Cyclopedia Square

No, I'm not talking about web traffic. It's real automobile traffic. Google maps now shows traffic conditions , and sure enough, eastbound Highway 26 is slow (and I dare you to find a time when it's not!).

I discovered Steve Yegge's long essays and blog posts a while ago. I think it was his Effective Emacs post that I first came across actually, but he's written a whole bunch of interesting geeky stuff. So interesting that I find myself telling my wife about it. So interesting that, even through my pathetic retelling, it actually interests my wife (a little), who isn't even a computery geeky person. I wish I wrote stuff half that interesting. Go check his blog out, because it's just so interesting. Have I mentioned it's interesting? So anyway, I was inspired to write, and publicly thank him for his recent little emacs tutorial . Very educational and entertaining. What more could you want? It just so happens that I'm in the middle of a repetitive editing task, using emacs, of course, and I took a break for lunch and read this tutorial and was inspired to write some interactive lisp functions to make it easier. It took about 30 seconds (after, I don'...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/21/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. Because I've been too cheap to pay for a real domain name, or a static IP address, I've been using the wonderful free services of DynDNS.org to bring you this family website. I use ddclient to keep DynDNS updated, but somehow I messed it up last night when configuring it for Ubuntu, and the family website has been unavailable all day. I know, your world had ended without it. I'm sorry! I've learned something from this though, and here are my new ddclient tips. If your webserver is behind a router, like mine, then you need to have ddclient visit a webpage to get the router's IP address. To make ddclient do this, it's configuration file needs to have this line in it: use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.org/, web-skip='IP Address' My mistake was that I also had the normal 'use' line in the config file, after that one: use=if, if=...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/20/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. In a previous entry I explained how I set up subversion on my linux box . At the end I left a reminder to myself to write down how to set up network access to the repositories before I forgot. Well, I forgot, and now that I'm migrating everything over to Ubuntu 5.10, it's time to re-learn. Here's my notes on how to do it. I will again be using the subversion book . Specifically chapter 6 . I also got help this time around from a blog entry about setting up subversion with apache on Ubuntu . Alright, under Prerequisites in the svn book it lists what you need to install. These are all easily obtainable through apt (since I'm on Ubuntu): aptitude install libapache2-svn (I already had apache2 and subversion installed. I'm assuming the above would have grabbed those too though, if they weren't already installed, because apt is cool like tha...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/17/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. The promise of easy OS upgrades with Ubuntu has lured me to make the switch. It was a pain to upgrade Mandrake versions last time I did it. People always talk about how easy it is with Debian/Ubuntu. I've been pretty impressed with the online help for Ubuntu too, way better than I've seen for any other Linux distribution. So I'm making the painful switch. If you see the website not working, you now know why. I've realized, more than halfway through this, that it was much easier to upgrade from one version of Mandriva to the next than it is to go from Mandriva to Ubuntu. Package names and configuration file locations and defaults are all just different enough to make it a very manual process. How sweet it will be go upgrade from Ubuntu Breezy Badger to Ubuntu Dapper Drake with a few apt commands (and it better work!!!!)! Here's a few web p...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/10/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. Not willing to wait any longer (two whole days already!?!) for a fixed mondo rpm, I tried to compile it myself. No luck, make complained about no target for the man pages or something. So in the meantime, I'm looking at good ol' dump . It looks kind of handy, and I think I could get it to almost do what mondo promises with a little scripting. It wants to backup whole filesystems. It will do a sub-directory, but if you do that it won't do differentials. You can have it exclude files and directories, but you have to supply it the inode numbers of what you want it to exclude. Apparently a simple file or directory name isn't good enough for dump, you have to use stat yourself. Also, it won't split the backup file up like mondo, unless it runs out of tape. That means that if you are backing up to CDs, you'd have to manually use split and ...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/8/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I finally got to where I'm confident mondo is going to work for my backup needs, and I got the command-line that I want all figured out to backup just the stuff I need. Here it is, for posterity's sake: mondoarchive -O -i -I "/home /etc" -d '/mnt/home/backup2' -E '/home/pub /home/bryan/.mozilla/firefox/6ytxpczd.default/Cache /home/bryan/backgrounds /home/bryan/downloads /home/bryan/glazba /home/bryan/roms /home/bryan/src /home/bryan/tmp /home/bryan/video /home/bryan/vmware/Browser-Appliance /home/bryan/vmware/test' -g -s '700m' The '-I' option I'm using is straight from the mondoarchive man page. However, mondo gives this error message when I try the above: Fatal error... ERROR ! You specified a directory to include which doesn't exist ---FATALERROR--- ERROR ! You specified a directory to include which does...

I discovered two missing features from blogger today. Things that shouldn't be that hard for them to do. First, if you put a future date on a post, it still shows up on your blog as soon as you click "PUBLISH," not in the future. Lame. Second, when you click "PUBLISH" it creates a permalink for the post out of the title you've entered. That's nice, except that if you realize you made a mistake and change the title, the permalink can't be changed to match. You would have to delete the post entirely and re-create it. Lame. My simple family blog that I wrote in Django made it simple to do these things with the automatic admin interface. I was hoping blogger would be a step up, and it is in a lot of ways, but I miss those features.

