I solved my TAPI-problem using C#s excellent COM binding – BUT my solution does not work reliable. Recently I discovered this knowledge article - M$ recomends against using TAPI from managed code, which made me searching for another solution to invoke calls from a python script. TAPI handling is really really ugly if you do not want to dive into Windows COM-programming and using the older C-interface also is the opposit of fun.
TAPI SUCKS!
… and once again the Deutsche Post managed it to really annoy me. Their online-stamp-system uses PDFs with embedded JavaScript .. you have to click away about 5 warning messages, about remote connections, printing etc and you can print it only ONCE… of course you can print test pages from their PDF-JS-”Application” … I just hate it - it’s so stupid.
This year for the first time, I was able to visit the German “LinuxTag” every single day and I must say, I am a bit disappointed. Surely, I heard a lot of good speeches, but I wanted more - most of the stuff was not very technical.
My impression is, “LinuxTag” lost some of it’s magic, might be that’s because many projects choose other events as their main meetings. And with German being the main conference language it was pretty uninteresting for an international audience.
It was not (truly) boring and I significantly improved my vim configuration *g*, got (false) information on some LaTeX-options, felt competent and spend very much money on food and caffeine.
The best speeches I heard where about Modsecurity and PosixCapabilities.
It’s very likly I will visit LinuxTag again next year, but I will see it more like a nice trip to the capital - visit friends, museums and enjoy the beautiful parts of the town.
PS: Jono’s a true community specialist - he knows his buissiness - I decided to take a leaf out of his book.
The Fritz!Box mentioned above is now capable of receiving Fax-Messages and forward them as Email-attached PDFs - Nice!
This little script I picked up here (and modified just a little bit) makes it easy to make a Fritzbox reconnect it’s DSL-connection. It works fine with my FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7170 at firmware version 29.04.49.
There are some really nice hacks out there for the Fritzbox, like the DS-mod and other stuff, but at the moment I like the box just like it is (remote WoL would be a nice thing though) and having a 2 year warranty also is not a bad thing.
Since journaling filesystems should not have only advantages about the old simple ones, filerecovery became a lot more difficult with most of them. XFS and Ext3 are pretty difficult to recover files from - especially, when they are not text based.
When having demolished or accidently deleted some of your most important files, photorec may help you to bring some of them back (it’s part of the testdisk-project). Photorec recovers jpg, pdf and some other file-formats from almost any file-system, by “simply” grepping through the bitstream and watching out for the typical file-headers.
Since I just had some very bad experiences concerning backups, I wrote a little cronjob invoking the brilliant rdiff-backup. Now I am (hopefully) save from myself.
A really annoying Thunderbird-Bug concerning View->Headers->All gets fixed if you install this addon. The bug known to the Mozilla-bugtracker as #223132 almost was designed to drive anyone not having a 30″-multi-display setup insane (especially when trying to use the sieve-addon for Thunderbird - btw a usable Sieve documentation can be found here).
The plugin is still (very) alpha, so use it just for toying around at the moment. Everything you need to know is here. For experiments the needed bzr-xmloutput plugin is best installed into the local bzr-plugin folder (”~/.bazaar/plugins”).
Installation of the plugin itself is best done via the update site mentioned at the project HP.
Publishing branches via ssh (or anything else which requires authentication) currently requires preshared keys for there is no username/password-dialog yet.
If anyone out there is willing to get his hands dirty, either by hacking bzr-xmloutput or anything else related to this (hopefully soon) very useful project, I’ll give him a hug.