Present Perfect

LUG Radio Live

After repeated harassing by Jono to "blog about it" (1), I'm taking this precious piece of your real estate to flood your retina with shameless self-promotion.

Yes, that's right. Come this Saturday, I will be talking about Flumotion at LUGRadio Live 2007.

It will be extra-special for me because it happens to be on my 31st birthday! Things you can do to make this particular event more memorable for me:

• Promptu break out in an inpromptu "Happy Birthday"/"Cumpleaños Feliz" rendition (bonus points for glockenspiel or harp)
• Show up with a present (Suggestions on US or UK Amazon wishlist (2))
• Refrain for a day in calling me "Schnitzel" in any kind of variation (3)

Monday morning I will get up insanely early and take the plane to ...

Europython

This year's Europython conference is held in Vilnius, Lithuania (4). Again, I will be talking about Flumotion - but probably more from a developer's point of view. I'll also take the opportunity to do some recruiting - if you happen to be there and would be interested in working for Fluendo or Flumotion, do let me know.

On Thursday, I will fly back to Brussels. I will spend some time in the arm of my girl, go to Rock Herk (Archie Bronson Outfit AND The National FOR FREE !), and go to de Gentse Feesten (10 days of crazy partying all over my home town). After that, flying off to

GUADEC

The yearly mothership. This year I decided I wanted to do a new kind of talk, so GUADEC will see a 0.1 version of that - a talk on Practical Project Maintenance. It is still under construction, feel free to drop me some suggestions if you want me to address particular issues.

If you want to meet up at any of these events, file a ticket.

(1) He sent one mail and that's it.

(2) The folks back home are as always also eligible for this one-time-only exclusive offer

(3) That's you, Jono Bacon. A man called Bacon has no right to call someone else Schnitzel.

(4) Holy crap I've never been this close to Russia.

LUG Radio Live After repeated harassing by Jono to "blog about it" (1), I'm taking this precious piece of your real estate to flood your retina with shameless self-promotion. Yes,...

Now that we have one web developer on Linux and one on Windows, I get to experience first-hand the pain of EOL markers.  On the one hand I'm trying to teach my guys why it makes sense to use a VCS (and how it is better than FTP even though it's more complicated), but on the other hand it takes a while for anyone to notice that when the Windows guy commits something, the whole file has been changed and nobody knows what happened in the commit.

And obviously I figure this out the first time I want to use svnmerge to merge from trunk to a deployment branch.

It seems like Subversion could have made this a lot simpler from the get-go.

But anyway, after some Googling I realize I need the following things:

• set svn:eol-style property to native on all "text" files (DONE)
• set up svn client-side configurations for everyone to automatically set these properties
• get a pre-commit check to make sure that these things are set as needed (see the warning in this section) It is nice of the Subversion book to tell us what we should do.  But surely you could have given us a simple script to do the right thing ?

So, plea for help - any of you nice hackers out there have a decent client-side configuration file and a matching pre-commit hook to check ?

Now that we have one web developer on Linux and one on Windows, I get to experience first-hand the pain of EOL markers.  On the one hand I'm trying to...

I'm going to be an Evo bug avoidance master if I keep this up.

Today's annoying Evo problem is "sometimes when you drag and drop mails, something gets stuck and Evo stays in drop mode even though I've released the mouse button."  If you've ever ran into this you'll know what I mean and how annoying it is.

For the others, the biggest annoyance is that, at this point, your mouse and keyboard are useless in X.  There's nothing you can click, close, or resize with your mouse to leave drop mode.  Most of your keystrokes go to evolution, you can't even activate the panel or switch to other tasks.   You can only switch to console and Do Stuff from there.

In the past, I always used to switch to console or log in through ssh, and do something like

DISPLAY=:0.0 evolution --force-shutdown

This is pretty annoying however, because

• I use drag and drop heavily when I'm sorting my mail
• so this bug happens more often when I'm sorting my mail
• but forcing Evolution to quit typically makes it lose all the state for which mails I've moved and where
• so I have to start over again and remember to expunge regularly

Today, I thought "what would happen if I start another evolution instance ?¨

So that's what I did, from the console, and bam - it Just Fixes It.  It's amazing how such a small change makes me so much less frustrated using Evolution.  Tied for the lead with the Cancel button.

I'm going to be an Evo bug avoidance master if I keep this up. Today's annoying Evo problem is "sometimes when you drag and drop mails, something gets stuck and...

Has anyone tried one of this nifty Bluetooth laser keyboards on Linux ? I'm assuming they would be using the standard HID stuff in Bluetooth, so there shouldn't be a problem, but it'd be nice if someone who tried it could confirm or deny before I shell out for it.

If it did work, my N800 + keyboard would be awesome to take with me to, say, a cinema, and be able to fix platform issues away from home.

Has anyone tried one of this nifty Bluetooth laser keyboards on Linux ? I'm assuming they would be using the standard HID stuff in Bluetooth, so there shouldn't be a...

Things that suck: getting woken up by an alarm at 7:30, a machine running out of disk space, and realizing that the cron job to clean up MPEG transport streams didn't run correctly because the crond service wasn't reloaded to take the cron job changes into account.

So, doing general maintenance, reading LogWatch:

 pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user harrypotter : 1 time(s)

Are there actually people that create a harrypotter account on their server ? Or do crackers have a sense of humour these days ?

Things that suck: getting woken up by an alarm at 7:30, a machine running out of disk space, and realizing that the cron job to clean up MPEG transport streams...