binfalse

Just stumbled upon a small bug in Debian’s version of Gajim (0.15.4-2 – currently in testing and sid).

The following error occurs when Gajim starts to idle:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/idlequeue.py", line 533, in _process_events
    return IdleQueue._process_events(self, fd, flags)
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/idlequeue.py", line 394, in _process_events
    obj.pollin()
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/transports_nb.py", line 420, in pollin
    self._do_receive()
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/transports_nb.py", line 606, in _do_receive
    self._on_receive(received)
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/transports_nb.py", line 620, in _on_receive
    self.on_receive(data)
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/xmpp/dispatcher_nb.py", line 488, in dispatch
    handler['func'](session, stanza)
  File "/usr/share/gajim/src/common/connection_handlers.py", line 2009, in _StreamCB
    conn=self, stanza=obj))
NameError: global name 'obj' is not defined

This results in a dis- and a subsequent reconnection. As the traceback already suggests the error can be found in /usr/share/gajim/src/common/connection_handlers.py on line 2009. This is the corresponding function:

def _StreamCB(self, con, iq_obj):
        log.debug('StreamCB')
        gajim.nec.push_incoming_event(StreamReceivedEvent(None,
            conn=self, stanza=obj))

Obviously, there is no variable obj : The passed argument is called iq_obj … To fix that mistake just substitute the function definition with (replace iq_obj → obj in line 2006):

def _StreamCB(self, con, obj):
        log.debug('StreamCB')
        gajim.nec.push_incoming_event(StreamReceivedEvent(None,
            conn=self, stanza=obj))

This bug is already fixed in their repository (13861:239ec662de5a). Thus, this article is mainly for people not familiar with python/programming, who need a quick fix. (wasn’t able to find something on the Internet)

Btw. I’m not sure why, but this error just affected one of my four machines which are running Gajim.

About 6 or 10 moths ago we were searching for a student to work with us in the SEMS project. In order to reduce the number of applications I started a challenge. To solve this challenge you had to show some understanding for basic techniques and programming languages, so we didn’t waste our time with people not able to write a single line of source code.

And what should I say? It was successful! We’re now a great team with three students :D

However, currently this challenge seems to spread over the internet. And lot’s of people try to solve it (and many submit a wrong answer^^). But even worse, some of you guys try to exploit it by submitting something like

"; SHOW TABLES;

In general I don’t care. It was just some lines of PHP that send me an email in case of a correct answer. There is no database and the worst that can happen is a full inbox, but now I decided to close this challenge and instead forward users to this article.

Thus, if you arrive here feel free to apply for a job! I guess all of my readers, even if they didn’t solve this challenge, are perfect fellows…

If you nevertheless want to give it a try you can download the challenge.

MyTinyTodo is a self-hosted todo-list which convinces by its simplicity. It allows to maintain several different lists, you can assign tags, priorities and due dates to certain tasks. I used it myself for a long time and decided to fork the project in order to implement some stuff I missed in the original version.

I do not intend to talk about MyTinyTodo a great deal. Very tiny, does nothing that isn’t necessary. No Dropbox/Facebook/Instagram etc integration. I really like this kind of software :D

But I was missing an essential feature: Creating tasks via mail. Lucky us, MyTinyTodo is distributed under the terms of GPLv3 license. Thus, I hg clone d and extended the tool with desired functionality. And since the IDE was already opened I added a tiny authentication (now: username + password; previously: .htaccess ) and secured the API by introducing a signature. Nothing special or complex, but it had to be done.

Long story short: I’m now able to submit tasks via e-mail. That means, a mail containing the following:

To: todo@your.server.tld
Subject: My New TodoItem
some more text

to describe this todo item

priority:1
tags:someTag1,someTag2
duedate:nextweek
list:myNewList

will result in something similar to Figure 1. All possible attributes that are recognized in the mail body are listed at the wiki on GitHub.

Find out more on GitHub.

You can configure the Apache web server to forward requests to Tomcat. Thus, you can speak to both servers on ports 80 or 443 and get rid of the :8080 for your Tomcat applications. I’m somehow doing that very often, so here is small how-to for copy&paste purposes.

Install jk

As you might know, while Tomcat is Java stuff Apache is written in C. So in general it’s not that easy to get them talking to each other. The key to achieve an integration is called mod_jk (see The Apache Tomcat Connector). So first of all you need to install it:

aptitude install libapache2-mod-jk

If it is installed you can configure an AJP worker in /etc/libapache2-mod-jk/workers.properties :

# Defining a worker named ajp13_worker and of type ajp13
# Note that the name and the type do not have to match.
#
worker.ajp13_worker.port=8009
worker.ajp13_worker.host=localhost
worker.ajp13_worker.type=ajp13

As soon as this is done the bridge is ready to close the gap between Apache and Tomcat.

Configure Tomcat

We need to configure an AJP connector on port 8009 . So open /etc/tomcat7/server.xml and add another connector next to the other ones:

<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" address="127.0.0.1"/>

If you’re lucky there is already such a connector defined in the comments. So just remove the comment…

Configure Apache to speak through jk

Here I’ll show you how to setup a virtual host. For example, copy the following to /etc/apache2/sites-available/012-yourapp.conf :

<VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerAdmin some@body.tld
      ServerName yourapp.yourserver.tld
      ServerAlias ya.yourserver.tld

      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /YourApp/$1 [L,PT]

      JkMount /* ajp13_worker
</VirtualHost>

Ok, let me shortly explain what I did there.

1. Everything that arrives at this vhost gets forwarded to our previously defined AJP worker (line 9)
2. I assume your Tomcat webapp is running on server:8080/YourApp , therefor I configured a substitution of the URL to insert /YourApp (line 7). Of course you need to have mod_rewrite installed and enabled. (You may skip this line if you’re fine with having /YourApp in all your URLs)
3. The rest should be clear. The vhost is available at http://yourapp.yourserver.tld , as well as at http://ya.yourserver.tld (lines 3&4). You can also use SSL, just configure line 1 to listen at *:433 and add the SSL stuff to the body of your vhost. (SSL exmaple)

Afterwards, enable the vhost to populate it:

a2ensite 012-yourapp

Give it a try

If this is done just restart everything:

service tomcat7 restart
service apache2 restart

Now Apache forwards all requests to http://yourapp.yourserver.tld to your Tomcat webapp at http://yourserver.tld:8080/YourApp .

Because I was thinking of something like that for a long time.

In bash/zsh (add it to your .rc ):

textfiles ()
{
    file $(find $*) | /bin/grep -E 'text|empty' | cut -d ':' -f1
}

Using this function it’s possible to open all text files of a project at once:

kate $(textfiles project/*)