ditoinfo in english

If you ever want to use ABNT rules on Latex documents, ABNTex is a great resource. ABNT for those who don’t know, is Brazil’s national “ISO”. 

My experience using it on a Mac was very straightforward. First, I download and installed MacTeX. It is a huge download, more than 1GB. It may work if you get the smaller versions, but I never tested.

Then, I was as simple as downloading ABNTex and unpacking it on ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex . This directory structure may not exist, so you may need to create the folders after Library. 

Done. It worked fine for my monograph latex files.

I work with subversion as a version controller, and I’m a big fan of console. But it’s quite annoying to type a “svn status” and receive lots of question marks on something.swp or .sw0 . Other version control system probably suffer from this issue, unless they have recursive ignore (which, as far as I can tell, svn doesn’t)

Well, I just found Vim Tip #20, which teaches us how to change the folder path for swp files. This way, all swap files for Vim (and, of course, gVim) will be saved on the specified directory.

The comand is :

set directory=/path/to/dir,/path/to/another/dir

There is also “set backupdir=/path/to/dir” to move those something.rb~

Hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

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.

So, have you ever heard of Swiftfox? If you are coming from google, probably yes. It is just like Firefox (the same source code) but it is compiled with optimizators for the major CPUs avaiable. So, it will perform better on your machine. It’s like having Firefox on Steroids. So, since it has the same source code, you can use your existing extensions (and install new ones) as well as use your plugins. There’s an platform independent installer on the website, but if it does not import the plugins for you, or, for some reason, you have installed it using another method (like Automatix, or tarball), you can create soft links from your existing plugins to use them on swift fox.

1. Go to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

2. Do a ‘ls -l’ so that you can see where the link points to

3. Now, create links on /opt/swiftfox/plugins to the original files

Tip: ln receives the target and then the name for the link (I always misplace them)

Example:

Giving ls -l you find out that the java plugin (firefox-javaplugin.so) is in /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so. So you do a

ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so /opt/swiftfox/plugins/

Swiftfox will automatically use the new plugins.

Hey folks. It’s interesting how difficult it was for me to get Rails up and running on Lighttpd. I’ve tried lot’s and lot’s of tutorials, but none of them seemed fit to me. I came up with this solution, wich is actually a merge of lot’s tips. Feel free to contribute, and I hope that this helps you out.

1) First, include UNIVERSE on your sources.list. It is located on /etc/apt/sources.list. If you are unsure, take a look at this web-site. It may help you out. Remember to sudo, or be root to do everything Read more…

If you are interested in GNU/Linux and other free software, then you probably already know this website. If you’re not, feel free to take a look at it. It is full of how-tos, explaining, step by step, complicated procedures like configuring an anti-spam server for your company. Worth a while! HowToForge.com .