http://www.omnigia.com/news Scheme, web applications, tech Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:00:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My MSI Wind U100 has finally arrived (a few days after Christmas when I was expecting it, but still in 2008 luckily) and it has been exhibiting several strange Windows crashes. Since the U100 version I ordered comes with a "bonus" 1024M of RAM, which (by my understanding) are not ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2009/01/01/memtest86-usb-stick-freedos/ Updates: per readers' request, I have added Hardy backports to all packages mentioned in this article (except Pulseaudio where the appropriate section isn't clear) in my PPA. I have also added newer ALSA packages. Many Ubuntu users have chosen to stick out with Hardy, the Long Term Support (LTS) release, supported ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/12/21/update-hardy-audio-music-tools/ If you ever need to interrupt (and then resume) a slow cp operation (e.g. from a USB stick or over NFS), you will appreciate cURL’s support for the file:// scheme: curl -C - -O file:///media/memstick/file.avi will resume the copy (and display a nice progress report as well). Here are some alternatives that don't ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/10/16/resume-interrupted-cp-using-curl/ As a laptop user, I often find myself switching between LCD-only, external-monitor-only, and dual-screen setups. Read below for a summary of how to achieve this flexibility under X (more specifically Xorg), both statically (via multiple configuaration files, requiring X restarts) and dynamically (while X is running) — but also some ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/09/30/x-laptop-external-monitor/ Today I uploaded Ubuntu source and binary (Gutsy and Hardy) packages for Zorba, the new C++ streaming XQuery processor. The Ubuntu PPA system (Personal Package Archives) is a great service; without it, you'd need to host an APT repository in order to conveniently distribute packages that are not (yet) part ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/05/19/debian-ubuntu-packaging-zorba/ I've been doing quite a bit of C++ programming (and, alas, debugging) for a project lately. One endless source of annoyance in C++ (at least in Linux) is the impedance mismatch between the compiler (gcc) and the debugger (gdb). C++ is notoriously hard to compile (and even just parse). gdb ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/04/30/gdb-examining-complex-c-objects/ While everyone is familiar with bash's TAB completion for paths and filenames, fewer people know that since bash 2.04, TAB can complete arguments in many more contexts thanks to a feature called programmable bash completion. The default completions handle mount, cvs, ant, ssh and many others; it's also possible to ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/02/19/ssh-bash-completion-fix/ I have recently had the chance to play again with the 3 BSD's, under the excuse of testing the portability of a piece of software. I was able to install all of them in separate virtual machines under VMWare Server. I'm summarizing my impressions below. Chiefly, I was surprised at ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/01/30/3-bsd-vmware-install-impressions/ If you search for xpath and mozilla, you will find a lot of pages telling you how to do a single query (I personally learned from Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive into Greasemonkey). What you will not find, though, is how to further refine the xpath results by chaining a second ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/11/30/chained-xpath-browser-query/ After setting up Bluetooth on my phone and laptop, I was faced with another problem: the phone saves images using filenames of the form ImageXXX.jpg — which is OK the first time, but tends to conflict with older files later on as the "XXX" counter restarts from 0. One may ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/10/28/mass-generating-random-file-names/