a bit torrent client that runs on the command line. But it’s not like a wget, that you run, and watch the output. It is ncurses bases, so you will have a user interface, just not graphic. On Ubuntu, it is on the repositories, so you can apt-get install rtorrent and you’re ready to go!

Here are some tips on how to use it:

First of all, you WILL, some time, want to exit rtorrent. Don’t try vi-style here. To exit, just type CTRL + Q. Simple right?

Opening a torrent for download:

1. type “rtorrent  my_torrent_file.torrent” if you are not already inside the app OR
2. type ENTER on the main interface to  get the open “dialog”: it has TAB completion, so you don’t have to remember the hole path.

Starting the Download

• If you openned the torrent using the first option, it will start STOPPED. To start it, select it using your keyboard arrows. A few asterisks will be shown to indicate wich torrent is currently selected.  Type Ctrl+S to start the download.

Information about the download:

• You can see more detailed info about each running torrent by selecting it (with the up and down arrows) and pressing the RIGHT arrow. It will show you a new screen, where you can, again, use the arrows to move. To return to the main screen, just keep pressing the LEFT arrow till you are there.

These are some basic usage tips. If you want to became the rtorrent guru (I just want to download a few files), I suggest you visit this website, a great blog from K Mandla, where I learned these things I’m passing to you. Or you can go straight to the RTorrent user guide.

Sometimes you just run a command people on websites ask you to. Well, you actually won’t do something like “rm -Rf /”, but you will  follow some apt-gets for example. I did this today, and ended up with a system that did not play any video (the site was explaining to me how to convert FLV to AVI – I can’t do that yet). So, I messed it up. But how to undo the changes?

Fortunatelly, DPKG (wich apt-get uses under the hood) mantains a log of it’s works. It’s right there at /var/log/dpkg.log

Good lines to look at are those wich the first word after date/time is INSTALL. It says that you (or apt-get) requested to install that particular package.

I’m trying to undo my mess here!

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