Some unrelated thoughts

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Scripts

gpg-update-key

If you are using GnuPG, you may receive new signatures or do other changes to your GPG key and want to upload it to keyservers and/or your webserver to make it easier for other people to find it.

Since this is a tedious task, I wrote a little script "gpg-update-key" which does the job for me:

#!/bin/sh

KEY="CC03633F700990F2"
REMOTE_DIR="myserver.org:/var/www"

# upload the key to some key servers
gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pgp.uni-mainz.de --send-key ${KEY}
gpg --keyserver pgp.surfnet.nl --send-key ...

Build GIT version of Xfce4

This is a little build script for Xfce4 to fetch and compile the sources from GIT (master). Short instructions:

You should start with an empty directory, where you put this script. Edit the script and modify the list of packages or modules, you want to install.

Then run the script with:

./xfce4-build.sh init

this fetches the sources from the Xfce GIT server and:

./xfce4-build.sh build

configures, builds and installs the sources. For more information read the script (it's really simple). The script can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/xfce4-build.sh.

Show or hide the mouse cursor

hide_cursor.c is a small tool, to hide or show the mouse cursor on an X display. The source code is based on a tool from Nevrax (www.nevrax.com). To compile it, just type something like:

gcc -lXft hide_cursor.c -o hide_cursor

Run it with "hide" to hide the cursor:

./hide_cursor hide

Run it with "show" to show the cursor again:

./hide_cursor show

The source code can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/misc/hide_cursor.c.