tomboy notes for android - tomdroid

I am a avid user of tomboy notes on my Ubuntu PC.
It is a very friendly note taking app which is the best of its breed because of the following :
1. Search : It indexes all your notes and allows you to easily search through it
2. Text Formatting : It allows one to highlight a text(with color), use bold fonts and also supports bulleted listing.
3. Notebooks : You can categorize your notes and create a number notebooks for each category e.g. office, home, kids, linux, blogs etc.

For those corporate guys who have to use Microsoft Windows; good news .. It's also available for you guys.

I am addicted to it and I am sure those of you not using it; will soon find it hard to stay without it ;-)

Now the breaking news :
If you guys have caught up with the popularity of Android phones and bought a one for yourself; Tomboy Notes is available for Android also :-)
As of writing this it's still not available in the "Android Market" but you can download it from here : https://launchpad.net/tomdroid/+announcements

Now for those of you wondering .. "how does it help to have the same application on desktop and mobile phones ?" .. because you can sync them up using the "Ubuntu one" cloud. "WOW".

Other thing .. tomdroid is still in beta. So, you can't edit or search your notes for now .. wait on .. things are getting better.

For details on setting up things on your mobile, desktop or syncing it with Ubuntu cloud; please search for it in the Internet. You'll get a lot of tips.

Redirect WebPages in Apache WebServer

Recently I had to move my webserver to a different domain (i.e. URL).
Although the old domain was still around for some more time; I still wanted my old users/viewers to be redirected to the new website.

This article in yolinux did the trick
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/ApacheRedirect.html

I had to replace my index.php with something like this :

disable directory browsing in Apache Web Server

While working on a website I understood that it was a "MUST" security action to disable directory browsing of the files in your website.
Thanks to this post
http://www.felipecruz.com/blog_disable-directory-listing-browsing-apache.php

remove the option "Indexes" from your apache config file and you are good to go.
Please refer the above link for more details.

print to pdf when not connected to printer

Sometimes we come across a situation where we want to print a confirmation e.g. a train/flight ticket; but don't have a printer directly connected.
At those times we can directly print to a pdf; which we can print later.
cups-pdf is the package that does the trick and in Ubuntu it can be installed by "sudo aptitude install cups-pdf".For other rpm based distributions use "yum install cups-pdf".

More details can be found here :
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2008/07/03/printi-directly-to-pdf-in-ubuntu-804/

shell script timing various commands

The time taken to execute a particular command (e.g. ls -ltr) can be saved to a file.
This can be useful when your shell script takes a lot of time and you want to profile the time taken by various commands.

-----------------------------
#!/bin/bash

"Time taken by ls" 2>> time.txt
{ time {
ls -ltr
} } 2>> time.txt

"Time taken by cat" 2>> time.txt
{ time {
cat test.sh;
} } 2>> time.txt

----------------------------

vim - work remotely

vim is an editor which I love to work with. I make sure, I am using the latest stable version and also from time to time explore the new features incorporated into it.
I love my customized "vim" so much that I hate to use the basic "vi" installed by default in a new aix/linux machine. Also it is tedious to install vim in those machines; every time I make a new installation on my test machine.

But as always, there is a solution to get past this problem. use "vim" installed in your local system to read/edit files located on a remote server/machine. "vim + ftp" comes to our rescue.
for e.g. if you want to open "/home/sangeek/test.txt" located in server "abc.xx.com" as a "root" user, use this command :
vim ftp://root@abc.xx.com//home/sangeek/test.txt
you will be prompted to provide the password.

Alternately if you already have "vim" open you open the remote file in "command mode" :
:e ftp://root@abc.xx.com//home/sangeek/test.txt

That's it; a local copy of the file is made on your machine. Any edit and save you make using "vim" is also made in the remote server.

Other advantages of using "vim+ftp" to access files over remote server :
1. This is very helpful in case your remote server is very slow to access over network. Since you have a local copy of the same file; you navigation/edit in the file is very fast .. only delay the is when you save the file.
2. You don't have to authenticate for the ftp session if you want to open another file on the same remote server.
3. Best, your local vimrc settings apply to all the files opened remotely.

strings - smart and useful

Someone gives you up a binary a.out and says he has added some line like this
printf("Hello Universe");
Now the changes may be much bigger then the example. During your testing you do not get the desired result as was expected after his changes.
How do you confirm that he has not misplaced his binaries and handed you a wrong one?
So, if there is a string involved in the change; then you can use the strings command and confirm it.
$ strings a.out | grep Universe
Hello Universe

Better explanation on why to use strings is given here as http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/linux/news/linuxnut_0800.html

'''

Sometimes you really want to see inside a binary file. Maybe there isn't a manpage and you're looking for usage information, or perhaps you're looking for information about who wrote a program or what application a file is associated with.

The strings command is perfect for that purpose--it searches through a file looking for sequences of printable character strings and writes them to standard output. You can pipe the output through a pager like more, or if you are looking for particular text, you can pipe the output to the grep command.

'''