Random Thoughts
Random Thoughts inside Alan's head
Save that thought…
1
17 years
At work, our build process can produce thousands of lines of code, and sometimes the important bits can slide off of the terminal’s scrollback buffer.
So I created an alias that logs all output of the shell. It’s nothing fancy… it’s just a call to script with an argument to put the time and date in the filename. But it goes a step further, actually exec-ing the script command, so you do not have to exit twice when you’re done (once to exit the script, and once to exit the original shell).
alias log='exec script "/home/alan/logs/terminal-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)-$$.log"'
Still, this requires you to think about logging before you start your work.
Since I normally launch my shell windows from a Gnome application launcher icon, I decided to modify that launcher so that EVERYTHING is logged.
On Gnome, right-click on the panel at the top and select “+ Add to panel…”. Then select “application launcher” and pick out the gnome-terminal from the menus. You’ll have a little terminal icon on the top Gnome panel.
Right-click on that terminal icon and select “properties”. It should say “gnome-terminal”. Change it to the following:
sh -c "exec gnome-terminal -x script $HOME/logs/terminal-$(date +%%Y%%m%%d-%%H%%M%%S)-$$.log"
The double-percents are so the launcher will not interpret them.
Now, when you click on that application launcher icon, a new terminal window will open, and all output to that terminal will be logged.
Firefox: invalid or unsupported form of compression
0
17 years
Occasionally, I have been seeing the following error in Firefox (v3.0.11).
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
It occurs frequently when I am using a SOCKS proxy. One web site which happens to exhibit the problem more than others is Bruce Schneier’s blog.
The work-around that seems to work for me is to do a “Tools / Clear Private Data…” and select Cache, Cookies and Offline Website Data.
There’s a lively discussion on the Mozilla support forum, but no one seems to know what the source of the problem is.
Peek-a-boo!
0Please welcome the newest addition to our family, a hermit crab named “Peekaboo”.
He comes from Wings at Atlantic Beach. He lives in a plastic shoe box with a sandy floor, a water dish to bathe in, and LEGO’s to crawl on. He likes to be sprayed with water, and he likes to crawl up Audrey’s arm.
Two heads are better than one
0
17 years
At work, I got a new PC with two monitors, and I have really enjoyed having the extra screen real estate.
When I worked from home this week, I decided that I needed to try hooking an external monitor to my HP laptop. I was happy that, unlike the last time I tried this a few years ago, it “Just Worked” ™ without any special calesthenics on my part.
I wondered why Gnome decided to put the panels (the bars at the top and the bottom) on the external monitor instead of on the laptop display. To me, it seemed more natural to have the “start” menu (actually, the “Applications, Places, System” tri-menu) on the external display instead of right in front of me.
It turns out that this is really easy to fix. Gnome has this configuration tool that is roughly equivalent to the Windows registry… yuck. You can access it using either gconf-editor or gconftool-2. Inside that deep mine of settings, there is one jewel that tells where the panels should go. So I wrote a quick script to move the panels from one monitor to the other and back.
#!/bin/bash
m=$1
if [[ ( ! -z "$m" ) && ( ( $m -eq 1 ) || ( $m -eq 0 ) ) ]]
then
menu="/apps/panel/toplevels"
panels=$(gconftool-2 --dump $menu | \
grep '<key>.*/monitor</key>' | \
sed -e 's/^.*<key>//g' -e 's/</key>.*$//g')
for p in $panels
do
gconftool-2 --set "$menu/$p" --type integer "$m"
done
else
echo "usage --> $0 [ 0 | 1 ]"
echo "moves gnome panels to monitor 0 (VGA) or 1 (LCD)"
fi
exit 0
The Quick Lounge
0
17 years
In my line of work, I occasionally have the luxury of working from home. When that happens, I prefer to run all of my applications on my desktop PC at the office, and I use “NX” to connect remotely. Specifically, I use the NoMachine NX server on my Ubuntu PC at work (although I am considering trying the open source “freenx” server), and at home I use the “qtnx” client on my laptop, which also runs Ubuntu.
This works pretty well, except my desktop environment does not like the stress of changing resolutions back and forth. It seems that the “panels” in Gnome get confused about where to place the different applets and widgets, since at one time it may have a lot of room, and at another time it may be more cramped.
I got tired of scooting my quick-launch icons around one-by-one, and so I was looking for a container where I could keep them together and move them around as a group. I tried the “drawer” applet, which is available in Ubuntu by default, but that was not quite right. I don’t want to open and close the drawer every time I launch something… I just want the icons to always be there in a group.
