A little while ago I wrote a post about the wonderful guessnet. It really works well! It integrates so nicely with GNU/Linux that I wonder why (for example) the gnome network manager doesn’t make use of it! I’ve been playing with the thought of making a GUI for it. But for that I have to become a little better at making them

But back to why I’m writing this post: I had a problem with guessnet. I had a last-ressort profile for my wireless adapter. Whenever it can’t find a known network it looks for any open networks and tries to connect with that. But this rule didn’t work too well. It regulary got picked over any known closed network in my configuration file. So I contacted to creators of guessnet (Thomas and Enrico) and they reckoned it as a bug. After some mails they fixed it in the svn version of guessnet. So I set of to install it. I know a little of how debian packages are created so I couldn’t be too much of a hassle.

The steps I took:

sudo apt-get  build-dep guessnet
mkdir -p ~/src/guessnet/trunk
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/guessnet/trunk ~/src/guessnet/trunk
cd ~/src/guessnet/trunk
./autogen.sh && fakeroot debian/rules binary

Et voila: a package was born. And it worked like a charm! Guessnet worked better than ever.

And when I did another svn update, I saw a .gitignore file appearing. So I believe they are considering git also. Go git!

I the release post of com_resized there was asked the question why one should use com_resize. There are three reasons to use it:

1. The generated images aren the size you want them to be. So they’re smaller of size than the original images.
2. You won’t get any ugly resized images (see the example below).
3. It works with remote images. So you can link to an image one someone else’s blog and they get resized to the size you want + cached. So that way they get loaded from your own server: so faster.

No more ugly resized images:

The one on the left is without com_resize. The one on the right is _with_ com_resize. If you don’t see any difference. Your browser is probably doing some fancy stuff with the image. In that case you don’t need com_resize. But maybe the readers of your blog do!

For the people who don’t see any difference (leave a comment with your OS + browser, please!) I have attached a screenshot. Made in IE6, so the font is ugly too

Hi all! I’ve released my first project on rubyforge. The sourcecode is on github though. For the  simple reason that my git repository on rubyforge doesn’t work (yet). I hope they will fix it soon.

I’ve setup the project with the wonderful bones of Tim Pease.

I’ve got some reasonable documentation about it, a kick-ass website (stolen from Dr. Nic’s newgem) and some nice unit tests. I’m now integrating the gem in one of my own projects. If that’s succesfull I’m gonna release a version 0.1. The version after 0.1 will have new features.

The website ws generated with webby. A really nice way to create static websites in ruby. Maybe I’ll dedicate a post/tutorial to webby.

So please look at the website, install the gem and give me some feedback. It will be very appreciated!

I always forget what tire pressure my Bridgestone battlax BT45′s have. So now to never forget:

2.5 & 2.8

(front & rear)

I’m now working on a project that is hosted on github AND rubyforge. And lazy as I am, I don’t want to do:

git push origin
git push rubyforge

That’s why I create a handy shortcut for it and placed it in my ~/.bashrc:

function git-push-all() {
for remote in `git remote`; do
git push $remote
done
}

What it does: it lists all remote repositories linked to that git project and pushes them all. Usage:

git-push-all

Don’t get confused with “git-push –all”! That’s something completely different!

I saw the MountainWest Ruby conference video: code generation: safety scissors of metaprogramming. And the speaker (Giles Bowkett) used vi from inside irb. And I’ve never liked Vi, but using an editor from within irb is nice! Especially if you’re testing a big chunk of code.

So I began crawling the Internet for how he did this and I found the utility_belt gem. The utility belt contains the file I needed. So I installed the gem, edited my .irbrc and now I can use nano/gedit (or any other editor) from withing IRB!

These were the steps:

gem install utility_belt

My .irbrc:

require 'utility_belt/interactive_editor'
module InteractiveEditing
def nano
edit_interactively(:nano)
end
end

Now to use nano in irb, just type: nano

And the bonus: a nice screencast that shows this feature in action. I tried to edit it with pitivi. But that really sucked. After I finally found it out how I could cut pieces I tried to save it and the whole program crashed. “apt-get remove pitivi”!

Nice: blog.html.it/layoutgala

If I browse some random “post your screenshots here” thread, I always think by myself: “I should install Conky one time, It looks godverdomme nice”. So I apt-get install conky. And what a dissapointment. It doesn’t work out of the box. You have to make and edit a conkyrc file. Just downloading some random .conkyrc doesn’t work because it isn’t geared towards your system. *Sigh* Just wished everything was apt ‘n run.

I take a fairly amount of pictures. Some months more than others. And sometimes I want to share them with relatives/friends. And everyone is using hotmail or some other crappy e-mail provider. So I want to keep the file size to a minimum. Well, then you need to batch resize the photos. What to use? If you search on google, they come up with all these cwazy shell scripts. That’s not what I want!

So I did an apt-cache search, and voila: nautilus-image-converter
Mhhh…. what’s that? After a search on google I found some promissing screenshots. so I did an:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

Restarted Gnome and…. resized my images with two mouseclicks! Nais….
Did not have to configure, edit, google, et cetera anything. I just worked™

I usually boot up my ubuntu box with gnome, but sometimes I want to play UT (on a bare x server) or I just want to use my laptop as a server. In those cases I don’t boot into Gnome but into the terminal. But the problem is Gnome manages my wireless network card. So no Gnome, no connection.

Some months ago I started searching for a solution for this. I found several options like guessnet, whereami, et cetera. I first tried whereami. But that wasn’t a success. I required to much configuration and didn’t really felt polished at all.

I stumbled upon guessnet last week. I found it in a thread on ubuntuforums. I installed it and after some fiddling with it, I couldn’t get it to work properly. I asked some questions on the forum (nobody answered). So I had to solve it myself. After some trial and error, I managed to come up with a working configuration.

Sorry about the indenting not working. It’s this stupid highlighting plugin that does not behave properly.

My original “/etc/network/interfaces”:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

My working config:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
mapping wlan0
script guessnet-ifupdown
map default: none
map autofilter: true #Look for wlan0- interfaces
map timeout: 9
map init-time: 9 #For slow drivers
map verbose: true
map debug: true

iface wlan0-home inet dhcp
test wireless essid USR5464
wireless-essid USR5464

iface wlan0-tim inet dhcp
test wireless essid Tim_online closed
wpa-psk 234243242342424
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-ssid Tim_online

#If all else fails: pick an open network
iface wlan0-open inet dhcp
test wireless open
wireless-essid any
wireless-mode auto

In the configuration above, the Tim_online network uses wpa security. WPA2 is available too if you want to. Just search the net for it. The interface sections are ordinary /etc/network/interfaces configurations. Except for the “test” statement. This is guessnet specific.

I installed the newer package from Debian unstable. Just to make sure it wouldn’t work due to some obscure bug.

The only drawback is that the network applet in Gnome doesn’t show the wireless connection anymore. So I can’t see what network I’m connected to. For that I have to fire up the terminal (iwconfig).

If you have some questions about it: just leave a comment.