Guy Rutenberg

Deleting Comments from Tickets in Trac 0.12

About a year ago I wrote about a way to delete comments from tickets in Trac prior to version 0.12 (as it didn’t exist back then). Basically the method was to directly delete the comment from the database. Lately, spammers have been harassing one of my Trac installations, bypassing the spam filtering, and changing ticket properties. The old method wouldn’t revert those changes. After searching for a solution, I found a little documented option in Trac 0.12 that allows to delete comments and revert changes to tickets.

To enable it, go to the admin panel->Plugins->Trac 0.12 and enable TicketDeleter under tracopt.ticket.deleter.*. This will add a “Delete” button right next to the “Reply” and “Edit” buttons of every comment. It will also revert any changes to the ticket properties.

See #3641 and [9270] for the relevant ticket and changset in Trac’s own Trac.

LaTeX for TiddlyWiki – A MathJax Plugin

Update: The MathJax Plugin for TiddlyWiki has a new home: https://github.com/guyru/tiddlywiki-mathjax
Some time ago I came across MathJax, a nifty, Javascript based engine for displaying TeX and LaTeX equations. It works by “translating” the equation to MathML or HTML+CSS, so it works on all modern browsers. The result isn’t a raster image, like in most LaTeX solutions (e.g. MediaWiki), so it’s scales with the text around it. Furthermore, it’s quite easy to integrate as it doesn’t require any real installation, and you could always use MathJax’s own CDN, which makes things even simpler.

TiddlyWiki with the MathJaxPlugin — A tiddler with LaTeX equations.

Using Monospaced Font in the TidddlyWiki Editor

By default, TiddlyWiki uses its default fonts (Arial or Helvetica) for it’s tiddlers editor. While these fonts are more than fine as default font for the text in tiddlers, I found it much less convinient when editing tiddler’s. Furthermore, it’s even a bad choice when one has code snippets in his tiddlers.

The following code snippet solves the problem by resetting the font used in the editor to monospaced font. Just add the following snippet:

/*{{{*/
.editor {
    font-family: DejaVu Sans Mono, Courier New, monospace;
}
/*}}}*/

To your StyleSheet tiddler (or create it if it doesn’t exist yet). Now the next time you’ll edit a tiddler you will do it using a monospaced font.

Temporary Disabling Bash History

Say that you’ve got to pass some password as command line argument to something. It would probably be a bad idea to store it in your ~/.bash_history, but clearing the file isn’t desired either. So you need to temporary disable the command history for the current session. You can do it by unsetting the HISTFILE environment variable.

unset HISTFILE

The result is that while the session is active you can access the history as usual, but it won’t be saved to the disk. History for other sessions, will behave as usual.

`search_for_updates` 0.2

This is a small update to my search_for_updates script which have been laying around. The script allows to search for updates from portage without resolving dependencies. Thus, it’s much faster than

emerge -pvu world

The new version lists the best version available for each package which can be updated using the --verbose flag. You can download the new version from here: search_for_updates-0.2.

CSS Compactor – Reduces CSS File Size

This is a script I wrote back 2006 that reduces the file size for CSS files by removing unnecessary whitespace and comments. It’s also capable of taking such compacted CSS file, and re-indent it to make it readable. For example it would take the following CSS:

/* sample css */
* {
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px;
}

/* define style for the logo */
#header .logo {
    float: left;
    /* another comment */
}

and turn it into:

*{ margin:0px; padding:0px;}#header .logo{ float:left;}

which is an equivalent but much shorter CSS code. It can also reindent it back to:

*{
	 margin: 0px;
	 padding: 0px;
}
#header .logo{
	 float: left;
}

Continue reading CSS Compactor – Reduces CSS File Size

`iproute2` Cheatsheet

The iproute2 package offers the ip utility, which is a modern replacments for tools such as ifconfig, route, arp and more. It allows to configure addresses, links route and arp tables. The only problem is that its documentation can be quite confusing. This post is intended to be a task-oriented guide to this utility, it’s far from complete and I intend to update it from time to time.
Continue reading iproute2 Cheatsheet

Security Vulnerabilities in the Imagin Photo Gallery

Following a friend’s request I’ve did a short security review of the Imagin photo gallery couple of weeks ago. I’ve looked at the newest version, v3 beta5, but the vulnerabilities may also apply to older versions. So here they are, from least to most important in my opinion.
Continue reading Security Vulnerabilities in the Imagin Photo Gallery

WordPress Administration over SSL on Lighttpd

In this tutorial we’ll walk through the steps of enabling SSL (https) for the WordPress’ admin panel when using Lighttpd as a webserver. The tutorial consists of two stages, the first is enabling SSL at the Lighttpd level and the second is in the WordPress level.

Continue reading WordPress Administration over SSL on Lighttpd

Building CookieJar out of Firefox’s `cookies.sqlite`

Firefox 3 started to store it’s cookies in a SQLite database instead of the old plain-text cookie.txt. While Python’s cookielib module could read the old cookie.txt file, it doesn’t handle the new format. The following python snippet takes a CookieJar object and the path to Firefox cookies.sqlite (or a copy of it) and fills the CookieJar with the cookies from cookies.sqlite.

import sqlite3
import cookielib

def get_cookies(cj, ff_cookies):
    con = sqlite3.connect(ff_cookies)
    cur = con.cursor()
    cur.execute("SELECT host, path, isSecure, expiry, name, value FROM moz_cookies")
    for item in cur.fetchall():
        c = cookielib.Cookie(0, item[4], item[5],
            None, False,
            item[0], item[0].startswith('.'), item[0].startswith('.'),
            item[1], False,
            item[2],
            item[3], item[3]=="",
            None, None, {})
        print c
        cj.set_cookie(c)

It works well for me, except that apperantly Firefox doesn’t save session cookies to the disk at all.