xdg-open vs exo-open
While playing with XFCE (more on that later) I was searching for a tool equal to gnome-open. Gnome-open can be used under Gnome to open files etc in the preferred application. While Googling I found not one, but two tools in various blogposts and forum messages: xdg-open and exo-open. I tried both, and both did the trick.
So that left me wondering: what's the difference after the two? Googling didn't really give a useful answer.
Yesterday I found the answer, by accident: exo-open is the tool from XFCE to open files etc in your preferred application, similar to gnome-open, under Gnome, and kde-open under KDE. xdg-open is a shell-script which works independent from the desktop-environment. It will inspect your environment and if it can detect that you are running Gnome, KDE, XFCE or LXDE it will use the correct tool from your Desktop Environment (such as exo-open under XFCE). If it can't detect your environment it will try to open the file itself. So basically, if you know which Desktop Environment you are running, you can use the tools which comes with your DE. If you're uncertain, or you are writing a script which should work across different Desktop Environments, use xdg-open. Or simply always use xdg-open.
Talk: Git in Depth
This weekend I gave my talk about Git. Since I invested quite some time in the slide show I think it would be a waste not to share it. (I also hope to do the talk a few more times at different places).
Since it is a talk about Git, the talk itself obviously is also version controlled with Git. Since I'm finally really tired with WYSIWYG presentation software (yes, even LibreOffice Impress), I tried something different. The slide show is written as a single markdown document, which is then converted using the nice S9 application. It uses the 'HTML5 Google rocks' template to give it a very cool and clean look.
My slides are available on my github account: https://github.com/teranex/git-talk and they are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
My Bash prompt
A few days ago I took the time to finally rewrite the code for my Bash prompt. I had been using the prompt for nearly two years, but the code was fugly and had some problems. Now it runs without problems and is nicer so I can finally share it with the world. You can find the 'trexprompt' in my dotfiles repository on github. It also has a project page on this site with installation and configuration details. The prompt has the following features:
- Shows the current path, trimmed in the middle for very long paths.
- Shows the current load and time when last command finished on very wide terminals, right aligned.
- When inside a Git repository, shows the current branch and state
- Shows the exit code of the previous command when non-zero
- Configurable colors (left and right)
- When no colors are configured, colors will be calculated based on the hostname. So every host will automatically display other colors.
And a screenshot:
Getting Audex to rip into Ogg Vorbis
Audex is a really nice (KDE) application to rip Audio CDs. It can lookup the CD information (so most of the time you don't have to type all the tracktitles yourself), it also tries to fetch the correct cover (and succeeds most of the time) and has very flexible configuration settings. Sadly, the version in the Ubuntu (currently 0.72b1) repositories has a few problems when you want to encode your songs in Ogg Vorbis. Here is an overview of the problems I had and how I hacked my way around them (without recompiling Audex), so I can use Audex to rip my CDs to Ogg Vorbis.
The most important problem is that Audex simply doesn't detect the Ogg Vorbis encoder. As documented in this Debian bug report Audex passes an incorrect parameter to oggenc to detect the version. While it should pass -V (uppercase V) it passes -v (lowercase v). To 'fix' (read: hack) this I took the following steps:
- First check that your have the Ogg Vorbis encoder (oggenc) installed. In Ubuntu you can install it from the repositories by installing the 'vorbis-tools' package:
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sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
- Now you should have the Vorbis encoder in /usr/bin/oggenc. But Audex won't detect it because it will call it with an incorrect paramter. So to fix this I first renamed oggenc to 'oggenc_real':
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sudo mv /usr/bin/oggenc /usr/bin/oggenc_real
My vim configuration on Github
Ever since I started using Vim as my preferred text editor I have been keeping my configuration under source control. At first I kept my config for all the various applications + some useful scripts in one Git repository. But after I had given a (very) short presentation at work, I started to think about splitting of my vim-configuration into a separate repository. I have already learned a lot of useful tricks and settings about vim by studying other peoples vimrc-files, so I feel like it's only fair to also put mine out in the wild.
So first I did a little Git magic to split of my vim subdirectory into a separate Git repository, without losing any of the history. The answer on how to do this can be found on StackOverflow: Detach subdirectory into separate Git repository.
Then I created a repository on Github and pushed my entire vim configuration. Feel free to explore it and use pieces from it. (Or use it in it's entirety, but I don't think that would really be useful)
Some 'cool' features I use in my vimrc:
Pathogen
A few weeks ago I started using the Pathogen-script for vim. This script makes it possible to keep every vim-plugin in it's own directory. To use Pathogen you need to call at least one of it's functions so it can do it's job. I choose to keep this initialization in a separate file from my vimrc-file. That is why my vimrc starts with the following line:
Redefining functions in Javascript
A few days ago I wanted to know how easy it is to redefine a function in Javascript which is already defined. I know that doing something similar in Ruby is rather easy and I had the feeling that it would be possible in Javascript as well.
After some googling and testing I came up with the following test document (which is perfectly valid HTML5 btw!):
1 2 3 4 56 7 8 9 1011 12 13 14 1516 | <!DOCTYPE html> <title>foo</title> <script type="text/javascript"> function foobar() { window.alert('hello'); } oldfoobar = foobar; foobar = function() { window.alert('hello overwritten'); oldfoobar(); } foobar();</script> |
I'm not sure if this is the 'javascript-way' of doing things, but it works. First I defined the function foobar(), which simply shows a 'hello' alertbox. Then I redefined that same method to first display another alert, and then call the original function, which will still show the 'hello' alertbox.
While the example is not very useful, this technique could be useful to redefine a method of some framework to attach custom logic (such as logging) without having to modify the framework itself.
Budts.be: version 3 is here
Today I'm happy to launch the new version of my weblog. (Oh and also the rest of the website, although some content still needs to be updated.) This is version 3 of the weblog, not counting my very first weblog at blogger.com. Although it's only been 1.5 year since I switched from Nucleus CMS to Wordpress, I once again switched over to another CMS: Drupal. Not because I was unhappy with Wordpress (it's a really nice system), but Drupal gives me a lot more flexibility. Flexibility which I needed to implement some new ideas I had for this version of the weblog and my website in general.
I have always maintained a few different sites, running on a plethora of applications. I had my photo website (fotos.budts.be), which ran on ZenPhoto; I had lightyear.be with the activity stream, running on Gregarius with some self-hacked ruby code to write the final stream; Then I had my cv-site (budts.be/jeroen), which was mainly just static html with some PHP-hackery; Joining the club was also gluefish.net, which was built with some other static html and PHP-code; and finally I had this weblog on Wordpress. Clearly a mess :)
So now all these sites are integrated in one Drupal site. The cool thing about this is that all my content is now available on the website as real content, or 'nodes' to use the correct Drupal-speak. That's right, blogposts are nodes, normal pages are nodes, photos are nodes, tweets are nodes, delicious-bookmarks are nodes*, project pages are nodes, (allmost) everything is a node. This has the advantage that I can tag nearly everything on the website with the same set of tags so you and I can easily read all of the content about something. And it also allows easy searching.
Dell Latitude E6510, screen and touchpad
When we got our new laptops at work (Dell Latitude E6510) we had some various problems while installing our preferred Linux distros on it.
The first problem which we all had was trying to get the screen to work. I could get it to work by booting with the following kernel params xforcevesa nomodeset (I also removed the default quiet splash). Now I just run with only nomodeset, which works without problems for me, but without 3D. Jan has compiled a patched kernel for Ubuntu with 3D support but with less colors.
Then the second problem: scrolling with the touchpad didn't work. To fix this I ran the following commands:
1 2 3 4 56 7 8 9 10 | cd /tmp/ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/57421117/patch-dell-e6510 sudo apt-get build-dep --no-install-recommends linux-image-$(uname -r) apt-get source linux-image-$(uname -r) cd linux-2.6.35/drivers/input/mouse/patch -p0 < /tmp/patch-dell-e6510 make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` psmouse.ko sudo rmmod psmouse sudo cp psmouse.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/ sudo modprobe psmouse |
Reisverslag Guatemala 2010
Nadat we vorig jaar een kijkje hadden genomen in India en Nepal wilden we nu wel eens meer richting Amerika trekken. Ook wilden we eens een groepreis proberen. We hadden in India gemerkt dat we toch wel tijd verloren aan het zoeken naar de juiste plekken en we toch niet overal zo direct onze draai vonden.
We hadden al van verschillende mensen vele positieve dingen gehoord over Djoser en zij bieden sinds dit jaar een 17-daagse rondreis door Guatemala aan. Ons eerste plan was Mexico, maar als we het aanbod bekeken leek Guatemala ons aantrekkelijker omdat het zowel echte Maya-cultuur heeft, maar ook jungle en mooie natuur, zodat het, zo hoopten we, een gevarrieerde reis zou worden. En dat werd het ook!
