The joy of colors

November 9, 2008 - 1 min read

Ever so often, as I have mentioned before, I lose myself in trying to find new ways of working and doing my daily tasks. One such digression is the topic of editors. I mainly use GNU Emacs for development and other major tasks, for everything else I use Vim. Vim is quick to start, capable, good looking and easy to use, contrary to other vi implementations. (Most notably nvi, which I hate with a passion!

Minix editline v0.2.2

November 8, 2008 - 1 min read

Oups, it seems I forgot to announce the v0.2.2 release of the Minix editline library! It was made official in Bazaar over a month ago, 2008-10-02, but it was not until today that the tarball was created and uploaded to the FTP. The most noteworthy in this release is support for command completion with the addition of rl_complete() and rl_list_possib(). Two function pointers that easily can be overloaded by the user.

Ubuntu 8.10rc1 — NetworkManager WTF?!

October 27, 2008 - 1 min read

I tried upgrading from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex this weekend. Big mistake. If I disregard the total dpkg meltdown that I, as usually, had to resolve manually there still remains this recurring madness called Network Manager. I’m an engineer. I have a masters degree in computer engineering. I have worked professionally with GNU/Linux since 2000 and been a die hard user of it since I left OS/2 behind in 1996.

Cross Compiler Foo

August 20, 2008 - 2 mins read

There is a certain magic surrounding cross compilers and the people that know how to build one. Not unlike that of (Linux/BSD) kernel developers. At work we today support two embedded Linux targets, both are ARM based, and in neither of the two have we built the cross compiler ourselves. The first was ye’ old 2.95 based from uClinux.org and the second we had a consultant build for us. Lame!

Moving to ISC

July 30, 2008 - 1 min read

I hereby announce that all of the code I produce from now on will use the ISC license. Previously I’ve used the MIT license and the GNU GPL, or LGPL where applicable. The reason for changing this is two-fold. First, I like to be able to reuse much of what I do in proprietary settings. Yes, I’m one of those people who look upon the world with “grey” eyes rather than black & white.

Link Collection w31 2008

July 30, 2008 - 2 mins read

George Dyson, son of legendary Freeman Dyson, talks about the first computer, the first software bugs (both physical and logical) and the initial struggles of hackers. Fun history lesson for computer engineers and programmers alike. (Now, go crawl the web for “Dyson Sphere” and “Star Trek”! :-) Is Ubuntu 8.04 really that buggy as everyone suggest? My guess is that we’ve reached a breaking point where beginner users (< 1 year) are starting to outnumber the older “hard core” users.

HowTo: Build GNU Emacs from CVS

July 28, 2008 - 1 min read

Why would you want to do this? Well, considering all the neat new things that have been added lately it should be tempting for any old Emacs fan. The Emacs Wiki has all the info you need, but here is a quick run-down of the bare necessities. Start by checking out your working copy: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co emacs cd emacs/ ./configure make bootstrap Start with ./src/emacs or symlink the binary to your ~/bin/ directory.

More Emacs Progress!

July 22, 2008 - 1 min read

Wow, I’m almost starting to feel like a Windows user. The latest CVS builds of GNU Emacs has a lot of new features: XFT Support (font anti-aliasing) Better GTK integration (desktop) A font selector! I use the CVS version now as my daily driver in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s really useful, and I love the improved support for debugging programs inside Emacs! I think it is quite impressive how far this little editor has come.

No Wireless LED on ThinkPad T61

July 19, 2008 - 1 min read

ThinkPad
T61

I’ve got a ThinkPad T61 with Intel iwl3945 wireless chipset that I installed fresh with Ubuntu 8.04. Everything worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, except for the useless fingerprint scanner and the wireless LED. Don’t get me wrong, the wireless network worked fine, but the LED wasn’t on. At first I thought there was something wrong with the LED itself, but a couple of searches later I found that it was a known limitation of the 2.

Suddenly Compiz is not Working Anymore ...

July 17, 2008 - 1 min read

So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it! Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn’t start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this: