Eclipse, you could be nicer to me

So I’m playing in Eclipse going through Android development HOWTOs. Yes, I know. Java. Thankfully there’s a scripting layer for Android, but I want to learn it all before I choose a toolset for a particular problem. Besides, Java ain’t all bad, just mostly. Anywho, I fired up the HelloWorld tutorial, made my project, and [...]

Bash, sometimes you suck

So, I’m trying to pass a ! character to a shell command. Should be simple right? Not so much. twit –post ‘OMG…I’m out of coffee…work stoppage!’ bash: !’: event not found Huh? Oh yeah, in the fine tradition of crappy shells like csh, bash uses ! to re-run commands from the command history. But you’d [...]

DBUS, an interface only Java programmers could love

I decided to move away from Gnome on my netbook desktop, as recent Ubuntu updates caused more problems than they solved, and now I’m back to running my beloved Fluxbox. Of course, doing so means that I lose some conveniences in the Gnome desktop. For example, when I close my laptop lid, the netbook no [...]

I really love *nix

So I’ve recently been playing with Ditz, a ruby-based distributed issue tracker, to go along with my distributed workflow in Git. It’s a good start, but not quite polished yet. I added the issue-claiming plugin, played with it for a while, and then realized that I don’t need it since I’m the only developer on [...]

Humour in manpages

I just discovered surfraw in the results of an apt-cache search (love that command) and I had to laugh at the manpage: DESCRIPTION Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many [...]

Ruby silliness

Ok, this is just dumb. msoulier@kanga:~$ gem list torrent –remote *** REMOTE GEMS *** Well that’s wrong, I know there’s a RubyTorrent gem. msoulier@kanga:~$ gem list tftp –remote *** REMOTE GEMS *** tftpplus (0.4) It finds my tftp library just fine with a substring. msoulier@kanga:~$ gem list RubyTorrent –remote *** REMOTE GEMS *** rubytorrent (0.3) [...]

Big Gentoo upgrade today

Checking emerge for available updates for my Gentoo workstation, I was surprised to see a big jump in many packages. The reason was Gentoo pushing Xorg 1.5 as the new stable version as opposed to 1.3. I know it works, as I’m already running it on my laptop in Ubuntu 8.10, but there it’s configured [...]

More building rpms from Git

A fellow #oclug friend Michael Richardson (mcr) responded to my post on building rpms from Git in his own blog. I find the need to wrap up content into a tar.gz so that I can build it really dumb. It wasn’t always like this… with the DEBIAN version the rpm command, I can actually just [...]

Building rpms out of Git

Having gotten heavily into using Git lately for a lot of my work, when I’m prototyping something and I want to make an rpm out of it, I find this script, kept at the root of my working files, quite helpful. msoulier@kostya:…itel-msl-webproxy$ cat git2rpm #!/bin/sh specfile=mitel-msl-webproxy version=$(grep Version ${specfile}.spec \ | head -1 | awk [...]

Gentoo defaults to system breakage

I ran an emerge, which picked up a new nvidia-drivers package. I learned some time ago that I can’t sit in front of my display while emerge runs, as I can take hours to complete, so I didn’t. I did however, happen to look just in time to see this: * ***** WARNING ***** * [...]