If you have been using the Linux console text editor vim (or: Vi IMproved), you have probably noticed already that at times - especially in files with a large amount of comments - the default color scheme on a black background is less than ideal. Dark blue on black is pretty hard to read and can strain the eyes a lot.

So today I went out to see if somebody had come up with a solution for this particular problem. I saw people who changed console colors by exporting and overwriting certain system variables, and others who edited the default color scheme.

The simplest solution I have found to this problem is just switching the color scheme. You can do that by typing the following in the already open vim session:

:colorscheme desert

where desert is just an example for the scheme of choice. Desert - for me - has just the right color for comments: aquamarine / light blue.

If you are satisfied with the scheme and would like it to be applied each time you launch vim, you can just edit /etc/vim/vimrc (or in my case with CentOS: /etc/vimrc) and add the following line:

colorscheme desert

with desert again, of course, being the chosen color scheme. This would apply this setting automatically for each vim instance that is launched system-wide. If you do not have access to the system-wide preferences or prefer just using it for your own user account, edit the ~/.vimrc instead.

The blog entry I got this tip from (Asher's space) has further instructions on how to edit existing color schemes and even a link to a blog post that explains how to edit the dark blue color for directories in ls listings with color, but I did not feel the need to go that far. If you are interested in that topic I can only encourage you to visit the original post.

Thanks for reading!

Update (2012-01-04):
Okay, looks like pingback isn't working, so here's a direct link to the original blog post:
vi code highlighting: change the default comments color from dark blue to light blue (https://asher2003.wordpress.com/)

Yesterday evening and early today I decided to implement something that has been flying around in my head for quite some while. I enabled SSL for my website - including this blog! - and at the same time moved the blog back to its original URL: http://blog.plee.me/

Now, as some of you might know, that subdomain URL has always continued to work even though I switched the URL to the subdirectory one for a while. However, instead of invalidating one or the other, both will still work. If you visit a link pointing to http://www.plee.me/blog/... you will be redirected to the new subdomain one.

So, with SSL being enabled as well, you can also reach this blog via https://blog.plee.me/, which I would strongly advise you to use over the unencrypted one. It's quite unlikely that I will post highly sensitive content on here to justify SSL encryption, but hey, it's fancy, and who doesn't like fancy stuff, right?

In order to not get any warning due to untrusted certificates, however, I recommend (not only for my site's sake but for a number of other privately or non-commercially run websites throughout the whole web) you visit http://www.cacert.org/ and get the root certificates for your browser so that CAcert will be trusted as a Certificate Authority.

Alright, that's it for now. I think I will have some relevant stuff to write about in 2012, so stay tuned.
Don't hold your breath though

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I have actually been active on Twitter again for the last half year or so, and I'm intending on keeping that trend. So swing by there if you like The link/info is on my main website.

Thanks for reading and sorry for any inconvenience.

Just a quick method to (roughly) detect your linux distribution and version:

$ cat /etc/issue
or
$ cat /etc/*release

Cheers

This particular tip was written over at http://www.ohnekontur.de/2011/05/13/adblock-facebook-like-button-blockieren/. Any credit goes to the original author. I am merely posting this on my blog to have a reference for myself in the long run.

You might have heard about the fact that even without clicking on Facebook's Like buttons you might be tracked by Facebook (technically it is absolutely possible for them to see which site it is you visited and had the Like button on it).

So if you are using Firefox and have the Adblock Plus addon installed (which I strongly recommend in the times of annoying flash advertisements) you can just add the following lines under the Adblock Plus preferences => "My Ad Blocking Rules":

||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

These rules disable any Facebook scripts that are not used from the Facebook domains (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn.com, fbcdn.net) themselves, including the Like buttons or any other webpage widgets they offer.

Of course, if you are using a different browser or a different kind of ad blocking / script blocking script, the idea is the same: forbid Facebook's scripts to run anywhere but their own website.

As always, I hope to have been of any help to you.

Thanks for reading.

If you have used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (or several other CS5 products as I've read), you might have encountered long waiting times during the program launching. In the case of Premiere Pro CS5, the splash screen shows "Loading ExporterQuickTimeHost.prm" and sticks with it for a couple of minutes (yes, minutes). This is not even a one-time thing or a once-per-Windows-session, it happens each and every program launch.

When I researched this, I quickly found the answer in Adobe's forums: Premiere CS5 takes 5 minutes to start up

In fact, what's causing this is not just the Adobe program, but rather the combination of a firewall and the Adobe program. If you are as restrictive in terms of Internet access as I am, you might have forbidden Adobe Premiere Pro.exe outgoing IP connections altogether. However, it is trying to establish a TCP connection to localhost / 127.0.0.1.

The fix is to allow outgoing TCP (I chose IP, which of course includes TCP) to 127.0.0.1 for the following executables:

• <Premiere Directory>\Adobe Premiere Pro.exe
• <Premiere Directory>\32\Adobe QT32 Server.exe
• <Premiere Directory>\32\dynamiclinkmanager.exe

with <Premiere Directory> of course being the path to your Adobe Premiere directory.

Note: Of course you can still stop every other outgoing traffic. Regard the 127.0.0.1 rule as an exception.

If you are trying to apply this fix to other Adobe programs, you are on your own to find out which .exes require 127.0.0.1 TCP connections. With modern firewalls, however, this shouldn't be that big of a problem. Just look at the prompts your firewall pops up and/or determine the .exes via logging.

I hope that helps you enjoy your respective Adobe program(s) all the more.

Good luck and, as always, thanks for reading.

Update (2010-03-28):
I recently found out that with my kind of firewall "Adobe Premiere Pro.exe" would prompt me again for a rule for outgoing traffic to addresses different from the localhost zone. If that happens to you, make sure you don't accidentally replace or override the localhost rule you added above. Rather add an additional rule for all the remaining outgoing traffic and forbid it (or allow it, depending on what you want).

In order to circumvent that problematic, you surely know that you can just open the Start Menu, type the name of the program into the quick search field, wait for it to show up in the results, right-click it and choose "Run as administrator". I found that it was a little to bothersome to use the mouse in addition to typing, especially when you have to elevate quite often in a short period of time.

What is faster is the shortcut I recently found out about. Type the name of the program into the Start Menu's quick search as usual, and instead of right-clicking, just press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. That way, you run the selected program from the list with elevation. You don't even necessarily have to wait for the search results to show up: for example, just type in cmd and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter.

This is a nice and nifty time saver.

Of course, there is also the method to just create a shortcut, go into its properties, click on the "Advanced..." button on the "Shortcut" tab and tick the "Run as administrator" checkbox. This shortcut will then automatically ask for elevation each time. Downside: You have to use another one in order to run it without elevated privileges.

Also note that the key combination Ctrl+Shift+Enter only seems to work in the Start Menu quick search box. I tried Start => Run with it (or: Windows+R), but it had no effect. Too bad.

I hope that was helpful to you and that it will save you as much time and hassle as it did for me.

Thanks for reading.

Since I've recently found out that my new router, the T-Home Speedport W 722V Type B, apparently does not support automatic disconnecting at a specific time (in order to circumvent the 24-hour connectionreset by my ISP), I took a route that my good friend Pool has been using for quite some time.

It is a batch script, so in order to use it, you have to be able to execute it.

On a side note, the Type A model of this router does support automatic disconnecting! Make sure you choose "Other provider" when you're in the internet configuration menu in order to be able to see the setting for that. The "T-Online" option sadly does not show it.

What you need:

• A Windows machine that is running at the given time (has to execute the script)
• cURL for Windows, preferably the win32-ssl-sspi version (download page). win32-ssl should be fine as well.
• Configure a scheduled task for the script, which is not covered in this guide (but quite simple. Just make it execute the script.)

The batch script:

REM Speedport W 722V Type B Internet Reset Script v1.0 - 2010-04-29
REM Written by pl (plee.me)
REM
REM Works with the T-Home Speedport W 722V Type B home router.

REM START CONFIGURATION
REM Adjust these variables to your own ones!
SET PWD=12345678
SET COOKIEFILE="routercookies.txt"
REM END OF CONFIGURATION

@echo off
curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/login.cgi -d "pws=%PWD%" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_start_passwort.stm" -c "%COOKIEFILE%"
curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/status_startseite.cgi -d "connect=0&disconnect=1&block=0&nonblock=0&abc=0" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%"
curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/status_startseite.cgi -d "connect=1&disconnect=0&block=0&nonblock=0&abc=0" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%"
curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/logoutall.cgi -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%"
del "%COOKIEFILE%"

What this script does:

It logs on the web administration interface, uses a hidden option to disconnect the internet connection, then uses a hidden option to connect, and finally logs out again.

Because the cookie is cached in a text file, it is deleted at the end of the script.

Additional information:

The lines beginning with REM are comments, so you might as well leave them out.

If you run the script, make sure that you either have the cURL directory in the PATH environment variable, or that you set its folder as the working directory, so that it can find the curl.exe and actually execute the (central) steps of the script.

I'm sure that this script can be optimized (probably a lot), but for now, it's doing the job.

I hope that was of any help to you, and thanks for reading!

If you have recently encountered a weird behavior within your browser (I only know of Firefox because that's what I use), chances are that Adware has been installed onto your computer.

When I was looking for a picture on my own website and I mistyped the URL, I noticed that immediately after it showed me my custom 404 page, I was redirected to a domain called mybrowserbar.com. The URL was:

http://www.mybrowserbar.com/cgi/errors.cgi?q=[404URL]&type=404&ISN=[funkystring32]&ccv=130&cnid=302398&cco=US&ct=12

with [404URL] as the wrong URL. [funkystring32] seemed to be some kind of MD5 string (32 characters, 0-9, A-F), maybe a unique identifier.

After searching the internet for a couple of minutes, I read a thread on the official Avira forums. In it it was explained that PDFCreator comes with an Adware called "Search Settings Plugin" that installs and enables itself in Firefox. Luckily, being a normal addon, the problem was quickly solved from there: Tools => AddOns => Extensions => Search Settings Plugin => Uninstall/Disable.

I can only shake my head at things like this.

There has also been discussion on the official pdfforge (PDFCreator) forums about this:

http://en.pdfforge.org/forum/open-discussion/3140-search-settings-plugin-installed-wo-users-knowledge-along-yahoo-search

http://www.pdfforge.org/files/old_forum/2903.html

Thanks to the people at the official Avira forums! Oh, and nevertheless, in all honesty: thanks to pdfforge for providing such a nice tool. I have the feeling it's gonna be of great help to me in the future

Source: http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=895237

When I set up my VPN with OpenVPN yesterday, I found out about a little difficulty under Windows Vista and 7. Thankfully it was not that much of a hurdle as the UAC was the reason for this bug just like for a series of other bugs with different software I experimented with over the last few weeks. Nevertheless I hope that this piece of information helps you get rid of the following problem.

If you have set up your VPN and got it running without any major problems, and everything seems to be running just fine (connecting works), but you still can't establish connections to the other machines, you might find that pinging returns the error message "TTL expired in transit". This is due to the fact that Vista (or Windows 7) needs administrator privileges to adjust your computer's settings properly in order to function when you've connected to the VPN successfully. I think it's about the route.exe process, but I'm not 100% sure.

Windows Vista and 7 have the equally famous as infamous UAC (User Account Control) that prevents even administrator privileged accounts from executing programs with administrator rights by default. In order to enable these rights you have to right-click the program (or program shortcut) and click on "Run as administrator" next to the yellow-blue shield if it does not run with administrator rights exclusively anyway (in which case you'd see the yellow-blue shield in the bottom right corner of the program icon itself and would be asked for administrator privileges automatically when you launch it as any other program).

Please note that the following steps are for on-demand OpenVPN connections. For automatic connections, read further below.

OpenVPN on-demand connection

So what you need to do is launch the connection with UAC. But how do you do that if you usually launch OpenVPN connections with a right-click and "Start OpenVPN on this config file"? Even creating a shortcut to the .ovpn file doesn't give you the "Run as administrator" option.

A simple solution is to create a batch file that simply changes to the work directory and executes .ovpn with the openvpn.exe.

Example file "ovpn_connection1.bat":

@echo off
D:
cd \Programs\OpenVPN\config-ondemand\
D:\Programs\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn.exe D:\Programs\OpenVPN\config-ondemand\connection1.ovpn

This batch file has the following parameters/assumptions:

• Your OpenVPN dir is on the D: partition (otherwise change the drive letter in the respective paths and leave the "D:" line out altogether).
• The path to your OpenVPN dir is D:\Programs\OpenVPN.
• Your connection configuration file is located in the config-ondemand subdirectory.

Basically, you just switch to the work directory and execute OpenVPN's openvpn.exe located in its bin dir on the configuration. In a way, this works as a shortcut, but just as an executable batch.

The @echo off part is just so that you won't see the other commands displayed in the window each time you start the connection.

Now you either make a shortcut to this batch file or use it itself.

Whenever you want to start the connection, right-click on it and select "Run as administrator".

Done! Test your ping and it should be fine.

OpenVPN automatic connection

All you need to do is to move the .ovpn configuration file and all the other required files into the config subdirectory of your OpenVPN installation.

When the OpenVPN service (Start => Run => services.msc) is started, it will look for .ovpn files in its config subdirectory and execute them all - with SYSTEM privileges. No UAC circumvention needed.

So just set your OpenVPN service to "Automatic" and you're good to go!

OpenVPN on-demand connection with OpenVPN service

Just do what is described under the "OpenVPN automatic connection" paragraph except for setting the service to "Manual".

Now each time you want to launch the connection, you just need to type "net start OpenVPNService". To stop it, type "net stop OpenVPNService".

Note on using connections with the OpenVPN service

As the OpenVPN service feature executes *all* .ovpn configuration in the config subdirectory, there is no way to manually interfere with one particular connection of that directory and let's say disable it shortly. All config-connections are handled as a group with the OpenVPN service.

So if you need manual independency, look at the on-demand section.

I hope this wasn't all too fuzzy with the wordings and such.

Please comment or contact me if you have any questions on this matter.

Thanks for reading!

If you ever attempted to send a text message on your iPhone, you will probably have noticed that it is kind of hard to estimate the amount of letters you have entered. Which is quite annoying though, seeing as a miscalculation might cost you money.

When I dug around the internet in order to find a capable app that could replace Apple's standard Messages app, I could only find solutions for jailbroken phones ("BiteSMS", I believe). My iPhone however isn't, and it won't be (at least not for a long time), so that wasn't an option.

A nice little application that doesn't integrate with your standard Messages app (sadly ) but however does the job quite well (as in: count the characters AND have a landscape mode keyboard) is CountSMS (iTunes link). It is for free and you can use it with the clipboard of course without any problems whatsoever. It even has nice Copy and Paste buttons on the top corners!

I know it's not an absolute amazing app, but it gets the job done (a lot better than Apple's standard Messages app! Shame on you, if I might say so )

Thanks for reading and I hope you can benefit from that.