Reid's Random Stuff

Possibly useful things

• zmhm, the Zephyr Multi-Realm Host Manager I wrote, is actually useful!
• Look at these files if you want to set up zephyr notification for RT events. I no longer remember the details; email me.
• Patch to give zwrite an option to set the sender of sent zephyrs ("zspoof").
• wmkrb (tarballs, i386 .deb), a somewhat rudimentary yet useful Window Maker dockapp that keeps track of your Kerberos tickets.
  A similar applet for GNOME, by Andrew Chatham, but Window Maker rules.
• wmlaundry, a similarly rudimentary Window Maker dockapp to let you know when your laundry is done, assuming you live at Random Hall.
• Patch to give wmCalClock a "30-hour" mode; each day starts at 6 AM and continues until 6 AM the next day, so, for example, 3:29 AM on Friday is displayed as 27:29 on the previous Thursday. It's cool. Now in Debian lenny! Just 26 months after I submitted it...
• Patch to make Adium not blink names in the dock icon when "Animate the dock icon" is unselected. Accepted within 2 hours--the system works.
• I have tzc support working in Adium, so I can use zephyr from behind a NAT. The code is however very flaky and can cause Adium to crash when something goes wrong. I may in the future try to clean up these stability issues; in the meantime, email me if you are interested in a copy.

Things that are broken, and how to fix them

• [2006/01/20] "How to overlay images correctly with imagemagick"
  imagemagick seems to have countless bugs, but the one I ran into is that, contrary to the "documentation", you should write

  convert image1.png -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 image2.png" image3.png

  rather than

  convert image1.png -draw "image Over 0,0 0,0 image2.png" image3.png

  if you want to overlay one image on another correctly. (It looks like this might be fixed in version 6.2.5, not yet available in Debian as of January 20, 2006; but from my hazy understanding of the source SrcOver may still be faster than Over.)
• [2006/01/20] "How to configure the UDP timeout of Mac OS X natd"
  I discovered recently that the OpenAFS client works just fine through a NAT as long as the UDP timeout is set to over 15 minutes. (If you have an authoritative source for this information, please let me know!) Unfortunately the Mac OS X natd does not allow this timeout to be configured. The culprit file is /usr/lib/libalias.A.dylib; if your copy of this library has md5sum 05e8567a214ba86f93192ebd5cd1c6fe, then make a backup and then change the two bytes at hexadecimal offset 0x3ACA to 0x13 0x88 and the two bytes at hexadecimal offset 0x3AEE to 0x03 0xE8. The effect should be as though you had recompiled the code with UDP_EXPIRE_TIME defined to be 1000 rather than the default 60. This code will do that for you, but make a backup first, etc. If you have another version of /usr/lib/libalias.A.dylib, you may find it useful to know that the relevant source code is in the network_cmds "project" in the Darwin source code available from http://developer.apple.com/darwin/, in file alias/alias_db.c, and that otool -t '/usr/lib/libalias.A.dylib(alias_db.o)' -v -V will get you a disassembly of the library.
• [2006/01/26] "How to use (some) Mac OS X fonts with ghostscript"
  ghostscript can use TrueType (.ttf) fonts if you set the environment variable GS_FONTPATH appropriately. It seems to choke on something in /System/Library/Fonts though, and it looks like accessing the more common .dfont fonts requires recompilation.

Sillinesses