Code snippets and small stuff

Cleaning Cisco URL rewriting and mutt

Mutt or other text-based mail user agent users suffer from URLs crippled by security software performing URL rewriting, such as the Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA). The following script undoes the Cisco damage. History. 2024-01-03: I decided to dedicate a little site on its own to ciscoclean. 2020-03-08: The original version of this content appeared at FHs hacks.
Posted: Wed, 03 Jan 2024
A udev event monitor to configure X

We investigate the problem of re-configuring X settings, like keyboard settings, when input devices are plugged in, e.g., a USB keyboard. Instead of deploying system-wide udev rules for a specific user, we present a solution based on udev monitoring and user-specific systemd services.
Posted: Sun, 17 Dec 2023
A gruvbox colorscheme for mutt

A colorscheme inspired by gruvbox for mutt and neomutt
Posted: Sun, 26 Aug 2018
A modular vim configuration

A modular and customizable configuation system for vim/gvim/neovim.
Posted: Sat, 25 Aug 2018
Echo analysis

Produces sound pulses by a notebook speaker, records the acoustic response and does some signal analysis. Uses PulseAudio and ipython/scipy.
Posted: Mon, 23 Jul 2018
Topological peak detection in two-dimensional data

A simple Python implementation of the 0-th dimensional persistent homology for 2D images.
Posted: Wed, 23 May 2018
oe1archive.py

A little tool to query the Ö1 7 Tage archive online and print the MP3 URLs of selected broadcasts.
Posted: Wed, 07 Jun 2017
Nagios plugin: check_rdns

check_rdns is a plugin for the system monitoring software Nagios, which allows to check reverse DNS entries using the tool dig.
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2013
bruttonetto.py

A python programm to compute net and gross incomes with Austrian tax rates for social insurance and income taxes.
Posted: Thu, 30 May 2013
gdb cheatsheet

This is actually not a piece of code, but as I frequently forget yet sometimes need the not-so-standard commands of gdb I wrote a little GDB cheatsheet.
Posted: Thu, 29 Nov 2012
pdf-autorename.sh

SpringerLink makes it very hard to download conference proceedings (which cost money, by the way). One is expected to click on every single PDF and give it a meaningful name (other than fulltext.pdf) manually.
Posted: Thu, 06 Sep 2012
timer.py

A small python script I wrote to do timings of talks or exams and the like.
Posted: Mon, 08 Aug 2011
eFindStaleFiles

The python script eFindStaleFiles.py recursively traverses all directories given to the script for files or directories that are not tracked by portage. The blue output is debug output on stderr.
Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011
ÖBB Fahrpläne

The script fetchOebbPlaene.sh fetches the timetables of the Austrian federal railway company. Further it tries to find human readable filenames and creates according soft links. Finally a little index.txt is generated.
Posted: Sun, 28 Nov 2010
Blender: io_import_off

This is a Blender plugin which imports DEC Object File Format (.off) files. This feature was built-in for blender 2.49 but apparently has been removed for version 2.54 beta. I have implement the input parsing according to this format specification.
Posted: Fri, 08 Oct 2010
ipeify

A little shell script that automates the conversion of general pdf, eps or svg files to Ipe xml files using the tools pdftoipe and inkscape. Download it here.
Posted: Tue, 05 Jan 2010
periodicFetch

This little shell script fetches a website periodically. If a given interface shuts down then the script exits automatically (at least after a whole period).
Posted: Mon, 16 Feb 2009
ooffice-gpg

I frequently execute a decrypt-edit-encrypt cycle with gpg and OpenOffice.org. This can be pretty annoying and therefore I wrote a little shell script that does that for you. Just call ‘ooffice-gpg <file>’ to edit the file with ooffice and transparently decrypt and re-encrypt the file with gpg. But please note that ooffice-gpg has to be executed from a shell to answer to questions from gpg and the script.
Posted: Sat, 18 Oct 2008
External Editor Mod

When writing larger emails I love to use the External Editor Plugin for Thunderbird so that I can use gvim. One good practice is to set mail composing to plain text format. This avoids the problem of reconverting to a non-monospace font after closing the editor.
Posted: Tue, 20 May 2008
runfinite

Consider the following problem: You want to run automatic software tests and you want to guarantee that a test is finished in a finite amount of time. In other words, you may want to limit the execution time of a process to a specific timespan.
Posted: Thu, 24 Apr 2008
randcirc

The python package randcirc computes a given number of random circles in the unit square and is able to extract intersection-free arcs covering the circle-set. To do this in reasonable time geometric hashing has been implemented. The code can be easily extended to other objects than circles and arcs. Only a few primtiva have to be implemented for the geometric object wanted.
Posted: Sat, 29 Dec 2007
MP3 script for mplayer

A little training in Bash scripts: The script can recursively scan directories for mp3s or play them in random order or just repatedly. You can get the script here. The script can be easily modified to show pictures, etc.
Posted: Sat, 17 Nov 2007
Small C# SMTP-Server

To freshen up my memory I coded a little program in C#: A SMTP server. By the way: I implemented Semaphores and a Consumer-Producer-Queue for this purpose.
Posted: Mon, 16 Jul 2007
Rubiks Cube in Python and C++

Since I always wanted to know a little about OpenGL I implemented a Rubiks Cube in C++ and in Python. I’m not a graphics-crack, so be flinty.
Posted: Wed, 30 May 2007
Some FPU hacks: Carpet creation

Motivated by slides made by Stefan Schirra I programmed a few lines in C: A sideness test of a point and a line based on determinants is performed in a numerically interesting square of the plane. You may want to download the code here.
Posted: Sat, 20 Jan 2007
Gnu-assembler: cat

To broaden my programming skills I learned assembler programming under GNU/Linux by reading the book Programming from the Ground Up. This led to a small code snippet which implements a little Unix-like cat tool.
Posted: Thu, 28 Sep 2006
Sudoku solver in python

I wrote a simple Sudoko solver in python. This is my first little tool I wrote when I teached me Python. It uses a few logical rules to reduce the number of possibilities and if no further simplification is found Backtracking emerges.
Posted: Sat, 02 Sep 2006