I found an applet called “quick-lounge-applet” which really fits the bill. One wonders whether the author meant to say “quick launch”, but perhaps had a poor grasp of English. Either way, this little applet does a great job of keeping my quick-launch icons together in a group, and it can be moved around easily.
After installing the applet (using the normal apt-get install quick-lounge-applet, I found that it was not listed in the “+ Add to panel…” menu. Apparently, Gnome needs to be prodded before it recognises newly-installed applets. There is a simple work-around. Simply re-start the service that keeps track of that stuff: killall bonobo-activation-server. The service will re-start, and there will be a new entry in the “+ Add to panel…” menu called “Launchers List”.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am in a hurry. I have some quick lounging to do.
Internet lie: “in stock”
0Apparently, on the Internet, the term “in stock” means something completely different than it does in the real world.
What was I saying?
2Now that I am married and have two kids, I find that I have to edit my stories down to under a minute and a half. Otherwise, the end of the story just never makes it out.
“Hi Honey, how was your day at work?”
“I have to tell you about this new tool we discovered today. We were installing our network software on a cluster of machines, which is usually pretty tedious and time consuming. And then one of the guys pulls out this live CD, and …”
“Daddy, is rice a vegetable or a fruit?”
“Hey kids, put that stuff down and wash your hands and face… now!”
“My friend Drew says that Megan won’t talk to Carter because his sister is mean!”
“I think the dog just threw up.”
What was I saying again? Oh yeah, 90 seconds. Sigh.
Firefox plug-in: SyncPlaces
0
17 years
Early last year, I decided that my tired old HP laptop wanted to retire, and I started shopping for a new one. However, before I could find a suitable replacement, I discovered the Asus Eee PC, and I knew that I had to have one.
It did not make a lot of sense to buy a new laptop and a new Eee PC as well, so I held off buying a laptop. Over time, the Eee PC became my primary machine. Sometimes, I would plug in an external monitor and mouse and keyboard. And other times, I would just use it by itself. After a while, I migrated all of my old stuff off of the laptop and onto a mini- file server, and I eventually left the tired old laptop powered off.
I started using the HP laptop again when I started working from home, but I never really installed anything other than NX. On a whim, I installed the latest Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and that really breathed new life into the tired old laptop.
So now I find myself strattling the fence, sometimes using the tired old (but rejuvinated) HP laptop, and sometimes using the Eee PC. Since I keep most of my important stuff on an encrypted thumb drive, it was pretty easy to switch back and forth.
But there was one thing missing… my Firefox bookmarks.
I don’t like the idea of storing my stuff (tax records, email, bookmarks, or anything else) on a site like Google or xmarks (formerly foxmarks). So I went looking for a plug-in that would allow me to synchronize my bookmarks among multiple machines, but use my own server for storage.
SyncPlaces does a pretty good job of that.
It can sync using FTP (yuck) or https (yay) to a WebDAV-enabled server. It only took a few minutes to figure out WebDAV, and pretty soon I had the same bookmarks on the HP laptop and on the Eee PC.
Pidgin and Yahoo
2
17 years
by alan
in free software on 2009-06-22
I ran into a strange bug with pidgin where I could not log into Yahoo. Strace did not shed any light on the problem:
gettimeofday({1245688276, 23774}, NULL) = 0
open("/home/alan/.gnome2/nautilus-sendto/spool", O_RDONLY...
fstat64(7, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...
getdents(7, /* 3 entries */, 4096) = 48
getdents(7, /* 0 entries */, 4096) = 0
close(7) = 0
read(3, 0x93c4508, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN ...
gettimeofday({1245688276, 24697}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN},...
Instead, the answer came from a blog post here.
Yahoo changed their login protocol. Pidgin released an update. Ubuntu did not propagate the fix, apparently because it was not a security bug, but new functionality.
The pidgin developers have released an Ubuntu package in their PPA (Personal Package Archive). See the details at the pidgin web site here.
South East Linux Fest (SELF)
0
17 years
by alan
in free software on 2009-06-13
I spent the weekend in Clemson SC at the first South East Linux Fest.
It was a great chance to geek out with a bunch of Linux enthusiasts, as well as some of the movers and shakers in the industry.
We enjoyed presentations on topics that ranged from SQLite and the fsync() bug to Asterisk, Open Street Map and the Ubuntu kernel. These guys provided a clear perspective of how the open source world organizes and operates on a daily basis. And their projects just glowed with coolness, which created this viral kind of buzz around the entire event, whether you were a casual Linux user or a hardcore developer.
In the vendor area, we were wooed by several distros, a handful of businesses that sell services around open source software, and some content providers (that is, podcasters and “nerdcore” rappers). We were treated to several raffles… woot!
Mad props go out to the planners of the event, which seemed to go off without a hitch.