digitalself

With the new decade upon us, it’s time for new year resolutions, and more importantly, a renewed call to action. With no posts in 2009, the crisis year, it was a dark time for my digital content output. But, after losing the fight against webdesign, I took the high road in the new year, and landed on a new theme called sevenfive, from press75. The old one never felt quite right, and actually prevented me from posting by feeding my procrastination critter.

Chroots is a collection of bash scripts to create, maintain, manage and use several chroot environments on debian based systems. It sports such features as privilege drop, multiple chroot maintenance and caching.

This is the first public release, under GPLv3. The software is now in a state where I can use it every day to maintain chroots. To download the source code, use the link below. There is also a git repository available for cloning. Chroots is developed under Ubuntu, and can build debian and Ubuntu chroots through deboostrap.

I was a part of GLUA, my university’s Linux User Group, for many years. But, I must confess that I’ve never been this excited about an event organised by the group like I am for this one. Not even when I was organising them. GLUA Tech Sessions promises to be entertaining, enjoyable and educative, covering topics which are dear to me. So here is the plug, if you are around Aveiro, Portugal next weekend, drop by:

I haven’t blogged for a while now, guess I need a new redesigned template, which seems to boost my blogging ability. But here is a simple and short guide to build ffmpeg with the appropriate codecs to encode stuff for the PSP or iPod. These codecs aren’t enabled by default to legal (patent) issues.

You should have the medibuntu repository enabled for this to work.

Get some tools to build tje package along with the ffmpeg source in Ubuntu Intrepid. Then get the appropriate packages to build ffmpeg, and satisfy the evil codec dependencies:

apt-get install dpkg-dev devscripts
apt-get source ffmpeg
apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
apt-get install libmp3lame-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev libx264-dev

To finished up, go into the sources directory, build the package with the external codecs and install everything after it finishes building the debian package. Note that the first command is optional, and is just to bump the package version so that is “newer” that the original repositories:

dch -i
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=externalcodecs dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc

dpkg -i *.deb

And that is it. Look for scripts that use ffmpeg to encode stuff for the PSP or iPod. There are plenty around. I’ll post my favourite at a later time.

I have never understood what l10n stands for, nor i18n, nor m4 for that matter. But reading a good online book about autotools, there are a couple of words explaining that in fact m4 stands for Macro, which is m+4 chars. l10n is localization written as  “l+strlen(ocalizatio)+n”. Fun. Since I was on vacations while I read this, I had time to write a bash script to do this automatically while enhancing my bash skills. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

STRING=$1
STRLEN=${#STRING}

A=${STRING:1:$STRLEN-2}
echo ${STRING:0:1}${#A}${STRING:$STRLEN-1:$STRLEN-1}

Try running internationalization on it.

As I (re)evaluate my GTD workflow, I’ve been testing a couple of applications that may help me increase my productivity while becoming a distraction or burden to manage. The next one on my list is Tracks. I decided to put forward a quick howto because it might not be that trivial for some users to git this running with Ruby on Rails.

So tracks going on your Ubunty Hardy you just need to install a few packages, most importantly ruby, ruby gems and sqlite 3 support. Then you just need to enable the sqlite3 gem for Ruby on Rails. Copy paste commands below:

sudo apt-get install rake rubygems libsqlite3-ruby
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then just follow the instructions on the tracks website. But, if your are lazy as me you can just copy paste the information below, which is a nice quick cheat sheet:

Get tracks, unzip into a folder. Go into that folder and edit the configuration file, making it look like the example shown here for sqlite3:

gedit config/database.yml

development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-dev.db

test:
adapter: sqlite3
database: ":memory:"

production:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-main.db

Change a variable in config/environment.rb by putting whatever in it:

gedit config/environment.rb

SALT = "MakeThisYourRandomPhraseToGenerateSalt"

Build it:

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Run it:

./script/server -e production

And that’s it, you should just be able to point your browser at http://localhost:3000 and give it a try. I personally don’t think that Tracks is my cup of tee, but it’s worth a shot.

One a side note, this is probably my last post before my summer break, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I hope.

Read the title. Test posts are always welcome. Nothing else to see, move along.

After reading this entry on planet gnome, I thought to myself: “Another try at fail”. I like dark themes. Dark themes are soothing on the eyes, and at least for me, tend to make a much better work environment because they annoy less. Hey, my blog theme is dark, I like it.

After using apt-get to install the ubuntustudio-theme package, I was amazed at the first theme that bring dark windows with light background not compromising usability for a dark theme. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a screenshot:

So far, every dark theme I encounter before is a try at fail mostly because they are not usable. Attention is brought to lines, row or text, like Gtk TreeViews in evolution by using a bold font on a dark background, or a little icon that glows just a little bit more than the rest. This is hardly usable, since you fail to get the visual hints needed to quickly parse through an inbox for example. The same goes for the desktop calendar. Try a dark theme and find your events on it and let me know.

This one doesn’t fail like the rest. I’m not saying it’s a perfect theme, I’m not sure about the window borders (too thick), or about the icons, or even the bright blue highlight colors (but it’s customizable). I’m gonna stick with it, play with it some more, and be happy for a while.

You know your life has taken a wrong turn when you spend more than 15 minutes listening to white noise.

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu hardy, I’ve been trying to give Firefox 3 a fighting chance, mostly because of all the hype around it, along with a couple of bumps with Epiphany.

With Epiphany using the gecko backend, it was hard adding exceptions for every website using self-signed certificates, or broken certificates, including my own, due to the interaction which was covered in Firefox but no in Epiphany. I even started my own Certificate Authority (it’s just a bash script). All of this made me give Firefox a try for a while..

But, after a while, I have come to dislike all the things that made switch to Epiphany in the first place. It’s slugish, it eats all my memory, and makes me squirm in pain…

On the other hand, Epiphany feels lightning fast, snappy and doesn’t eat all my RAM. Meanwhile, with the updates in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 adding SSL exceptions is not a broken process that equals fail. It shouldn’t be easy though, but it should be doable.

Does anyone have any hard facts if the page rendering is faster on Epiphany than on Firefox ? Or is that just a “feeling” people get ?

I can only wait to check out Epiphany with webkit! In the meantime, I’ll take it as it is, and make it my default once again.