(By the way: Linode, my VPS host, seems to be awesome.)

My chat client Irssi combined with OpenSSH, GNU Screen and Bitlbee provides me with hugely powerful social infrastructure in the form of continuous conversations that can be reached with any SSH client. Add logging and basic Unix tools to the mix and you have a silly fast and simple way of finding stuff you’ve discussed. In other words: my IRC/Live/Jabber logs are important works of reference and must be kept up to date with the system locale.

I failed to find any directly suitable or functional shell one-liners for this operation, until Thomas handed me something that worked for me.

The conversion command later on this page converts all files in Irssi’s default log location, ~/irclogs, and its subdirectories from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8.  The conversion is performed on the files themselves using recode in their current location. Don’t run with scissors, please do yourself a favor by making a backup copy of your precious logs. The most obvious tool for that is perhaps:

"cp -r ~/irclogs ~/backup_irclogs"

This is Thomas‘ conversion command:

"find ~/irclogs/* | while read i; do echo "Converting $i"; recode ISO-8859-15..UTF-8 "$i"; done"

Stig later informed me about find having exec capablities, but since I’m lazy and all that, you’ll have to optimze the above version yourself.

This probably means that HP does a lot of business with Linux, and that there really is a real demand for a GPL’d modern file system with features comparable to those of ZFS.

I like writing longer texts, but length leads to a number of problems. Most importantly: the editing process of making a long text readable is a timesink in itself. To make things more difficult, I’m usually blogging in a language I don’t speak natively, which makes it hard to live up to the ideal of posting nothing but well structured divine words of wisdom, unless I choose to give writing indecent amounts of time I’d rather spend procrastinating in a different fashion. Also: no one reads long texts on the web, at least I know I hardly do so.

In other words, by writing only longer texts, fewer individual works get written and I’m giving any readers I might have less useful information. Choosing to focus on longer texts of a certain level of depth causes the the exclusion of stuff that really should be posted somewhere.

I think I’ve now solved this dilemma. No, I didn’t discover Delicious/SU or the for ‘merican Internet celebrity and presidential candidate types so popular combination of Twitter and Tinyurl – the whole point here is to be self hosted, and besides I already use IRC and Facebook for real world contacts.

What I did do was to open a WP site at omglog.com. Beginning with the Prologue based design, it feels like a combination of a microblog and a tumblelog. Keeping omglog.com within the bounds of being a simple diary of notable links is a high priority, as I believe that all the five to eight people who read my posts regularly don’t need another source of lengthy rants written in dysfunctional English.

Hoping to activate a few potential contributors, I chose to include the author’s name in the “permalink structure”, the way URLs look on the blog. To illustrate this: my entries can be reached at omglog.com/thomas. All authors obviously have individual feeds with their own posts; my first use for this was to automatically import my posts as “notes” on Facebook and similar places.

I invite all readers of this to subsribe to the main omglog feed. Anyone I know is also welcome to join omglog.com as a contributor, consider contacting me if you need a place for storing interesting links in mainly English, Finnish and Scandinavian languages. The goal is to be very free-form, all contributors are asked to kindly define “interesting” by themselves, I’m already busy being interested on my own.

If you don’t want to post yourself, feel free to send me links (hello [at] omglog [dot] com).

Does this imply that the Jesus of file systems for serious storage needs may be ported to a near future version of the Linux kernel, despite the current licensing issues?

(image borrowed from some Apple dude)

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix.

I fixed this by changing opening Settings - Configure Amarok - Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other engine is installed by default these days) output plugin from “default” to “alsa“. The problem is probably related to PulseAudio, a new sound server used by default in many recent GNU/Linux distributions.

In this particular setup, the printer is shared from its USB port using one of those utterly disgusting Apple Airport Extremes that don’t even have an http user interface for configuration. Don’t buy Apple’s networking equipment! The hardware may be of good quality and well designed but the devices are, thanks to their software, obfuscated and very limited in terms of functionality. Why do people even buy routers that require special software for both the initial setup and any later configuration changes? There certainly are cheaper an more functional printer and file servers for home networks.

