Hazard's stuff

Google rules, as usual

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-04-29 15:03
One problem I encountered when using Opera on my Motorola A780 is that when I go to Google it responds in WML. Considering that Opera is fully HTML compliant, this is very inconvinient, as you can't directly go to websites or use Google Images. So about a week ago I found Google's problem reporting form and described the issue there. Yesterday I got a reply - they are working on a fix, and as a workaround, I can use http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en, which forces Google to answer in HTML.

mod_dav_svn and mod_auth_pam combo unstable

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-04-20 22:26
I was investigating strange "Connection truncated" errors when Subversion clients were connecting through WEBDAV. It turned out Apache's mod_dav_svn and mod_auth_pam do not interoperate very well and results in httpd crashing with SIGALARM and "*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer:" errors in the error_log.

In my case the solution was to switch to mod_auth_ldap and the crashes were gone.

Caching of DocBook DTDs

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-04-20 22:21
To my surprise I have discovered that whenever I create a PDF from DocBook using docbook2pdf, it fetches DTDs from the Net. This process makes PDF generation slower by 3-4 times. Some Googling resulted in buildDocBookCatalog script which can be downloaded from xmlsoft.org. It creates a catalog file which contains mapping from URLs to locally cached DTD files.

New Category "Software"

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-04-20 22:18
Leonid has been bugging to blog about my adventures with software, for the benefits of Internet. :) Hence, a new category was born...

Motorola A780 is here :)

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-04-10 02:40
Last Monday my Motorola A780 mobile phone finally arrived. This is a Linux-based quad-band GSM smartphone. Below is a review of my experience with it so far.

Ergonomics: a little bit bigger than I would like to, but still fits fine into a pocket.
User Interface: Fast. A bit confusing, probably because I'm used to Nokia. All applications have uniform layout and you can copy/paste between several applicatoins running at the same time.
Phone functionality: T9 search in address book is very convinient. However, contact management can only be done in fullscreen, meaning that you cannot use keypad or T9 (only through virtual keyboard).
Web browsing: built-in Opera shows most of the pages, including non-English ones, although Russian font is a bit weird.
Email client: IMAP works, but not very useful when you have 700 messages in your mailbox. :(
VPN: seems to support only IPSEC (not PPTP).
Photo: built-in 1.3MP camera makes adequate photos, however nowhere close to digital camera (out of focus, bad lighting etc).
Media playback: MP3, WMA, mobile MP4 play fine using built-in RealPlayer. RealPlayer can be accessed without use of fullscreen. MP3s can be used as ringtones.
Third-party applications: most of J2ME applications run without problems. MIDPSSH works great as a telnet/ssh client. VNC client is available, but I didn't try it yet.

Now I'm working on synchronization of Calendar with Ximian Evolution. Stay tuned.