If you are a developer or simply a command-line geek/fan, there are times where you type some documents using the command line, like for README’s or for documentation. It is also important to have a very good writing in English if you wish to distribute those files.

Hunspell can help you with spell-checking. It is based on MySpell and contains a nice terminal interface to spell-check your files.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

Last month, I decided to drop Evolution and start using claws-mail. Now that I’ve been using it everyday, I see that it fits very well my needs as a mail user agent.

I will list the features I like in Claws-Mail, instead of writing a huge boring paragraph:

• Tree view (or Thread view) for emails that are related (replies for examples)
• GPG support through plugins (MIME or inline, and with SHA512 support too!)
• Very lightweight (almost all of the time less than 10mb ram used)
• Can display HTML emails in plain text (by stripping the html) and it works really good
• Rules/Actions can be added for a lot of events
• Bogofilter spam filter support through plugins
• HTML viewer, just in case! (added through plugin)
• Choose which headers to show when reading email (see screenshot: I chose to show the SPF header)
• “Next” button to quickly read the next unread email
• Extract email addresses from received mails and add them into your addressbook.
• Different Layouts, even one for small screens
• Many other features…

Claws-Mail is well worth the try, there are lots of nice features like those. And I’m quite happy to have switched to it.

You can either find claws-mail through your package management system (synaptic, yum, rpm, …) or through the official website.
I also packaged it for Ubuntu/Debian without the maemo support for LPIA architecture (this was for my HP mini 1000).

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

scanerrlog offers the possibility to generate a summary or report about Apache errors and sort them depending on how frequent they are.

To install it (for Ubuntu users):

sudo apt-get install scanerrlog

or use Synaptic and search for scanerrlog.

It’s written in Python, and it is very easy to use it. (type ‘man scanerrlog‘ in a terminal to see the manual page)

I tested it with Apache2 log files using the following command:

scanerrlog -f text -o /tmp/log.txt /var/log/apache2/*.log

• -f : format (text, pdf, html, xml)
• -o : output file
• args : log files

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

My wife and I recently went to Fort Wayne, Indiana and we enjoyed it a lot. Amongst all the things we’ve visited, we went to a flower conservatory and they had butterflies there. A couple of them really seemed to like the Ubuntu logo on my T-shirt. …And everyone knows that nature knows what’s best!

See for yourself.

Full size image.

The two pictures are also licensed under CC BY-SA.

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

I just feel like I want to share some of my favorite songs from Jamendo (see previous post).

They are free to download and use (if you follow the creative commons licenses). I’ve put different genres so that you one that pleases you.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

Evolution is a complete solution for mail, calendar, tasks, contact lists, but it uses a lot of resources, and I’m not using all of those features.
Last week I was looking at multiple mail clients (aka mail user agents). I was really interested in Claws-Mail, a fork of Sylpheed. It is very lightweight, and has a bunch of features, not as much as evolution, but it can compete pretty well.
Memory-wise, I switched from 30mb used by Evolution to ~14mb (maximum, but usually ~10mb) used by Claws-mail.

The only problem I was facing is setting it up with Gmail. Here’s how I figured it out after a couple days.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

After discovering Libre.fm which is an open alternative to last.fm, I found out about Jamendo.

Jamendo is a portal where artists can upload and share their music. The files/songs are available for gratis and libre download to the public (licensed under Creative Commons licenses). So you can download any files for your personal use, but for commercial use or derivative works, it depends on the album license, but you can easily see what the license is on the album page.

For example, you can see this album of Silence, called Encre. And on the right you’ll see Your rights on this album, and this tells you what you can or cannot do with this album. Pretty neat

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.

I was on #ubuntu-fr trying to help people, and a person talked about irssi-notify script. It’s a irssi script written in perl, that when there is message with your name in it (even highlights should work too), a notification pops-up (using the ubuntu notification system).

That’s very helpful. Plus it says the channel! Here’s a screenshot:

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez.