Stavros' Stuff

On programming and other things.

Apache problems

I recently moved to Slicehost because of their VPS hosting, so now I have a server all to myself. Unfortunately, I managed to screw it up quite badly when I upgraded it to Feisty. Apparently, the latest apache2 has a penchant for spawning 200 processes and eating all the memory, crashing the server. I am trying to figure out how to stop this from happening, but until then this site will crash a lo

Continue reading…

Nonzero Drupal theme

As you have perhaps noticed, I recently installed a new Drupal theme, Nonzero. It is all fine and dandy, but the right sidebar was moving to the left as the text in it grew, and it started to run over the text in the posts, making the layout look bad (particularly in Opera, which I use).

If you are using this theme, the fix is simple. Just add width: 13.

Continue reading…

Wireless problems.

Okay, so I have a WRT54GL running DD-WRT. Many people have those. The problem, however, started when I moved my desktop PC from wireful to wireless. For some reason, My laptop (also wireless) could not reliably access windows file shares. It would access some of the folders some of the time, and most of the folders none of the time.

I toiled and troubled over it to find out what was wrong, but no

Continue reading…

One reason to have sex.

I just read an article that basically argued that having sex saves you money (no prostitute jokes here please), so in the spirit of said article I would like to contribute my own reasons to have sex. Well, actually, it’s only one reason. Here it is:

Continue reading…

On graceful degradation

Oftentimes, when you design programs or objects or anything else, you have to make sure that people who lack certain prerequisites can still use what you designed. They must not fail badly, and they must still be at least a bit usable in extreme circumstances. For example, a car’s doors must always open from the inside, even if the battery is dead and the locks are magnetic. Therefore, the mechani

Continue reading…

The Sims

These last few days I’ve installed and been playing the Sims 2. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a game where you manage the lives of various people (henceforth called Sims). You have to tell them to get dressed, go to the bathroom, take baths, go to work, flirt with other Sims, buy them the things they need, etc.

My Sims are a normal couple. They have their wants and needs. The father is

Continue reading…

Image manipulation with Python et al

This weekend I had no internet connection thanks to a DSL upgrade (well, more like downgrade, since I’m getting half the speed I got before) and since I had Python, PIL and a webcam, I decided to see what I could do.

After playing around a bit with PIL and motion recognition in images, I decided to write an image stitcher.

Continue reading…

Gmail Checker Part II

Fans of Gmail Checker, rejoice. Your favorite Gmail notifier is back with a vengeance. The slew of changes I made in the last hour is a veritable deluge, but I will attempt to describe them in a few short sentences.

Version 0.1.5, codenamed “SUPER DUPER CHECKER EXTRA WITH 100% MORE PIMP” with IntelliMailAccountLoginPageDerivation technology is now able to open the sign-in pages for your accou

Continue reading…

Pi

I return once more, with a startling proposal. In the scientific spirit that governs this here blog, I am about to shake the mathematical world to its very foundations.

The basis of what I am about to lies shortly after prehistoric times, when the ancient Greeks started drawing stick figures on the ground, and thus realised that the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter i

Continue reading…

Gmail Checker released

My newest creation, Gmail Checker, has just been released. You can get it from the downloads page.

Gmail Checker is (yet another) Gmail notifier. It sits in your system tray and checks your Gmail account(s), notifying you when you have new mail. It supports multiple (unlimited) accounts, Gmail for your domain, is open source (source will be posted soon) and has many cu

Continue reading…