Stavros' Stuff

After the amazingly successful omnisync, it is once again time to present you of another creation of the inimitable Poromenos Studios.

This time, it’s Dead Man’s Switch. As you’re probably aware, everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would

Continue reading…

It is once again time to shake the world from its very foundations with my latest creation. I present to you… omnisync.

omnisync is a file synchroniser (something like rsync), only it’s not built to synchronise just files, but also anything else. It’s extensible through a simple plugin architecture, and you can have it synchronise anything to anything within a few hours.

Continue reading…

I just encoded my Futurama DVDs to put on my iPod, but it’s a real hassle adding tags to every single file separely, so I created a script to do it for me. I had actually written this before, but I forgot it at home, so I had no option but to rewrite it.

The script (written in Python) will search the filenames for “sXXeXX” and look up the episode name on IMDB, and then will rename the file as “Sh

Continue reading…

Well, I have a computer architecture exam in six hours and can’t be bothered, so I figured I would realize a lifelong dream of mine, and make a program that prints “Hello world!” using curve fitting techniques. Enlisting the help of a good friend with numerous mathematical papers under his belt (ostensibly because he could not afford a tighter belt), MATLAB and a longing for procrastination, we em

Continue reading…

As you may know, I bought a Macbook some two months ago, and the trackpad was broken. The pointer accelerates way too much when I move it, and that makes pointing at stuff really hard. Combine that with the keyboard-unfriendliness of OS X, and you have one big Mac hater in front of you. I sent it for service to the official Greek Apple distributor, Rainbow, but I was a bit worried that they wo

Continue reading…

I discovered today that Moneygement won’t accept unicode characters when someone adds transactions by email because of the editdist module I used to check it. Since I don’t really need a fast function to do it (it’s all eight-letter words on average), I decided to write my own Python version of the function and am sharing it here if anyone needs it (because I haven’t found a Python implementation anywhere). It’s released under a BSD license with attribution, meaning that I’d like it if my name was mentioned where it is used :)

Continue reading…

I recently got a Macbook after my last laptop broke, and I wanted to write about my impressions (well, after using it for a few days and past the initial “omg nothing works like in other OSes” shock). First, the good:

1. The GUI is really pretty and feels consistent and robust. Windows (whenever I mention Windows I mean XP, I don’t like Vista at all) is quite a bit uglier, but is also ra

Continue reading…

Recently I found out that mail I sent from this domain (poromenos.org) was being flagged as spam by Gmail. That is odd, because I have (correctly, I believe) defined the SPF records for this domain and it should be recognised as legitimate. I researched a bit, and came to a conclusion that other users have come to as well:

Gmail flags as spam Google Apps emails coming from Google’s SMTP server. I

Continue reading…

If you want to mount samba shares with Greek filenames under Linux (Ubuntu, in particular), here’s the magic command:

</p>

sudo mount -t smbfs //server/share dir -o username=guest,password=,iocharset=utf8,unicode

</p>

It took me a while to find, so here it is for posterity and for others who might need it. Ubuntu displays filenames correctly through the network without any config

Continue reading…

Lately I’ve been looking for a good way to explain OpenID to people, since they need to know what it is to sign on Moneygement, which uses it. I haven’t been able to find a good guide, so I decided to write one, and here it is.

The official OpenID site says that “OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.”

Continue reading…