I configured the E232 as an HP Jetdirect device (port 9100 on the IP address used by the Crapple Airport Extreme and printer sharing). Printing works fine using these settings.

[via:Linux Forums]

After upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) I noticed that Amarok (Ubuntu package version 1.4.9.1-0ubuntu3), one of my preferred audio players/music libraries, didn’t properly submit tracks to last.fm. All settings were OK, and Amarok even announced that it submitted the tracks, but nothing appeared on my profile.

Google revealed that this problem can be solved by entering a last.fm user name in ALL CAPS in Amarok’s settings window. The same solution can be applied to solve the same no-scrobbling problem as it may appear while using Rhytmbox, another free software audio player.

Something probably related to this surfaced when I upgraded to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). A program I use a lot, gnome-terminal, no longer has its own setting for disabling cursor blinks under Edit -> Current Profile. Users who want to get rid of this obnoxious response to “no keyboard input” now need to alter the system wide “Cursor blinks in text fields” option under the “System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> General” menu.

What if I only want to disable cursor blinks in gnome-terminal? In some situations in our world that forces black text on white backgrounds upon us, it’s hard to spot a static, one pixel wide cursor, but in a white or gray on black terminal with a fixed width font and a wide cursor, this problem doesn’t exist. By the way, why anyone would agree to use a terminal with black text on a white background is beyond me.

The crippled cursor problem isn’t limited to the gnome-terminal version 2.22.1 binary bundled with Ubuntu 8.04, it’s in the upstream version too. Luckily there’s at least one patch that removes this restriction. I’m sure I won’t take the time to roll my own patched gnome-terminal, but it’s good to know that I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by shit like this.

EDIT: I later realized that a patched binary has been made available by JLTC.

Settings for how the desktop environment should handle removable media are important for me as I loathe the idea of having to deal with any autorun/auto play or popup nonsense every time i attach removable storage devices.
Settings for this have been available under the System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media menu item in earlier versions of Ubuntu/Gnome.

Previously, said window looked approximately like this:

(image borrowed from The Sysad Linux Blog)

In Ubuntu 8.04/Hardy Heron’s Gnome 2.22.1, things look different:

.

Note the lack of reference to anything related to actual removable storage media (CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-ray, flash drives, USB hard drives…). Having settings only for scanners, cameras and such under a “removable media” window looks like a mistake in UI design to me… I haven’t checked if this is Ubuntu specific or something relevant to the vanilla Gnome release as well.

I found a way to stop the dreadful autorun/popup flood posted by user noynac in the Ubuntu forums:

“Load Nautilus and enter edit -> preferences -> media“

For some time, I’ve used Dimitar Zhekov’s clean, fixed-width font Terminus for terminal-heavy situations in both GNU/Linux and Windows. I’m clueless in the area of typography, but Terminus looks oddly appealing when looking at e.g. code (which I don’t write myself), configuration and log files. I keep backup copies of a TTF version of Terminus in my public file archive.

A few days ago, I discovered Consolas, a somewhat recent addition to Microsoft’s free TTF font collection (available for download on microsoft.com, no special MS software like Visual Studio is required), and I’m probably going to use it for some console based tasks, at least on Windows machines. Please note that Consolas is designed to be used with ClearType, a font anti-aliasing technology found in Windows XP and later. Without ClearType, Consolas isn’t worth looking at.

What I’ve found comparing the aforementioned fonts so far, is that while I like looking at Consolas in my IRC client, I still prefer the more blockish Terminus for staring at and scanning through code and logs. Consolas makes text in human languages, including busy IRC debates, readable at smaller sizes, but is in my opinion suboptimal for navigating through and quickly locating parts of structured text blocks.

EDIT: I’ve later found the following comparisons of fixed-width programming fonts: CodeProject, Stack Overflow.