Ever closed and opened a shell because you needed to refresh the history to pull up a command you used before? Nevermore! Read this excellent post on briancarper.net to make your terminal life much easier.
Backing up with Duplicity, Effortlessly October 15, 2009
Duplicity has a wonderful design feature: it’s really really simple.
Duplicity has an annoying design flaw: it’s really really simple.
In case you didn’t notice, Duplicity’s simplicity is both helpful and inefficient. It’s extremely easy to start using Duplicity because its usage is so very simple. Want to back something up? Just write “duplicity /some/directory ftp://user@host.com/some/other/directory” for FTP backup, or “duplicity /some/directory file://some/other/directory” for local backup, or any other protocol out of the 11+ protocols it supports. All it does is write files to the location of your choosing, and then it can recover and list files (either latest or at a date of your choosing) from the backup directory you give it.
This simplicity is really great for the simple use-cases, like backing up a home directory. It’s when you get into databases, exclusion and inclusion rules, and other such fine print that you have to plan a little.
I’ve got three different “things” I have to back up: my web development stage, my remote shell (mainly for irssi), and my home directory. Each one presents its own challenges, which I break down below. (more…)
Firefox Saved Password Security (Beyond the Master Password) October 12, 2009
I don’t know whether or not Firefox even allows JavaScript access to the passwords automatically filled out when you visit a page, but I sure am not going to wait until some cracker finds a hole in whatever security Firefox provides and gets at my automatically-entered password.
So, this time around I’ve decided to require Firefox to wait until I’ve entered the username before the password is filled out. If I forget the username, I simply hit the down arrow in the username box and it gives me a selection.
The setting is located at about:config (for those who don’t know: type that into the address bar) and is called “signon.autofillForms”. I set it to false. Long may security prosper!
The Last Month October 1, 2009
Hello readers! It’s been a while, hasn’t it, since I’ve made a good post about how to do something or other? That’s usually a good indication that I’ve been busy with something or other, and have been using my system as-is without much time for exploration.
Well, I want to let anyone who reads this to know I’m still alive and kicking. I’ve got two posts planned (one about how to compile Pidgin plugins in Gentoo Prefix properly, and another about how I use duplicity with 12+ options efficiently) so stay tuned.
What’s been keeping me busy? College, that’s what. This is my first year, so I’m still finding my feet. Even now I’m still experimenting with homework schedules, varying between solid week of work and lazy afternoons. At some point I will find a happy medium, I hope.
The Neuvoo project started out alive and strong, and I haven’t been able to check my idling IRC client in days, so I hope they’re doing well and well on their way to producing their first release.
Oh, and thanks for reading. 
Google Wave: The Revolution in Communication September 29, 2009
(I was so excited when I watched the Google Wave video that I had to write this while I watched. That’ll explain the overload of optimism and excitement.)
Google seems to do all the obvious things: make free e-mail with an excellent spam filter, take the existing phone system and digitize it a little, make an online word processor and collaboration, and provide a really nice search engine.
This year, Google is doing it again. Two engineers in Google’s forces stepped back and examined the world of communication we’ve built. We all know that e-mail is ancient and inefficient, and they knew that too. So, they decided to completely reinvent the entire communication system.
It’s called Google Wave. It’s really simple.
Instead of thinking of communication as messages that are literally shoved around from place to place, Google Wave thinks of messages as being part of a conversation, which doesn’t move anywhere. Rather, a conversation between two (or more!) people occurs in a single, shared location.
Messages can be very long or very short. You can send long paragraphs of text in an e-mail format, or you can communicate back and forth in a texting-like format. There is no limits to what you can do with these messages. (more…)
Tip: Don’t use HTTPS + Gears + Google Docs September 2, 2009
https://docs.google.com, when used with Google Gears turned on and allowed, will result in some kind of unreported error in the Gears backend, leaving its users with a blank page. I have a feeling that Gears cannot handle HTTPS connections, but I’m not sure. It could be just a Safari and/or OSX issue.
Others have reported endless authentication redirection, which makes sense if you study the URL that the HTTPS version always gets stuck on. (There’s a “redirect” parameter which points to https://docs.google.com/?pli=1, which, if followed manually, simply circles back around through the authentication again and sticks back at the same old blank page.) Hopefully Google takes notice and fixes this soon.
Using Gorg to Preview Gentoo Documentation August 14, 2009
This is very handy if you’re working on Gentoo documentation, which is composed of XML that gets translated into HTML.
Alright, enough with the introductions. I’m just going to write how I got gorg to work.
