Linux

I recently replaced a rusty satellite dish and faulty LNB (it has been in use in the house I moved in to for 10+ years I’d guess) and decided to try install one myself. Here in Ireland, the two main broadcast methods of receiving TV are satellite (Freesat / Sky) and terrestrial aerial (Saorview). An issue I have one larger sitting room TV and one small living room TV. I couldn’t get both to be Samsung (out of stock on smallest sizes - which seem to be going out of fashion). So both TVs had very different methods of switching between satellite and aerial connections. I’m not sure if it is a hardware limitation (they make switching tuners slow to hide this), a licensing issue (broadcasters pay to be on the Freesat EPG for example) or a software issue (seems least likely). The fact multiple TV brands (in my case Phillips/Samsung) make it this clunky - makes me think it’s a licensing issue. I wanted to solve this by using an external box and having one mental model for navigating broadcast TV. ...

Worth a read for those wishing to optimise programs that process a lot of data. It proves that less really is more… Money quote: The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

A great guide to get up to speed with Fish shell. What is Fish? It’s a shell written from the ground up to be more easily understandable the the traditional shells (bash, tcsh). I don’t know yet if I’ll switch (anything you can do in Fish can be made to work in Bash). It’s an interesting concept and I’ll try it for a while…

If your like me and you deal with a lot of servers for development or test and do it from a Unix machine, I’ve got a really handy tip: SSH hostname pattern matching. Say I’ve got a SSH config file like this (at ~/.ssh/config ): host s* HostName atrcu%h.example.com User example1 Port 22 host b* HostName atrcx%h.example.com User example2 Port 22 host ??* HostName atvts%h.example.com User example5 Port 2205 The ssh man page explains this really well: ...

Bash, a command line shell is one of the most used pieces of software in my daily work. I like scripting repetitive actions to save a lot time (it brings me great joy!). One of the simplest and easiest customisations is to add a bit of colour to your otherwise boring bash prompt (otherwise known as $PS1): [ngrogan@localhost:~]$ can be turned in to this: The thing about Bash is the colour codes to achieve this can look archaic: ...

I’ve seen an article by Miguel de Icaza, a great developer oft criticised for his love of Microsoft technologies on Linux. His latest piece is about his love for Mac OS X as a desktop and how he used to feel guilty about it (given his very impressive open source credentials). I used to feel the same also. Android even as a platform more closely follows my ideals, yet I am exclusively an avid iOS user at this point. But as I’ve learned more, the importance of pragmatism is clear. I use my personal iOS devices for countless hours a day and I really just want them to work. I want them to work in the way they were designed to do: quickly check email, browse the web, make calls, check messages and so forth. ...

As I’ve mentioned before1, I regularly watch technology podcasts and I’ve had a subscription to sites like Lynda.com. Between those and Youtube, I’ve watched an awful lot of technology how-to videos and 90% of them are quite poor in terms of editing, sound and being coherent/properly scripted. Sometimes though it’s a joy to genuinely learn something new in a short, concise and to the point video. This haktip is right up there with being among the best: short, concise, to the point and about a utility that will be super-useful to me. In work I’m in an agile software development team and I spend a lot of time on the command line. I like the command line, but many don’t (personal preference I guess). As part of being agile, we produce a lot of video demos to stakeholders. Increasingly though the demos we produce are just as useful for the team - you can’t be every team member at once and this provides huge visibility to the team of progress. Our software is a Unix product, but we develop on Windows - so Camtasia is usually used - which is fine for GUI demos. This handy utility will be great to demo CLI stuff we do. ...

I have recently switched my main desktop over to Arch Linux. If you have never heard about Arch Linux, it is a “roll your own” Linux distribution. This basically means from start to finish, the whole process is custom. Whether your system has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or sound is totally up to you. I switched from Ubuntu Linux, which is very much built for new people to Linux. I have been using Ubuntu since it’s release in 2004 (as old as this blog incidentally). I have found it slowly moving away from my power user needs from the release of the KDE 4.0 desktop up to the recently introduced Unity desktop for Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong I love the whizz-bang effects of the snazzier distributions (like Ubuntu) and have used it to show people the power of Linux (and how really groundbreaking Compiz effects were at the time, ~2005). It’s sad Compiz hasn’t got the kudos but since both Windows and OS X have copied from Compiz, some more usability has been gained. ...

via tuxradar.com For me it’s definitely Kubuntu, but I can see why they choose OpenSuSe. May I just mention the virtual machine builder system is awesome, pay attention Mr.Shuttleworth! Although PPA builds come a close second for useful online tools…

What are Desktop Environments? Wikipedia defines it as: In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface …… A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. (See WIMP.) I would add a file manager and browser to this list also! Let’s look at the two most popular consumer Operating Systems (in three variants) and their Desktop Environments: OS Name Widgets Window Manager File Manager Browser Windows XP Luna Stack Window Manager Windows File Explorer Internet Explorer 6 Windows Vista Aero Desktop Window Manager Windows File Explorer Internet Explorer 7 Mac OS X Cocoa Quartz Compositor Finder Safari 2.X Now take Linux; really a Kernel, but packaged means an Operating System. Which way you package it makes all the difference! You still use the same drivers, the boot process is still the same, but when your machine finishes its boot and launches all that graphics stuff anything can appear: anything. It’s abstraction to have no real graphics in a kernel other than that which are drivers to control hardware. This is very strange to people who think in the Windows way (nb. I used to be one of these). At the end of Windows XP booting I have never seen anything but Luna; and most people don’t know its called that. So it is very strange for people my age and slightly older who grew up over DOS and Windows 3.1/95 line to have this fundamental shift in logic. ...