Entries in Life

I have this “thing” about owning my own data. I probably won't be a real user of Tim O'Reilly's Internet OS. I like running my own mail server — not relying on Google for Domains, not giving Google more and more data to feed into their advertising.

But I've been using Google Reader. I'm not sure what Google is doing with that information, but, well, I can run my own feed reader on the desktop. So I switched to Liferea. Besides nice things like task-bar notifications, integration with del.icio.us — or, with a SMOP, my own GotNoBlog — it allows me to pull RSS feeds that require authentication so that I can read LiveJournal friends-only feeds now.

I've managed to reclaim a little bit of my data. Hurrah!

Tags: linux, ubuntu

(Took some more pics on my ride yesterday. Played with macro a bit, too.)

Last night, I gave a talk at the Central PA Linux Users Group (CPLUG) that I called "Bringing Open Source to Africa". While I could have made it more general and talked about the various Open Source projects that have grown out of or are centered around Africa -- and perhaps this is a topic for another time -- I focused on the projects that IntraHealth is doing and how we've created or used Open Source.

The talk was followed by some good discussion and I got to talk about KnowledgeTree some as one of my friends there had heard of it and thought it would be useful, but was a little scared of setting it up.

The biggest drawback was that, due to my poor planning, I didn't get a set of slides done till just before the talk. I was lucky here because other people at IntraHealth have done so many talks so I was able to use their material to create my own presentation.

(copy of my slides.)

(Today, I took my camera with me on my ride. 30miles at 30degrees. Click the photo for a couple more.)

After flirting with Google's Picasa for Linux for managing my photos, I'm back to using f-spot.

I like the timeline and that it doesn't ask me to give a single "folder" for all the pictures I'm importing, but, instead, creates a directory structure so that my photos are sorted by date. Interestingly enough, it is actually better than Picasa for importing. Picasa won't automatically rotate images when importing them from the camera where f-spot will.

I still use Picasa for uploading pictures to be printed out (F-spot doesn't support uploading to Wal-Mart), and I love the online Picasa's ability to help recognise and tag people in photographs -- 7000 faces in 10,000 photos are no fun to do by themselves, but when Google picks out the faces and suggests names, it becomes a little game to see how good it gets and to see which person Google thinks looks like each of my kids.

(Yeah, I'm probably helping them improve their facial recognition software and they'll end up selling that to the TSA, but ... oh well.)

(Hello, Planet Ubuntu Users!  I'm looking for a second MOTU on my php-xdebug package as well as someone to revu my libapache-test-perl package.  Any takers?)

Emacs CVS now includes XFT (i.e. smooth fonts) in the main branch, so I'm discontinuing my old emacs-xft-snapshot build.  Still, the other emacs-snapshot package is targeted to Debian and I'm running Ubuntu Gutsy.  So I've uploaded a snapshot build to my PPA on Launchpad.

One thing that I included is flymake support for PHP.  Carl asked me earlier today if I knew how to get the compilation mode in Emacs to work with PHP's lint function to find highlight problems.  I said flymake would be better, but didn't know how to do that right off, either.

After a bit of twiddling, I figured it out and, as a bonus, got compilation mode figured out, too.

If you want to enable flymake for PHP-mode (yes, I have a Debian package for that, too) in a version of Emacs you already have installed, add the following code to your .emacs file:

;; Flymake PHP Extension
(require 'flymake)
(unless (fboundp 'flymake-php-init)
  (defun flymake-php-init ()
    (let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
                       'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
           (local-file (file-relative-name
                        temp-file
                        (file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
      (list "php" (list "-f" local-file "-l")))))

(let ((php-ext-re "\\.php[345]?\\'")
      (php-error-re
       "\\(?:Parse\\|Fatal\\) error: \\(.*\\) in \\(.*\\) on line \\([0-9]+\\)"))
  (unless (assoc php-ext-re flymake-allowed-file-name-masks)
    (add-to-list 'flymake-allowed-file-name-masks
                 (list php-ext-re
                   'flymake-php-init
                   'flymake-simple-cleanup
                   'flymake-get-real-file-name))
    (add-to-list 'compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist
                 (list 'compilation-php
                   php-error-re  2 3 nil nil))
    (add-to-list 'compilation-error-regexp-alist 'compilation-php)
    (add-to-list 'flymake-err-line-patterns
                 (list php-error-re 2 3 nil 1))))


Now, whether you're using the emacs you started with or the latest emacs-snapshot, you need to tell emacs to use flymake on PHP files.  Add:

(add-hook 'php-mode-hook (lambda () (flymake-mode t)))


to your .emacs file and you're good to go.

I was a little worried that the hard drive in my laptop was dying (though, looking at the Load_Cycle_Count, I don't think it is Ubuntu's fault, at least not because of cycle time) and since I was on-site, I was able to get a loaner laptop.  I decided to use XFS (/boot would be ext3).

Big Mistake.

Everything worked great on the installation, but as soon as I installed all the updates and rebooted, gnome-terminal wouldn't start. Took a little doing, but I discovered that my XFS partition had become corrupted.  Ran xfs_repair and it dumped a few files in /lost+found. But now things work.

Take heed.