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/7/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I broke out the mondo man page. To verify my little backup, and see what has changed since I made it, I ran this: mondoarchive -V -i -I "/home/bryan/Documents" -d '/mnt/home/backup3' -g -s '700m' I had made a little change in a text file, and it flagged it and told me. I just noticed that it says the -I switch is ignored if you are just verifying. Oh well. Now, to do the actual differential backup I ran this command: mondoarchive -O -i -D -I "/home/bryan/Documents" -d '/mnt/home/backup3' -g -s '700m' For backing up one little text file it still took a while because it seemed to re-generate the boot disk. I think I saw an option in the manual to not do that, but it was highly recommended that you don't use that option. Anyway, looking at the backup directory, it seems to have overwritten the full backup iso ...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/6/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I tried backing up just the Documents directory in my home directory with mondo. It went much much faster, of course, but at the end it wouldn't restore. Weird. So I tried again and used less compression this time. It gave a strange error message at the end: Boot+data floppy creation failed. However, FYI, you may burn /root/images/mindi/mondorescue.iso to a CD and boot from that instead if you wish. But the restore still worked fine. I think I got the same error the first time too. The differences the second time were, I used the default iso file name of mondorescue, and I used minimum compression. Why didn't the boot disk creation work? Maybe it couldn't make the boot disk because I didn't back up anything under /. Who knows. I guess if I stick with mondo I'll have to double check each backup and make sure it works. I just ran the exact ...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/5/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I'm playing with Mondo Rescue for backing up my hard drive. Here are some quick notes of the experience so far. I ran a basic mondoarchive "gui" session, and accepted all defaults, except that I excluded /mnt from the backup. It asked for a max iso size, I didn't ever plan to burn these to anything, but I put in 700 MB because I didn't know what else to do. I backed up to hard drive (the unused hd on my system). It spent about 13 hours working, created 50 isos and then quit. I didn't see it quit, and from the log it looks like it gave up with the message "too many isos." No kidding. Now I'm attempting to restore a single file. I typed mondorestore. The "gui" started up and told me to insert the boot disk. I just hit enter and it went to a menu asking what to restore from. I chose harddrive. It asked for the...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/29/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. In my newest Ubuntu install, alt-b no longer moves the cursor back a word. It opens a menu. That's really obnoxious. Fortunately you can fix it: Note: To use the Alt-F and Alt-B shortcuts in GNOME terminal, you need to disable its keyboardshortcuts. To disable them, select Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts... from the menu and check both disable boxes.[ source ] Ahh. Much better.

This was originally posted on my family blog on 12/18/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. If you use emacs on windows you have seen how nice it can look, especially if you used the cool windows emacs installer (go with the patched version). Today the emacs wiki lead me down the path of nice looking fonts on Linux. I added these lines to my /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://debs.peadrop.com edgy backports deb-src http://debs.peadrop.com edgy backports Then I imported the gpg key: wget http://debs.peadrop.com/DD385D79.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - And then installed emacs-snapshot-gtk 1 : sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot-gtk Then I changed my default-font, like so: (set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-12") And now I start emacs like so: emacs-snapshot-gtk --enable-font-backend Wow, it looks really good. This gets you a pretty recent build from the emacs cvs repository, so there are some bugs. I’ve seen ediff r...

I just noticed this on the emacs wiki : the URL package . If you are using emacs from cvs you can M-x load-library RET url , and then open a url just like you would any file, c-x c-f http://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com , and get a buffer full of html. How cool is that?

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/13/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. More on making my windoze box work like my linux box. Focus follows mouse, copy to clipboard by only highlighting, pasting with the middle button, and sinking windows to the bottom of the pile with a right-click, all with the True X-Mouse Gizmo . It's very nice. The only downside is that if you want to change the default settings it takes a registry hack. Since my new standard issue work laptop doesn't have a middle mouse button I'll need to do this. Dang, if all these tweaks work well enough maybe I won't have enough motivation to install linux on this thing...nah, I'm sure I still will!

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/13/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I love multiple virtual desktops. I have to work on windoze sometimes at work, which doesn't have virtual desktops, but I found Virtual Dimension , and it rocks!

This was originally posted on my family blog on 3/11/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. If you've tried to access the website in the past few days you haven't been able to. I'm sorry. This will be way too much information for many of you, but so I don't forget I'll write down just what happened and how I fixed it. For the less interested, just know that I'm on top of it, and that the system is back up. Yay! Here is the sequence of events that lead to this, as far as I can re-create them. First, I don't remember how long ago, but I installed Mandriva Linux on this machine. I probably had it automatically partition the hard drive, probably for a desktop setup. This created a root partition and a /home partition. It made the root partition about 6 GB, and all the rest of the hard drive went for /home. I put a second network card in the machine and set it up as a router for my home network. I configured samba to serve ...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 2/6/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I really like having the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys swapped on my keyboard. It makes using emacs just that much better. In the past, on my Linux boxes, I've had to write a little xmodmap script to do it. I just learned that Gnome now has an option to do this in the Keyboard Preferences dialog under Layout Options, Control Key Position. Sweet. And who says Gnome isn't for power users? For windoze I usually find a regedit script with google, such as this one .

This was originally posted on my family blog on 2/2/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. No, I'm not talking about how to overthrow the government. This is how I set up subversion repositories on my Linux box. I got most of this form the subversion book . I'll try to link to the specific parts of the book where each part came from. First, create the repository using fsfs for the database, because I heard it's way cooler than Berkeley db. Seriously (no really, I wish I had a better reason, I read something that I found on Google somewhere that it was). svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos/project Next, set up the project directory tree to be imported. I'm using what seems to be the standard setup with trunk, branches, and tags sub-directories, as somewhat explained in the section on using branches in the svn book. mkdir project mkdir project/tags project/branches project/trunk cp -r /path/to/work/in/progress/* project/t...

I've created this blog as a place to post my learnings and discoveries of all things technical (AKA, geeky). I did this so family and friends reading my other website could enjoy the family news and pictures of their grandsons/nephews without having to endure my latest Emacs epiphanies, Python ponderings, or Ubuntu undulations. Just to make things clear, if you read this blog you will see acronyms, configuration files, and even source code. I must warn you of this ahead of time lest I be accused of technical harassment . Viewer discretion is advised. You have been warned.