OCR for Linux

I tried a few solutions to extract text out of a clear image containing alan0@hotmail.com:
Install with: sudo apt-get install gocr tesseract ocrad

$ gocr -i email.png
aIan0hdmaiI.com

$ convert email.png email.tif # requires tif
$ tesseract email.tif out
$ cat out.txt
Ina rrykeeg a

$ convert email.png email.ppm # requires p[bgp]m
$ ocrad email.ppm
alano_no_mall.


Upscaling the image slightly improved the results but still none were correct.
Disappointing ...

web2py on webfaction

In Panel create a custom script and then paste this URL: http://wiki.webfaction.com/wiki/Web2py-LatestSource

Tor on Ubuntu

I found Tor works with privoxy but not the recommended polipo on Ubuntu 9.10. To run tor first add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org [distribution] main

For me the [distribution] is Karmic.


Now install Tor and the proxy server with:

1. sudo aptitude install tor privoxy
2. sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc and modify MaxCircuitDirtiness
3. sudo vim /etc/privoxy/config
4. comment out: “logfile logfile”
5. find: listen-address 127.0.0.1:8118
6. add (on next line): forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . (including the period)
7. sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart && sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Now set 127.0.0.1:8118 as proxy (eg in firefox) to access the Tor network.

GAE domains

How to register a domain with godaddy and enable free hosting on Google:

• Purchase domain from godaddy
• This will use the default godaddy nameservers (ns35.domaincontrol.com, ns36.domaincontrol.com, etc)
• Set up Google Apps for domain
• Complete signup form and request cname value to verify domain
• Login to godaddy domain manager (advanced)
• Add www forwarding to get naked domain to work (use masking)
• Delete all the default cname values, which point to various services
• Add google.com cname value and use default TTL
• Add cname ghs.google.com with alias www
• Add www sub domain through GAE dashboard
• To enable email use this service
• Had to wait 10 minutes before service was active

SSH timeouts

Add this to ~/.ssh/config to avoid ssh timeouts (create file if does not exist):

Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 240

Call url with CRON

Call URL periodically with CRON, discard HTML, and send all output (including errors) to file:

$ crontab -e
0 * * * * wget URL -O /dev/null 2>> ~/cron.log

Memcached on webfaction

Choose memcached from custom install scripts and set extra info to maximum number of MB (eg 2)

This executes:

memcached start -d -l 127.0.0.1 -m 5 -P $PWD/memcached.pid -p XXXXX

Then can access with gluon.contrib.memcache

Take note of port used