Older blog entries for robertc (starting at number 37)

There seems to be a strong persistent meme that distributed VCS's - Bazaar/Cogito/Montone et al - make it easier for people to fork projects and not return changes. I.e. to have 'my libxml2'.

I think its important to note that people do this already, easily, by simply doing svn co svn://host/trunk. That is immediately a fork as soon as a change is made.

All a distributed VCS does is make it easier to return changes to the project.

Well, back at work aftersome much needed leave. Just before returning I attended the local Twisted Sprint, which was a great deal of fun. Amongst the things achieved are documentation improvements, a TDD variation of the finger example (which needs tidying up and human text to be put in the documentation), discussion of barriers to entry with Twisted, and last but not least, some refactoring of trial to fix a couple of annoying bugs, and prepare for making it not clash with unittest anymore.

Tip for folk that would like X to show fonts (i.e. the GDM log in screen) in the correct size: Teach X about the dpi setting!

Step 1: run xdpyinfo and look for the dimensions: line. There will be something like this:

dimensions: 1280x768 pixels (266x161 millimeters)

resolution: 122x121 dots per inch

Grab a ruler and measure the screen you have. If it matches the millimeters reported by X, then skip step 2.

Step 2: edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and locate your Monitor section:

Section "Monitor"

Identifier "Generic Monitor"

Option "DPMS"

DisplaySize 265 160

EndSection

Add in a DisplaySize like I have there. Now logout of your GUI and restart X - you can run /etc/init.d/{g,k}dm restart from the console, or do what I do - just hit ctrl-alt-bkspace so it restarts. Your login screen should change appearance slightly - either the fonts and regions will get bigger if your dpi was set too low, or vice verca.

Step 3: (For KDE users, someone please tell me what it should be, for GNOME read on)...

Run xdpyinfo again and find the Resolution: line. Ignore the fact that it may not be square, grab one of the two numbers ( I suggest the higher)..

Go to System, Preferences, Font, and select 'Details'. There is a Resolution field there. Put in the single number you chose. Changes should take effect immediately.

Applications that setting this right in that I know improve:

xpdf, gnome-* (panels are readable etc etc).

I spent an hour down at Dick Smith browsing laptops (the hoverbook screen is just about to break at the hinge.).

We also needed a new house phone - the old ones aerial is falling off (it is 6 years old :)). So Lynne pops up there after doing some browsing elsewhere and we find a neat digital phone with 200 hours standby. (Wow!). Buy that, leave, and get accosted at the exit by a staff member asking if 'may I inspect your bag'.

To which I give the simple answer - no.

Why the blog ? Well, theres no way I'm buying a multi-thousand dollar laptop from a store that doesn't trust me - and pays someone to stand outside the store and check everyone whos wearing a backpack. (Mine had my old laptop in it). If she had insisted (rather than asking) - I probably would have allowed her to check, as well as returned the new phone I had just purchased.

What is Australian culture coming to that this is considered 'normal' ? I don't recall seeing that at any store I've been to from the various Ubuntu conferences.

Shame Australia. shame.

classic tidbit of the day .... "In portuguese Fedora means Stink"

So newren blogged about baz not supporting -p last thursday.... we were kinda busy leading up to a release - but thanks to Aaron Bentley, we've now got -p support built into baz.

baz diff -p to your hearts content newren :)

As background, before we added this, diff output went into the archive as-is, so changing its format changed the archive format - potentially breaking third party tools, or even Baz itself. Now we internally differentiate and can do whacky parameters if we want to.

Dear evolution, you are on crack.

Time to 'filter new messages on my imap store': ~ 5 minutes.

Number of new messages? 6.

Ability to access already-cached-for-offline messages during this period? None.

Frustration because I can ssh home and cat /all/ the new messages, and determine they are spam, and their folders, in less time: Priceless.

Oh, and DNS is fine - a little slow (4 seconds to determine example.org), but working.

Cute hack of the day: checkout arch/bazaar projects via ls and cp.

You need fuse installed, bazaar, and pybaz.

for fuse, if you are using debian or ubuntu, install fuse-source, and this patch for recent kernels fuse.diff. You need to build the module for your current kernel. I did this by installing the kernel source, copying the config for it to .config, then running: "make-kpkg --revision 2.6.11-0.2 --append-to-version "-1-686" --rootcmd fakeroot modules_image". Hopefully fuse will be in stock kernels soon :).

For bazaar visit bazaar.canonical.com - binaries for debian/ubuntu & redhat.

For pybaz, see ddaa.net

bazaar-fuser itself it in arch at robert.collins@canonical.com--general/bazaar-fuser--0, robert.collins@canonical.com--general is at robert.collins@canonical.com--general.

Its at very early days now, just a couple of hours fooling around, but you can checkout any branch your usercode knows about by mounting in (say) ~/arch/ then doing 'ls ~/arch/archives/archivename/branchname/latest/'

Cute eh :)

Had a great Sunday, it was a friends birthday earlier in the week, so a few of us got together (10) and had beer, yum cha, then more beer.

One of the funniest things was running into a guy who is basically a down-under clone of Daniel Silverstone - same sense of humour, similar turn of phrase, etc.

IRC and utf-8 with irssi screen and xterm.

Its doable - heres a checklist.

first of all ensure you have a utf-8 locale: $LANG should be something like en_AU.UTF-8 (on debian or derived systems you can do this with dpkg-reconfigure locales). This should be done on every system involved. I.e. if you run screen, then ssh to another system, then screen, then irssi, you'll need to do this twice. You'll also need to login again to have LANG set by the system - you can just export it if you like.

now run uxterm, not xterm to start your terminal. (If you use a more primitive terminal, you may need to use a gui menu, or some other means to get it going)

Thats the terminal. Now, for screen (repeat for however many screens are in your chain) - in your ~/.screenrc (if you don't have one, copy /etc/screenrc) put

defutf8 on

Ctrl-A : defutf8 on

Ctrl-A : utf8 on on

Ok, now for irssi. Just run it and it should work. If it doesn't, check /set term_type - that should be utf8 (or at least, thats what mine is and it works :).

Thanks to the patience of #debian-devel, who suffered many repeated ‽ to get this going..