Getting Tor, Privoxy and Torbutton working on Ubuntu

This was tested on my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

1. From a terminal run

sudo apt-get install tor privoxy

2. Edit /etc/privoxy/config
3. Add the line (including the period at the end):

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

4. Comment out the line:

logfile logfile

5. Restart Privoxy:

sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

6. Install the Firefox torbutton extension.

Right clicking the torbutton and selecting Preferences | Proxy Settings | Test settings should work out of the box now.

The best thing I've read all day

Interoperability, transparency, extensibility, and storage or transaction economy: these are the important themes in designing file formats and application protocols. Interoperability and transparency demand that we focus such designs on clean data representations, rather than putting convenience of implementation or highest possible performance first.

From The Art of Unix Programming.

Free (as in beer) PDF to Word Conversion

Normally I try to avoid talking about my job here (this is my personal blog and nothing on it is attributable to my employer) but I want to make an exception in this case.

The company I work for (Solid Documents) just launched a free PDF to Word conversion service.

Usually when I'm at home I have to fire up a VM running Windows (and Solid Converter PDF) to convert a file (I typically convert to RTF as our software doesn't require MS Office for that conversion), but now I don't have to (and neither do you). Nice.

Stupid (but useful) one liner for Visually Monitoring Free Disk Space

I'm sure there is a better way of doing this (or a prebuilt tool that does) but I felt like doing some oldschool shell scripting while I update my local Ubuntu mirror for Intrepid Ibex.

One liner:

while true; do clear; date; df -ah; sleep 10; done

The output looks like:

Wed Nov 12 20:10:43 PST 2008
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              72G   49G   20G  71% /
tmpfs                 506M     0  506M   0% /lib/init/rw
proc                     0     0     0   -  /proc
sysfs                    0     0     0   -  /sys
procbususb               0     0     0   -  /proc/bus/usb
udev                   10M   44K   10M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 506M     0  506M   0% /dev/shm
devpts                   0     0     0   -  /dev/pts
/dev/hdb1             459G   59G  377G  14% /var/spool/apt-mirror