SSH, backspace and UTF-8

Just great. If you use UTF-8 characters encoded on more than 1 byte (such as Latin diacritics, Armenian, Japanese etc. characters) and you attempt to hit [backspace] through SSH to delete them, you might be surprised to find out that backspace in SSH only deletes the last byte.

This can lead to a lot of unexpected results in your documents and it can generate a lot of confusion for any app you might be running via SSH.

mt-daapd / Firefly media server -- follow-up

A little while back I was talking very angrily about mt-daapd / Firefly media server.

It just so happened that it was 1) crashing and 2) apparently scanning outside of the directories I told it to scan in.

mt-daapd is not the answer

Depending on how lucky you are, mt-daapd / Firefly Media Server might or might not work for you.

The problem at hand is how to elegantly share media files in your LAN without resorting to NFS exports or Samba shares.

Pidgin bug -- update

After more than half of year after noticing the issue and getting frustrated with the "can't set new Yahoo! avatar in Pidgin" bug, it seems that things have finally gotten a move on!

Pidgin bug

While I have to admit that Pidgin is generally speaking a great multi-protocol IM (instant messaging) client, it's got its flaws too... just like any software. And I'm not talking here about the notorious developers / users scandal, resulting in a Pidgin fork because users just wanted a resizable text input field, while the developers said they don't care. I'm not even talking about the lack of voice and web cam support (there's a ticket from the beginning of time there... prioritized as minor).

Default charset in apache

Darn! I finally got over my problem... so let's get back to the very beginning...

I use apache 2.2.4. I've been using it without a problem for a long time. My needs for apache are very basic: I just need tons of directory listings (indexes) with the ability to follow symbolic links, and ~10 aliases. The files in the directory listings are on my local computer and they usually have "weird" encodings, so I needed to let apache know I need it to use UTF-8 as default charset/encoding. Simple to achieve... or so it seemed: I used to run apache installed via aptitude under /etc/apache2.

dpkg-reconfigure locales...

"Open source features" take N+1 :-)

On a Debian system,

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

would prompt you with a nice menu allowing you to select new locales... Unfortunately, this is not the case with Ubuntu. You just get to generate or update the already selected locales. This is actually an Ubuntu bug, confirmed (with status: wishlist).

Make Konqueror remember the default view

One of the 'features' of open-source is this phrase that I'm sure you heard at least once: "Well now... that's not a bug, it's a *feature*!" -- yeah, right!


One of those "features" is the fact that Konqueror doesn't seem to remember the default view I set up in any profile. Namely, when I use Konqueror as a file manager and type something in the address bar, such as ~/tmp, I really want it to display the contents of ~/tmp in "Detailed List View", the way I chose it as default! But it doesn't.