- Install gorg. If you’re using Gentoo Prefix, and bug #281335 is not solved yet, use my Gentoo Prefix overlay to get it installed. (I only tested on OSX, though.)
- Copy /etc/gorg/gorg.conf.sample to gorg.conf, and begin editing it.
- Change the root variable to point to the directory where your copy of the Gentoo site will reside. I changed mine to:
root = "/Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo" - I’m not sure if this is required, or what this even does, but I changed the two mount variables to match root:
mount = /cgi-bin on /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/xml/cgi-bin
mount = /images on /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/xml/images - I left everything else to defaults. Save, exit. The other sample files should/can be left as samples. It doesn’t affect gorg in any way negative, at least as far as I can tell.
- Now you’ll need to make a monster of a checkout:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gentoo.org:/var/cvsroot co gentoo/xml/htdocs - When that’s done, either move the htdocs folder to the place indicated by root, or make a symlink. I opted for a symlink. This allows my gorg environment and my programming environment to remain at least organizationally (that’s a word!) separate.
- Run the following, replacing the “/User/jacob/Sites/gentoo” part with wherever you told root to point:
xmlcatalog --create /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/index.xml >> /etc/xml/catalog - You should be viewing Gentoo’s home page, albeit with images and other things missing. Congrats!
Now, to finish off the work on Gentoo Embedded’s documentation…
Cell-Phones: An Easy-to-Use Evil August 10, 2009
I read a blog post recently on Planet Larry, which describes only one facet of how cell-phones are disgusting. It reminded me that I’ll have to get one soon. All the same, it’s nice to see I’m not the only one who hates it.
It feels like the cell-phone world is moving at a snails pace. Sure, the iPhone stepped it up a notch. It introduced a certain amount of flexibility never before seen in cell-phones. However, the price for it is unbelievable, it’s still using the ancient idea of calling numbers, which are hardly memorable, it’s still locked down so that you can’t do anything creative with it, and the service itself won’t work with any device except the phones provided.
Why can’t cell-phone companies open their API’s so that more hardware can be produced which can log into and use the cell-phone system? Why can’t the cell-phone system either take on more features, or back off and start over with a better foundation for generic data (like mobile broadband already does) so that more information than just calls can be sent over the network? It seems like a no-brainer, and a way to make your network very, very popular.
I wonder if the iPhone is such a success because people feel the limitations of their phones. I think more can be done to break us free of a locked down system that is rigid and hardly feature-rich anymore. Unfortunately, people find it hard to get out of certain ruts when it comes to technology and move on to better systems. The current system is easy enough to use and can do just enough to stay useful. That’s going to make it hard to move on, and harder for companies to see the point.
When you Can’t Compile ‘Em, Virtualize ‘Em (in VirtualBox) August 10, 2009
That’s the approach I’m taking when it comes to Gentoo right now. September, my deadline for all computer projects, is my hard deadline, because that’s when college starts, and that’s when I expect my free time will be dramatically shortened, if not entirely consumed, as far as my computer projects are concerned. Because of that, I can’t waste a lot of time patching and hacking. If it doesn’t work in Gentoo Prefix like I want it to, I’ll throw it into VirtualBox’s copy of Gentoo and use the Shared Folders feature to keep data synced in and out of the virtual machine.
First off, don’t even think about doing this if you don’t have x86 virtualization extensions. You may survive the experience, but you won’t be able to stand it for much longer after. On my ol’ 1.8GHz Pentium 4, the speeds were always at least twice as slow. With my new Core 2 Duo processor with VT-x, the virtual machine can let the real processor take on most of the processing needs. If I had a “Core i7″ Intel processor, or something else with Nehalem, I would also have Nested Paging which can give as much as a 1/3 increase in speeds.
But never-mind, because VT-x gives me near-native performance, which is absolutely necessary for Gentoo. Another good thing to have is a bigger-than-8G hard-drive. (In other words, the default Linux size is not good enough.) I gave the machine 512M out of my 4G total, which is more than enough for a Linux desktop. I turned on 3D acceleration and gave it 64M of VRAM, because I want to try KDE4.3. Everything else are defaults, pretty much. (more…)
[Correcting] The Current State of Gentoo August 4, 2009
My last blog post was the first one I’ve really just started writing on a feeling, and expressed it in full. Unfortunately, what came off in the post was all negative, without much hope for resolution, or even without anything positive about the projects mentioned.
So, here is a continuation of the last blog post I’ve written, in which I go over again what was bad, but also what was good, and how the bad can be corrected. Probably what the first post should’ve been. (more…)
