Ofir Picazo

How to setup a SSH-based proxy

Ofir — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:28:55 +0000

I needed to get access to MSN at work, which for corporate reasons had recently been blocked. I believe there’s no effective way to block access to certain services, even if you had the most advanced firewall; as long as the network has access to the Internet and it allows SSH traffic, you can get [...]

Hide Apache’s Server header

Ofir — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:13:29 +0000

It’s a good practice to hide the webserver’s signature, so the attacker doesn’t know what software your server runs. A default installation of Apache under Ubuntu will show the following on the HTTP Server header: Server: Apache/2.2.12 (Ubuntu) If you wanna personalize the Server header, you’ll need to install mod_security, like so: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-security2 Then just go [...]

Django Google Maps form widget

Ofir — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:39:33 +0000

We’re building a Django application at work, and I had to implement a way for a user to select a location on a map, in order to be able to save the exact coordinates and the zoom level the user chose. I looked around to see if something similar had been developed, but I did not [...]

Linux medication reminder

Ofir — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:57:35 +0000

I’m having eye surgery done next Friday and the doctor prescribed me antibacterial eye drops every two hours during the two days before the procedure. Since I’m in front of the computer for most part of my day, I thought it would be very useful to have an on-screen reminder, and using Ubuntu’s notify-send and [...]

Drawing polygons using Raphaël

Ofir — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:38:25 +0000

I’ve created a simple plug-in for the fantastic JavaScript vector graphics library Raphaël, to add the possibility to create regular and irregular polygons in a simple way. The plug-in adds two methods to the Raphaël’s namespace, polygon and regularPolygon. They accept the following parameters: Raphael.polygon(params, points) params: object Attributes for the resulting polygon as described in the [...]

How to re-route the Django admin homepage

Ofir — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:56:52 +0000

It’s very easy to change the default homepage of the Django admin to show any other page you have already defined. For this example I’ll use the now famous “poll” application described in the Django documentation. Assuming you already have setup the admin interface for the Poll model, your polls/admin.py file should look something like this: from [...]

Iframe resizing across subdomains

Ofir — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:14:09 +0000

A few weeks back I had a problem: an application I’d installed on a subdomain of interalia.net, which is the domain name of the company I work for, was going to be contained inside an iframe in another application, which happened to be on a different subdomain of the interalia.net domain, and the requirement was [...]

Converting SVG to PDF

Ofir — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:43:26 +0000

I recently had the need to dynamically create PDF files based on Adobe Illustrator (*.ai) files created by a talented artist. The application allowed the user to embed his name on the resulting pdf file, and I had to make sure the quality of the drawing wasn't lost, since it was going to be used for printing. Therefore I turned to SVG, a wonderful XML-based file format for vector images.

Remuco on Blackberry Pearl

Ofir — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:14:11 +0000

Remuco is an application that lets you control your linux music player using your cellphone using either bluetooth or wifi, this is great for parties! I’m a Rhythmbox user and I wanted to try this functionality with my Blackberry Pearl 8120, which fortunately has a wifi antenna. I followed the instructions on the Remuco’s website and [...]

Batch convert files to utf-8

Ofir — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:07:25 +0000

I recently had to convert a directory structure of files from Windows created ISO-8859-1 format to standard Unicode UTF-8. I created a shell script that recursively creates a copy of the directory tree converting to Unicode each PHP file it finds. find . -name "*.php" -exec iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 {} -o ../newdir_utf8/{} \; It was originaly [...]