Biodegradable Geek

Easily Installing Vim 7.2 From Source

Sun, Aug 24, 2008

Vim 7.2 beta was released last month, and 7.2 is now stable. First check to see if your distro offers a package, and if not, follow these simple instructions on how to install it from source, from the vim7.2 subversion branch.

cd /tmp/
svn co https://vim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/branches/vim7.2
cd vim7.2/
./configure --with-features=huge --enable-gui=gnome2 --enable-cscope --enable-pythoninterp
make

Now you can use sudo make install and you’re done,…but

I suggest using checkinstall (sudo apt-get install checkinstall) to keep track of the installed files, create a package, and have the option of easily removing whatever you installed easily (i.e., dpkg -r vim7.2).

sudo checkinstall -D

If the above command doesn’t work, you aren’t alone. It recently began giving me these errors:

cp vim /usr/local/bin/vim
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/vim: setting permissions for `/usr/local/bin/vim’: No such file or directory
make[1]: Leaving directory
… etc …
**** Installation failed. Aborting package creation.

I dug up some info about the problem, along with a solution:

There seems to be a bug in the filesystem translation code which has been
biting people using newer versions of glibc found in most recent linux
distributions. It is being worked on. If you find weird install errors
when running checkinstall but your software installs fine without
checkinstall then you can work around the bug by disabling the fs
translation code and forcing checkinstall to install the package. Use the
–fstrans=no and –install=yes command line options:

checkinstall <options> –fstrans=no –install=yes <install_command>

Source: http://oclug.on.ca/archives/oclug/2004-May/038916.html

From the man page:

–install Toggle installation of the created package.
–fstrans Enable/disable filesystem translation. Filesystem translation
enabled causes the install to proceed in a temporary directory, thus not actually touching your system.

sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes

You can also have checkinstall create a package by passing in one of these flags:

–type Choose packaging system. Can be one of ’slackware’, ’debian’ or ’rpm’.
-D        Create a Debian package.
-R        Create a RPM package.
-S        Create a Slackware Package.

For example, to create a Debian package, I would do this:

sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes -D:

Done. The new package has been installed and saved to
/home/mr.Gvim/vim7.2/vim7.2_20080824_amd64.deb

To see the changes from 7.1, use :help version-7.2

“Exclusive Domain Investments” Emails are Spam

Thu, Aug 21, 2008

2 Comments

I recently got an email in my junk folder (I browse it for false positives sometimes) from “Exclusive Domain Investments,” a supposed domain brokerage firm representing a client interested in buying one of my domains. It’s not a scam, but it’s clever.

Here’s the email:

FROM: “Exclusive Domain Investments” <domianinvestor1999@gmail.com>
SUBJECT: Is <domain removed> for sale?

Hello,

One of our clients is interested in buying your domain <removed>
1. Are you interested in selling?
2, What is your initial asking price?
Sincerely,
Exclusive Domain Investments

Note to all existing clients: We have 16 cars registered to our company for our management team. As such, our insurance rates our very high. Danny Goldberg (our PR Manager) came across an insurance search site that’s saving us $50 per car/month. That’s $800 month in savings. There’s no charge for the search, so I suggest you check it out:

hxxp://www.spizzam-site-car-insurance.info

The first thing I noticed was the note on the bottom. It didn’t make any sense to have that there. The domain name alone was spammy. Why would any client give a shit about car insurance? They aren’t the management team, nor even work for the company. And why would the message knowingly be sent to a domain owner, a stranger to the brokerage? I don’t understand why would they give a shit about saving money on their car insurance.

My first impression was that this is too silly to work - who would fall for it? but upon second thought, I concluded that it’s a great idea. It’s creative, more than believable to the average joe, and on top of it, the dude(tte) might get serious responds for some kickass domains.

I like how the seemingly professional firm - that has 16 cars registered for their management team, mind you - has a Gmail email with the username domaininvestor1999. If nothing else in the mail raised some doubt, this surely did. Right?

Trying to round up insurance leads on the interwebs is hard. It pays exceptionally well, making it very competitive. I don’t personally spam (though I wish I did back in the ol’ days when 16 year olds were making a million dollars a year spamming AOL), but I’m interested in marketing and ads, in a creative/how-humans-tick sort of way.