Hieronder het verslag van onze reis naar Guatemala (en een klein stukje Honduras), die we deden in oktober 2010. Onze groep bestond uit 5 Belgen en 5 Nederlanders (waarvan eigenlijk 1 iemand van Spanje kwam) als je de reisbegeleidster meerekende. Het verslag is geen doorlopend verhaal, eerder een aangepaste versie van de verschillende mailtjes die we naar huis verstuurden (geschreven door Tine) met enkele van onze foto'tjes bij (gekiekt door Jeroen). Zowel de tekst als de foto's in deze blog-post staan onder de Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.
15-16 oktober: Ola Guatemala!
Na 27 slopende uren zijn we gisteren aangekomen in het wondermooie Antigua. Om geen 'dat hoort erbij'-speech uit te lokken, besparen we jullie van onze klaagzang over ontelbare paspoortcontroles, onnoemelijke 'customs and migration'-forms en het feit dat Continental Airlines echt wel een pak zuigt. Om eerlijk te zijn had ik deze nabijtraumatiserende ervaring liever ingewisseld voor een 27-uur durend tandartsbezoek. Zonder verdoving! Soit, het zicht van baggage die onbeschadigd van de band rolde en de chauffeur die een ruim busje had, maakte veel goed!
Vandaag prachtige dag. In de voormiddag Antigua bezocht, een zalige koloniale stad. Erg mooi met al die kleurtjes op de muren van de huizen, de kinderkopjes, de muzikantjes op de straat, de oude gebouwen... en dit allemaal in de schaduw van verschillende vulkanen. In de namiddag besloten we een 'korte' wandeling op een actieve vulkaan in de buurt te doen. Achteraf bleek het eerder een uitputtingsslag maar het was een superervaring. De vulkaan barst geregeld uit en de hele omgeving is bedekt met lava. De wandeling was inderdaad kort maar door de hellingen en het genadeloze pad met grote stenen en glibberig grind maakte dit een heftige tocht. Maar het uitzicht was fenomenaal! En het was erg indrukwekkend om lava te zien stromen in de tunnels onder het pad.
Upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)
Today we saw the release of Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat. Because I had some time today I immediately decided to upgrade my laptop. As usual the upgrade succeeded without too much trouble. Clicking a few buttons, letting the computer work for about an hour, reboot, and you are pretty much done.
Except for the few small things which break during upgrade. Out of experience from upgrading previous versions I know there are always a few small things you will have to fix. So here are the steps I did after the upgrade:
- The installer disables all your extra PPA's, so when the upgrade has finished I re-enabled those and ran
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgradeagain. - I quickly discovered that Guake didn't use my nice UTF-8 prompt anymore. This turns out to be a bug in VTE. The TERM variable isn't set correctly when launching Guake, so it acts as a dumb terminal. To fix this I changed the method of launching Guake in my startup script. It used to be
guake &, and now it isTERM=xterm guake &. Fixed! - During installation I saw that the upgraded had decided to remove cups-pdf. Simply reinstalling it with
sudo apt-get install cups-pdffixed this. I don't really know why it was uninstalled in the first place. - To quickly switch between a one screen and a dual screen configuration I used
disper(available from a PPA) on Ubuntu 10.04. Disper doesn't work anymore. However, once you have configured your desired dual screen setup once with the 'Monitors' configuration tool, you can simply open 'Monitors' again and ubuntu will detect the correct screen setup (one or two screens). To setup my correct screen setup I had to open the ATI Catalyst Control Center as root and play a bit with the settings. It was a bit of trial and error, but in the end it turns out support for my setup has improved. With Ubuntu 10.04 I could only select 1440x900 as the largest resolution for my second screen and I had one corner (5 by 5 cm) which was always unusable. Now I can select the correct screen resolution (1680x1050) and it looks awesome. - Because I did an upgrade, some of my settings were kept. I was still using the default ubuntu 10.04 wallpaper, so I manually changed it to the default 10.10 wallpaper (I always like to use the default wallpapers for a while). I also configured the 'programs font' to use the new Ubuntu font, just to give it a try. At first it looked a bit odd, but after using it for a few hours now, I'm starting to like it.
Apart from these small things I really like Ubuntu 10.10 so far. Certainly the upgraded theme looks really good.
