For KDE development, I work with a separate user. However, when you invoke su - kde-devel and run an X11 application, you'll get nasty errors like:

or

There are several solutions for this.

A couple of days ago I came across this excellent tip to download your GMail mail to your computer with IMAP. Before you continue reading here, I assume you read that article first. In this article, the path /path/to/gmail/backup is the path of the local repository, which you configured for offlineimap.

In the comments of that article, I stated that there's a problem with duplicate files. GMail has no real folders, but you can label e-mails. This implies that the same e-mail may possibly end up in more than one folder. When you download all folders, it is likely you store that e-mail multiple times.

An annoying problem arised when using x11vnc as a VNC server on one of my machines. Whenever I connected to it the Shift key did not appear to work from the client. For some people this is no problem because they have no notion about using capitals, but I do care. I tried two clients, both showing the same behavior, so I knew this was a server-side issue. Running xev (package xorg-tools) on the server showed me the desired behavior: the Shift key got captured after all. And Caps-Lock also just works.

One of the Arch Linux systems I maintain is still running KDE 3 from the KDEmod repositories. We're talking about KDE 3.5.10 here. Unfortunately, there's a bug in the audio CD ripping process. When you drag a (virtual) MP3 file/folder from the audiocd:// KIO-slave, it produces only MP3 files with white noise. Unless your audio CD contains white noise only, there's no problem of course, in other cases you might like to fix this.

Sometimes it's handy to checkout a branch based on a point in time.

will not work, because it uses the reflog (which expires after some time).

The trick (as found on Nabble) is to lookup the revision on a certain date and check out that revision. This can be done in a single command:

Those who use git frequently will often execute commands like git status and git branch to check which branch you're on and if there are pending changes.

Fortunately, git offers a Bash script which automatically shows the current state of your repository in your prompt.

I followed the tutorial of Google Web Toolkit and I must say it looks quite nice. Now I want to start a project with this toolkit, but I need a way to debug my code.

Okular, the PDF viewer for KDE, stores some metadata for the documents you have opened in the past. For example, it stores the position within the document whenever you close it, or the annotations you've made while auditing a document.

However, this metadata is not cleaned up automatically. This results in many files in the Okular data folder about files you have removed a long time ago. The following little script cleans all metadata of non-existent files for you. It is recommended to put this in a weekly cron job, so you never have to think of it again.

I tried to create a local API reference of the Zend Framework on our local network, with the PhpDocumentor tool. However, along the process it stops with the following error:

For a little while I use xdebug and vim in order to debug PHP code (see the vim-debugger module). With the F2, F3 and F4 keys you can step through the code. However, all of a sudden the functions keys did not do what I expected. With every function key I pressed vim complained with: