Vim Run Shell Command

Here is a nice simple vimrc file addition that will execute a line as a shell command and read back the output into the buffer: nnoremap <Leader>rl yy:r!<C-r>"<CR>

Fossil Command Line Tips

For small projects, Fossil is a great choice for revision control. Fossil’s command line interface is very easy to use and plays nice with utilities like grep, gawk and xargs. The following are examples of common operations:

• Check in only edited files: fossil changes | grep EDITED | gawk '{print $2}' | xargs fossil commit -m "Added feature X."
• Add only files with name containing "pattern" to repo: fossil extras | grep pattern | xargs fossil add
• Move files in repo to match move on filesystem: fossil changes | grep MISSING | gawk '{print "fossil mv " $2 " subdir/" $2}' | sh

New GoogleCL Blog Process

First post using a new blog process! All new posts will be written using Asciidoc text files. Each file is then converted to HTML and uploaded to the blog via GoogleCL. The whole process is automated using Python.

I’m hoping this new workflow will make writing new posts more efficient in turn leading to more frequent updates.

PyPy Intro

David Beazley gave an excellent introductory talk about PyPy at PyCon this year. I knew very little about PyPy going in and David really helped clarify the goals and approach of this ambitious project.

There are several other PyCon talks that discuss this project in more detail:

• Why PyPy by example
• How the PyPy JIT works
• How to get the most out of your PyPy

Also, check out the full list of videos from PyCon 2012 for other great talks.

Tweaking Gnome Panel

My HTPC is a Linux box running Ubuntu 10.04 and I love it. To give it a more couch-friendly interface, it's now running Avant Window Navigator. I wanted to keep the top Gnome Panel available but hidden with a 1 second unhide time. To tweak these settings, do the following:

1. Open gconf-editor.


2. Navigate to /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0.


3. Enable auto_hide.


4. Set unhide_delay to 1000.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a great site that hosts a large amount of educational lectures. I recently watched the series on building dynamic websites and I highly recommend it for anyone new to the subject. Currently, I am watching a physics series on vibrations and waves that is pretty interesting.

Fixing Remote Desktop with Compiz

I have a HTPC box running Ubuntu 10.04 which works great except for an annoying bug when using remote desktop alongside Compiz. If Visual Effects are set anything other than None in System->Preferences->Appearance the remote desktop session will never refresh (typically I am using TightVNC on Windows 7). The kicker is that when visual effects are set to None, some video sites (IGN Video for example) will cause strange behavior when fullscreened.

However, this website provides a great solution to the problem. With Compiz Visual Effects enabled, do the following:

1. Open a terminal o press ALT+F2, then run/type: gconf-editor


2. Go to /desktop/gnome/remote_access and enable "disable_xdamage"

Results should take effect immediately.