Making Inkscape Do Nice Things

The more I am using software for the KDE system, the more I like it. I mean that literally: very powerful applications that can do pretty much everything you would need from them, but they are inscrutable and unless you spend a ton of time with them, you won’t get much benefit at all.

KDE is not alone there. I guess the single most needlessly inscrutable application ever written by mankind is Blender, a monstrosity from a user interface perspective that looks like it is a sysadmin tool written for glitz effects and pretty pics. The novice that handles Blender (= me) is utterly lost at first and it’s quite impossible to tell what to do and how.

How do I get my gravatar.com URL

This is a really easy one, but since I had to crawl across the gravatar site to find out how to do it, here is a quick introduction to get the URL for your gravatar. No thrills and frills, but it does what most of us will need.

First, you need to create a gravatar account, if you don’t already have one. Gravatar is a site that aggregates avatar images for the different social networking sites (like Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and blogs (like Blogger). It works by storing an image of you (of your choice) and associating it with your email address.

Surviving a Catastrophic IMAP (Cyrus) Crash

In a similar post I described what to do in case your IMAP server crashes and it still behaves well. This time, though, Cyrus crashed and burned beyond recognition, and there was nothing I could do to save the databases. All utilities in the books simply told me the db files were corrupt, and I should run recovery. I ran recovery, and nothing happened…

This time I found a two-way approach helped a lot: first, I instituted nightly backups of my email server, and keep the last three days, three weeks, and three months on file. I created a script (attached below) in TCL to do the trick.

Setting the CUPS admin password

You can get to the CUPS admin page by connecting to http://localhost:631. But if you want to do anything useful, you have to present your administrator password. Who’s the administrator? root of course.What’s the password? Well, you have to set it to whatever you want.

To do so, go to a root shell and type:

lppasswd -a root

Enter a password, and that’s what you use in the CUPS screens.

Recovering from IMAP crash

One morning I connect to my IMAP server and it tells me there is an I/O error. Terrified, I connect using SSH and find out the hard drive is full of backup files. This in turn seems to have caught Cyrus in the worst possible moment, and I struggle to restart it. Whenever I do, I get weird error messages like this:
Feb 21 04:35:15 invent lmtpunix[9573]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
Feb 21 04:35:15 invent lmtpunix[9573]: DBERROR: critical database situation
Of course, I have not the slightest idea what to do. At least there is a hint to a recovery tool, no?