Textmode

A little off the main topic, but since this is a personal blog about foobar, I guess this doesn’t matter.

I bought a a Garmin GPSMap 60csx and I really like it.

I did a first test in the near mountains, yesterday, and I’m really impressed with the functionality.

The basic features are:

• 2.2” x 1.5” color (256) LCD, 240×160 pixels
• microSD memory card support (I’ve got a 2GB card)
• 1000 waypoints and 50 routes
• unlimited (on sd card) support for custom POI (Points of Interest)
• Automatic track log (up to 10,000 points and 20 tracks, and TrackBack lets you reverse tracks to navigate back to your starting point)
• Trip computer
• Provides DGPS accuracy within three meters
• electronic compass
• barometric altimeter
• area calculation
• geocaching mode and oudoor GPS games
• Waterproof

and much more

I’m playing around with it and collecting information about using it under linux (and VirtualBox) if you’re interested, stay tuned – I’ll post it in the next days.

I don’t really like Java, although we use it a lot at university. This is the reason I never looked at JRuby.

Andreas, of zargony.com had exactly the same opinion, except that he did give JRuby a try.. :)

So go, and read about the coolness of JRuby even if you don’t like Java.

About 2 years ago I tested various tools for file recovery which seemed quite good, and since I could not recover all the files I wanted, I kept that harddrive.

Today I gave it another try, and came across a tool called ext3undel

ext3undel is a collection of scripts that wrap the steps for recovering files from ext2 and ext3 filesystems into much easier procedures.

It has two basic modes:

• gabi, get all back imedeately
• ralf, recover a lost file

gabi saves you a lot of work: it can be used to recover whole partitions, it uses the recovery tools photorec/testdisk and foremost.

The ralf mode on the other hand uses Sleuthkit to look for specific blocks which are then processed by photorec/testdisk.

Looks like ext3undel is quite handy, still couldn’t find my desired file though :/

Note: If you delete a file with rm or lose your inode table in some other way, files can be recovered because the actual data still exists on the harddisk, you can of course not recover files that have already been overwritten.

Just a quick post .. the lastest opera release has a new default theme which looks pretty good.

The only thing that I didn’t like is the height of the bars. After a quick modification it looks much better:

Here is the modified theme, place it into your /skin/ directory and select it.

For the curios: The font is snap from the artwiz font package

I usually only display statusbar, addressbar and tabbar as you can see, everything else is on keybindings.

I think most uf us are frequently looking for a shell one-liner to list largest files on a system, either do clean up because the harddisk is to small, or just find out what’s using the most disk space.

ncdu to the rescue.

If you open up this nice tool, it recursively calculates the disk usage of a specified directory, and provides a neat interface to browse this directory.

It’s very basic, though has some useful options:

• sort by name, size
• delete specific files
• percentages, graphs
• unit powers of either 1000 or 1024

and more

The only thing I miss are VIM keybindings :)

Everytime I was in need for a good online irc client (webchat), the only applications I found were either Java based, very limited or not even working.

I’m glad I found Mibbit recently, which is a feature rich online irc client using Ajax.

Some features of Mibbit (some are quite funny):

• supports all major browsers
• full UTF-8 support
• multiple server and query connections
• ‘recent chat’ feature when joining a channel
• on the fly translation :)
• smiley fu
• SSL support
• per-tab input history
• integrated pastebin
• image url thumbnails

You can even integrate it on your own website! Pretty cool..

So give it a try :)

Recently drnic showed me his textmate bundle for github and I was really impressed.

It let’s you do the following:

• select some lines of code in Textmate, and open the same section (including selection hilighting) on the corresponding public github url

• go to a specific line of code, hit a key, and get directly to the github page of that commit and file, ready to post a comment

I didn’t even know about those possibilites github offers.. and I thought, wow I need this in my editor (vim) too.

So i created a little plugin, my first vim plugin, wrapping the – fortunately very modular – scripts drnic wrote.

There are 2 branches:

• Master – a standalone version without the github-tmbundle dependency
• TMB – a shorter version that depends on the scripts included in github-tmbundle

Both are available on my github repository as github-vim

The latter is easier to maintain since I only have to write calls to the existing methods, so I will update it with all new features in the tmbundle as soon as possible. But I will try to keep the standalone version as current as possible.

As mentioned this is my first vim plugin, therefore any suggestions, corrections and requests are very welcome.

Although there are tons of tricks and shortcut sites, 21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code by Peter Cooper is really nice.

Many things I did not really use or forgot. Check it out.

Ack-Grep is a replacement for grep written in perl.

It’s basic usage is ack fubar, which is about the same as grep -r fubar

It’s a very fast tool since it excludes a lot of files you don’t really want to search (like repository information, temporary files, backup files etc.) And furthermore it let’s you define and specify specific filetypes.

For example, I often want to search only .dryml files (I’ll mention in a future post what this is all about). To define such a custom simple define it in your ˜/ackrc like this:

--type-set=dryml=.dryml

This enables commands like

ack --dryml fubar

searching only files ending in .dryml

Furthermore the option ack-grep -f let’s you list the files only, without actually searching them, this can be useful, although good shells provide similar functionality. It’s nice to simply use something like

ack -f --dryml

You can even print the matching parts with perls special variables like $&.

Give it a try, you will like it! Note: The Debian package name is ack-grep, not ack.

Yay, check out Opera Dragonfly, Opera’s answer to firebug.

Finally there is a good alternative to using the memory eating Firefox monster to get firebug’s functionality.

It’s only a Alpha release, without editing support, but I guess it’s in very good hands :)

A button has been posted in the comments already: Opera Dragonfly

Although it is offtopic, I want to post it:

LA Homicide Map

Web2.0 map of death, this is pretty depressive, the numbers and especially the stories behind those incidents.