SnakeLegs

Here’s a quick perl script I used to migrate Excalibur EFS 3.7 filerooms to Adobe Acrobat PDF’s. Keywords: excalibur, EFS, efsbatch.

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Here’s a quick script to determine shell, perl, PHP, and groff files, and then run a quick check on them. For my use, I also use the WDG’s ‘validate’ command-line HTML validator, from the OpenBSD ports/packages collection.
quickcheck.sh.txt

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#!/bin/sh -x
# Use ls2mail to convert a LISTSERV(R) list archive to a UNIX mbox
# Then use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox to whatever you wish. It
# took under half an hour for me to convert a decade’s worth of around
# 50 lists into a single Outlook .pst file. Quite handy.
# SRCDIR is where the LISTSERV .LOG [...]

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Book recommendations:
Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar is a very good read; add it to your list. Then, if you’re in the mood for deeper reading, try the more scholarly and austere History of the Hour : Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, which covers the evolution of timekeeping to regulate and [...]

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My Visual Basic implementation (external link to PlanetSourceCode) of Lawrence Philips’ Double Metaphone phonetic algorithm (external link to Dr. Dobbs’ Journal)
 

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RE: keyboard mappings (keymaps) on BeOS and its open-source successor Haiku.

listarchives.zip - Archive of BEOS-KEYMAPS@LISTSERV.SNAKELEGS.COM mailing list (gone now).
uni2utf8.zip - Command-line application to print all Unicode values and their respective UTF-8 encodings. Source code included (4KB).
dvorak-us-standard.zip - Dvorak Standard Keyboard keymap and graphic.
dvorak-ansi-x4.22-1983.zip - Dvorak ANSI X4.22-1983 keymap and graphic. This is the ‘official’ version [...]

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I got a wild hair to start playing classical music on the banjo a while back.
I’ll add more songs as I learn them.
MP3 recording of Bach’s Prelude in C Major (BWV 846) on the 5-string banjo

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To check DNS for errors:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
http://www.dnsreport.com/ - View a quick sanity check of your zone (e.g. http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=snakelegs.org)
http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/
Men and Mice’s “DNS Expert” is pricy, but worth it.Here’s a list of each test DNS Expert performs.
Microsoft’s free DNSlint with a demonstration and training webcast
Net::DNS::ZoneCheck
EXAMPLE:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Net::DNS;
use Net::DNS::ZoneCheck;
my $zonetocheck = “your.zone.com”;
my $res = Net::DNS::Resolver->new;
$res->nameservers(”your.nameserver.com”);
my @zone = $res->axfr($zonetocheck);
Net::DNS::ZoneCheck::check(records => \@zone, [...]

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To check troff/groff input files for errors, run:
groff -b -z -w w filename
EXAMPLE:
groff -b -z -w w /usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0
/usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0:421: warning: escape character ignored before a backspace character
/usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0:425: warning: escape character ignored before a backspace character
/usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0:425: a backspace character is not allowed in an escape name
/usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0:428: warning: escape character ignored before a backspace character
/usr/share/man/cat1/f77.0:433: warning: escape character [...]

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To run a quick sanity check on a PHP script, run:
php -l filename
EXAMPLE:
Warning at line 46, character 15:  net-enabling start-tag; possibly missing required quotes around an attribute value or using XHTML syntax in HTML
Error at line 61, character 61:  text is not allowed here; try wrapping the text in a more descriptive container
Error at line [...]

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To quickly check a perl script or module, run:
perl -c filename
Always turn on warnings and use strict:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
To check the pod documentation, run:
podchecker -warnings -warnings filename
EXAMPLE:
# podchecker -warnings -warnings /usr/local/bin/rsnapshot
*** WARNING: No items in =over (at line 4502) / =back list at line 4518 in file /usr/local/bin/rsnapshot
*** WARNING: No items in =over (at line [...]

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If you’re going to do it, do it right.
Use CSE HTML Validator to validate your HTML and CSS.  It offers advice beyond syntax errors, like warning about variation in browser support for different constructs, and providing basic accessibility testing.  I highly recommend it.
The W3 HTML Validator isn’t as good, but it’s free.  The W3 CSS Validator works [...]

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