453. Very Briefly: internet crud: feedreader

I do a fair bit of vanity googling, it has to be admitted. The main reason for doing so is to find links back to this blog, so that I can post those links here (i.e. provide a way for readers to see how the different posts fared when tested by others).

In addition to the usual useless SEO-related crud, like xmarks.com, website-tools.net, yourwebsite.com (seriously, those sites provides no value whatsoever) I also stumble across feedreader hits a fair bit.

And they are much more nefarious since they actually penalize your blog in terms of page rank. (now, that may only hurt your ego -- but it might also have financial implications for the big blogs)

An example.

Say you want to compile kernel 3.9, and you for some reason want to get this blog's version of it:

So the first hit is by browse.feedreader.com. I mean, I wrote the post, but the link in the first hit goes to feedreader.com

The nefarious part of this is that because I have an identical post, my post gets relegated to the 200th page -- it's penalized for being simply a copy of the feedreader.com page.

As far as I can see there is also no added value by the feedreader frame that justifies their behaviour either:

In my biased opinion the added frame detracts and is an eye-sore.

In addition, note the bottom panel ('Recent discoveries...')? This takes you to lookup.feedreader.com, which is their internal search engine. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they try to monetize their 'service' -- by selling rankings.

Anyway, avoid clicking on feedreader hits -- as a company they don't add anything, and if anything they hurt blogs.

452. Briefly: Wine and MIME nuisance: MS Modelling is associated with everything...

I've battled with this on and off for a long time.

And it's not problem unique to me: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-c847a3ded88bac0e61aae0037fa7dbd4c7ae042a. The problem with that particular solution is that it's no good once the damage has happened. It's also a blanket method.

So, in a weak moment some winters ago I installed MS Modelling in Wine. I actually never use it, because there are better tools, but that's besides the point.

Unfortunately, MS Modelling has associated itself with most common (and uncommon) file types, such as .dat, .txt and .pgp:

I decided it was time to explore it in greater detail and remove all MS Modelling associations

The first step is to see how deep the rabbit hole goes:

grep "MS Modeling" $HOME/.local/share/applications/*.desktop

/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-3cam.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-accin.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-acx.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-arc.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
[..]
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-xsd.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-xtd.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-xyd.desktop:Name=MS Modeling
/home/verahill/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-xyz.desktop:Name=MS Modeling

85 file types. Not acceptable.

grep "MS Modeling" $HOME/.local/share/applications/*.desktop|sed 's/:/\t/g'|gawk '{print $1}'| xargs -I {} rm {}
grep "Materials Studio" $HOME/.local/share/mime/application/*.xml|sed 's/:/\t/g'|gawk '{print $1}'| xargs -I {} rm {}
update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

I also remove mime.cache, although I'm not sure whether that's a good idea. I haven't suffered for it yet though:

rm ~/.local/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

That solves the problem - temporarily.

Here's the issue: the files in $HOME/.local/share/mime/application/ get re-created when you start a wine program though.

And I think the problem is this: http://wiki.winehq.org/FileTypesIntegration

In other words, whatever associations are listed in the wine windows registry pollutes Gnome. And that's not acceptable. Anyway, let's put a stop to it using the method recommended on the Wine FAQ:

echo '[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\DllOverrides] "winemenubuilder.exe"=""'> ~/.wine/disable-winemenubuilder.reg
regedit ~/.wine/disable-winemenubuilder.reg 

It seems to have worked. Opening a program in wine no longer recreates any of the files in ~/.local/share/mime/application.

451. Seahorse plugins on gnome 3.4 -- PGP encrypting/decrypting in nautilus

Once upon a time it was possible to de/encrypt in gedit, and life was good. Then GNOME 3 came along, and the seahorse plugin for edit disappeared. (presumably you might be able to write a script to use with the External Tools gedit plugin).

It re-emerged as a plugin for Nautilus instead.

I'm showing version 3.4.0 since I'm on GNOME 3.4, and who knows what API has broken in between this and 3.8...anyway, look at https://git.gnome.org/browse/seahorse-nautilus/ for different versions.

There are probably more build dependencies than the ones I'm listing.

sudo apt-get install libcryptui-dev libnautilus-extension-dev libgpgme11-dev checkinstall autoconf automake checkinstall
wget https://git.gnome.org/browse/seahorse-nautilus/snapshot/seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0.tar.gz
tar xvf seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0.tar.gz 
cd seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0/
./autogen.sh

GnuPG Version:           gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12
GPGME Version:           1.2.0
Notification Support:    yes

Now type `make' to compile seahorse-nautilus

sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no

-  Maintainer: [ root@beryllium ]
1 -  Summary: [ seahorse-nautilus 3.4.0 ]
2 -  Name:    [ seahorse-nautilus ]
3 -  Version: [ 3.4.0 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ seahorse-nautilus ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

---

Encrypting:
Open nautilus, select a text file and right click:

---

Decrypting:
Simple:

Although in my case I had kde-full installed, which pulled in kgpg:

If you're having other issues with decrypting, check that the mime associations are correct:

xdg-mime query filetype plaintext.file.pgp 

application/pgp-encrypted