Stavros' Stuff

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 :)

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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

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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

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

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

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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

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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.”

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Good news, everyone! Moneygement is finally good enough to provide some basic functionality, and thus I have opened it up for everyone to use.

For those of you who don’t know it, Moneygement is a free online finances management tool. It keeps track of what you spend/earn and shows you statistics on it. It also keeps track of your budget and helps you limit your spend

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I just got a new PC which, after many MANY woes, just started to run OK. In case you are interested, I got an Asus P5B-VM DO miniATX motherboard whose onboard soundcard was crackling, and installed my Audigy on the one precious spare PCI slot, and it was popping. I finally relented and got a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R which is just awesome (not as many features as the Asus, but it works great).

I wanted

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As some of you may know and most of you not care, I am currently in London. London is a rather large city, so you need to have expert help if you’re going to do anything. Well, yesterday the “anything” we wanted to do is eat, and we sure as hell weren’t going to crawl into the first hole that happened to serve leftovers.

In a dire predicament and with precious few (read “no”) ideas, until I remem

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These last few days I have been trying to get my new pet project (Moneygement, it’s going to be a free budget/finances management web app) going. So far I have implemented the OpenID signins (yay for OpenID, I love it, I hope everything that is, was and ever will be uses it) and I have gathered some ideas on the functionality.

So, I was looking

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As you already may know, newer phones support SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). SIP is a VoIP protocol supported by most programs/devices (except Skype), which means that you can use your phone to make free calls to other PCs and very cheap calls to landlines from anywhere, depending on your data plan. My data plan is not unlimited but my phone supports WiFi, so I get free calls at home/work.

Th

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