Use ctrl-shift-u followed by the unicode character code in gedit, firefox, gnome-terminal, etc. Leading 0s (after the ctrl-shift-u) can be omitted. Works in webapps like Evernote as well.

Unicode 13 defines 143K+ characters, so you’ll soon need a map: https://www.unicode.org/charts/

u+00bc = ¼

u+00bd = ½

u+00be = ¾

u+2153 = ⅓

u+2154 = ⅔

u+202c = PDF

u+202d = LRO

u+202e = RLO

u+00b0 = °

Roman Numerals:
u+2160 = Ⅰ

in sequence through

u+216f = Ⅿ

I’ve been modifying the formatting.php file to change how WP reformats text in pages and posts.

As of WP 3.3, the edits need to be made at lines 56 and 57. The static characters are the same but the replacement strings are longer.
The array elements are highlighted red below.

$static_characters = array_merge( array(‘—‘, ‘ — ‘, ‘–‘, ‘ – ‘, ‘xn–’, ‘…’, ‘“’, ‘\’\”, ‘ ™’), $cockney );
$static_replacements = array_merge( array($em_dash, ‘ ‘ . $em_dash . ‘ ‘, $en_dash, ‘ ‘ . $en_dash . ‘ ‘, ‘xn--‘, ‘…’, $opening_quote, $closing_quote, ‘ ™’), $cockneyreplace );

Recently,  we had the need to resize some 8-bit greyscale tif images so that they took less space on disk. I had problems doing this since the app that wrote them in the first place used an old jpeg compression routine which was not compiled into the Ubuntu 10.10 tiff libraries.

I ended up installing the following in order on a Centos 5.5 VM. These were the latest releases as of this post.

jpg-8c (from www.ijg.org)

./configure –prefix=/usr –infodir=/usr/share/info –mandir=/usr/share/man

tiff-3.9.5 (from www.libtiff.org)

./configure –prefix=/usr –infodir=/usr/share/info –mandir=/usr/share/man –enable-jpeg –enable-old-jpeg

ImageMagick-6.7.0-9 (from www.imagemagick.org)

./configure –prefix=/usr –infodir=/usr/share/info –mandir=/usr/share/man

Once done, I finally found the best way to change the compression without ballooning the resulting file was to use:

convert 4527222.img -colorspace gray +dither -colors 8 -normalize -quality 75% 4527222.tif

( in this example, +dither actually disables dithering, -colors sets the palette to 8 bit and -quality sets jpeg compression to 75%)

This makes the file slightly smaller than the original, so to reduce it further, I used the downsize script from fwmconcepts

./downsize -s 100 4527222.tif 4527222-resize100.tif

You get fatal compile errors making all in Banshee.Dap.AppleDevice without libgpod 0.7.95 or newer.

Download the update here

Banshee 1.5.2 compiled from source code on Ubuntu 9.10 worked flawlessly until a system update around the end of November. From that point on, it locks up randomly when in shuffle mode.

So far I haven’t found out exactly why, and have worked around the issue by killing off the old banshee process and restarting:

kill -9 `pidof banshee-1`

Not elegant but it works…

The Java used by Tomcat is not in the user path in CentOS 5.3. The only time this has been a problem is when I need to create war files for the Web Interface and PN Agent from a new release from Citrix.

Rather than change the environment, I just provide the full path to java when creating the archives:

/usr/java/latest/bin/java -jar WebInterface.jar

Compiled and ran this to mixed results.
Seems to allow playlist ordering, but only for imported playlists. Also playlist order was not preserved on import.
The biggest problem was an unhandled exception that caused Banshee to exit as soon as the exception was confirmed.
Happened even after deleting /usr/lib/banshee-1 and ~/.config/banshee-1

Filed bug report 585057 with gnome bugzillla.

The stock FC iSCSI initiator is broken. Go figure.

Apparently it’s calls to sysfs don’t work correctly. The problem is that it’s not readily apparent. For instance, you can successfully send a discovery request to the portal and connect to an iSCSI LUN, but commands would fail completely, such as:

iscsiadm –mode session

iscsiadm –mode node -U all

So you can’t view or disconnect active iSCSI connections.

Fortunately, the fix is pretty easy. Download the updated iSCSI source code from open-iscsi.org. The current version is 2.0-870.2. Compiling against kernel 2.6.26.2 worked out flawlessly for me and so far has resolved the issues I found.