By the way, bloggers: Please stop approving spam comments. Some are fairly obvious to spot, like these:

I praise God for answering my prayers. God, you are so wonderful, majestic. Jesus Christ, I adore Your Sacred Heart.e

I like this website. This website helped me with prayer learning. Good job. Thank you. Please provide more French prayers. Bye-bye.k

Others aren’t as easy to spot from the message alone:

Your work is marvelous!!b

I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!

You’ll need to check if the comment has a URL or not, and where that URL goes. I notice that most bloggers don’t mind, and just let spam comments through, probably just because the quantity of comments a blog has is proportional to the blog’s popularity. Sometimes it just slips. If you poke around you’ll find some on this site.

Here’s one of my favorite spam comments.

Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugand

Workaround for “ImportError: cannot import name compat” issue in Trac 0.11.x

Sun, Aug 10, 2008

0 Comments

I had used Trac 0.10.4 for awhile before upgrading to 0.11. First time around I had no problems, but on a new server, a fresh install of 0.11.1 was giving me this error when I visit certain pages:

[Sun Aug 10 19:41:57 2008] [error] [client 69.204.200.139] PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend: Traceback (most recent call last):, referer: http://issues.biodegradablegeek.com/congen9
[Sun Aug 10 19:41:57 2008] [error] [client 69.204.200.139] PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend:   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py", line 299, in HandlerDispatch\n    result = object(req), referer: http://issues.biodegradablegeek.com/congen9
[Sun Aug 10 19:41:57 2008] [error] [client 69.204.200.139] PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend:   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11.1-py2.4.egg/trac/web/modpython_frontend.py", line 148, in handler\n    from trac.web.main import dispatch_request, referer: http://issues.biodegradablegeek.com/congen9
[Sun Aug 10 19:41:57 2008] [error] [client 69.204.200.139] PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend:   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11.1-py2.4.egg/trac/web/main.py", line 47, in ?\n    from trac.web.chrome import Chrome, referer: http://issues.biodegradablegeek.com/congen9
[Sun Aug 10 19:41:57 2008] [error] [client 69.204.200.139] PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend:   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11.1-py2.4.egg/trac/web/chrome.py", line 40, in ?\n    from trac.util import compat, get_reporter_id, presentation, get_pkginfo, \\, referer: http://issues.biodegradablegeek.com/congen9

After further investigation, it appears I had two compat.py files on my system:

mercury@tryptamine: /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11.1-py2.4.egg/trac $ find . -name compat*
./util/compat.py
./util/compat.pyc
./tests/functional/compat.py
./tests/functional/compat.pyc

Renaming compat.py to testcompat.py in trac/tests/functional/ fixes the problem perfectly:

cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11.1-py2.4.egg/trac/tests/functional/
sudo mv compat.py testcompac.py
sudo mv compat.pyc testcompac.pyc

The compat.pyc file may also be deleted.

That’s it. No restarting Trac/httpd.

I don’t take credit for this. Thanks goes to Jashugan (trac-users)!

Has vim/rails.vim been crashing lately? Here’s why.

Sat, Aug 2, 2008

0 Comments

If you are experiencing segmentation faults with vim and rails.vim, it may be due to this bug, which appeared after 1.7.127, but has been resolved in 1.7.147 (patch log).

To check if your installation has this bug, type the following (cred goes to Ralph) in vim: :r ~fo<tab> (’fo’ being the start of a username present on the system, i.e., fo for foo, or kirb for kirby). This does not require having rails.vim installed.

You can check whether your distro has updated vim, or install vim from source (see this post on how to do that).

A free, self-hosted, and open source alternative to Basecamp

Mon, Jul 28, 2008

0 Comments

In my search for a Basecamp alternative - because it’s not free, and I’d prefer something I can host on my own server - I have come across an excellent piece of software called ProjectPier. This is a branch from ActiveCollab — an open source project that later became a commercial product. ProjectPier is simple, speedy, and it works!

What I like about ProjectPier: