Hello World!

This is my very first *Amarok* specific blog post. Yay!

(Okay, admittedly I did not really blog at all since now. This will change now, of course!)

I just fell in love with vim ("the editor") after working for a very long time with nano. I love the way it highlights syntax, indents and copies/cuts/pastes visual blocks and stuff. But I don't like that it takes four+ key presses to save and quit a file. That has been the reason for not switching to it for me.
Now I added some key mapping to reflect nano's behaviour. If someone likes it, feel free to use it, too.

Put this in your /etc/vim/vimrc or ~/.vimrc:

I recently had enough of all the "*** GMX Antispam ***" lines in my kmail junk folder and tried to get rid off it. (It also marked false positivies in my incoming folder which also annoyed me).

Here's a small guide to strip the "*** GMX Antispam ***" string from your mail's subject (notice: this won't sort your mails in your junk folder, it only strips the subject line):

I've just found a nice article about enabling DNS-Cache for Konqueror at fedorawiki.de. It's very useful, because Konqueror doesn't provide this feature. If you take e.g. the german freemail provider http://gmx.net, Konqueror sends a huge amount of dns queries to load all the pictures and stuff. You really notice the performance gain if you cache these queries with a local DNS server, for example dnsmasq.

Here are the steps to install and configure dnsmasq:

Full package name: kde-misc/kicker-compiz

From the kde-apps.org project page:
"This is a modified pager applet for kicker to make it work with compiz. More generally, it is intended to work with window managers that use the concept of "large desktops" instead of "multiple virtual desktops" as kwin does exclusively."

I quite like the fork because it provides boarderless transparent snippets of your desks.

Full package name: kde-misc/kio-sysinfo

Hey, here is a new ebuild. I performed some updates (translations, etc.) on the original package. This is a testing version.

Note
You have to download both files (.ebuild and .patch file)! Put the patch into your files/ directory. Refer to the Gentoo wiki for more information: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds

Site theme changes:
* 2007-07-30, layout done, fixing some minor issues now
* 2007-07-31, minor fixes, site optimized for Konqueror-3.5.* and Firefox-2.*
* 2007-08-01, main site is now valid XHTML 1.0 transitional, added some icons, added search field in header, fixed drupal bug 85667, 111719 and 121283 to pass XHTML validation
* 2007-08-06, passed CSS validation
* 2007-08-07, added zoom support (should work fine up to a specific zoom level), added support of IE5 and IE6 (added some tables to have a clean 3 column layout); lynx, Opera and Netscape work fine, too; added anybrowser logo.

Full package name: app-admin/blockhosts

Ok, this isn't really new; I decided to extract the ebuild from the HowTo.
So here is the blockhosts ebuild.

Some information about the package:
Blockhosts is a python script which records how many times a system service has been probed, using configurable pattern matching to recognize failed accesses (such as for "sshd" or "proftpd" or any service), and when a particular IP address exceeds a certain number of failed attempts that IP address is blocked by using one of the following techniques, e.g.:

Full package name: x11-themes/black-gentoo

Black-gentoo is a theme package for KDE by xactive (http://art4linux.org). Black-gentoo provides...

• a KDM theme,
• a ksplash theme,
• a gensplash theme
• and a background image.

I like it and therefor I decided to distribute it.
Here's the ebuild (it's a repack; I hope I can keep it up to date).

Note
Downloading and installing the ebuild is enough; you don't need to download the source file (*.tar.gz).

(Updated version: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_BlockHosts)

Protecting SSHd (and others) with BlockHosts

What is BlockHosts?

Blockhosts is a python script which records how many times a system service has been probed, using configurable pattern matching to recognize failed accesses (such as for "sshd" or "proftpd" or any service), and when a particular IP address exceeds a certain number of failed attempts that IP address is blocked by using one of the following techniques, e.g.:

• using TCP_WRAPPERS (writes to /etc/hosts.allow)
• using "ip route" commands to setup null-routing for attackers
• using IPtables to setup packet filtering for attackers