Stuart Colville

vim

Updating Vim to Use Plugins From Branches

I decided the other evening that I should refresh my vim plugins to pick up any updates that have landed since the last time I updated them. The downside is that every time I want to do this, I have the pain of manually re-installing the updated files into the

Events

FOSDEM 2011

Photo by geekgrunge [http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekgrunge/5424572353/in/photostream/] Last weekend I attended FOSDEM [http://fosdem.org/] in Brussels. Here's a few of my chosen highlights: James Turnbull - DevOps - More than Marketing This was a good overview of the devops mentality, and how

android

Android: Force Moving Apps to an SD Card

This isn't anything new but I thought I would share my experiences of trying to free space on my HTC desire by forcing apps to be movable to the sd card using the android SDK on linux. WARNING: Ensure you have a backup of any important data before

Geek

A Geek's Christmas Present Wishlist

As Christmas will shortly be upon us here's a round-up of awesome things that are on my Christmas present wish-list. Moleskine notebooks Moleskines are the de facto standard notebook of choice for designers and hackers alike. Best thing is if you like using a notebook you'll

Spotify ScreenSaver Toggle with D-bus

UPDATE! - see This post for the latest version of the spotify screensaver toggle The latest version of the spotify client for linux (0.4.8) has added partial mpris support. This is great as it means controlling spotify via D-bus is far easier than the previous hacks using wmctrl

Python

Fake SMTP server with Python

The other day a colleague was testing some code which relied on sending mail to a local mailserver and it was failing when the mailserver couldn't be found. Needing to install postfix seemed overkill so I decided to look into what could be done to make a fake

screen

Inverting Screen Colours for Late-Night Hacking

I've recently found it really hurts my eyes when working late at night going from a terminal (which is black background and light text) to a browser window like google.com with a large expanse of white. To help with this I've been looking for ways

Code

Ubuntu: Spotify Screensaver Toggle

New version: I've updated the script to use D-bus with spotify for Linux version 0.4.8 see Spotify Screensaver Toggle with D-bus [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2010/11/03/spotify-screensaver-toggle-with-dbus/] for further information. In a previous post, Lock Screen and Pause Spotify [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/

Taking Screenshots of your Android Phone

Annoyingly it's far from trival to take screenshots of your android phone unless you've rooted your phone already in which case there are several apps on the market which provide this feature. This post focuses on what is currently the only alternative. DDMS stands for the

Brewing with a French Press

My Coffee Brewing alter ego has been hard at work on a post about brewing the perfect French Press [http://caferesearch.co.uk/post/1077277952/how-to-use-a-french-press]. Warning contains extreme coffee nerdery, though don't let that put you off!

Google

Android: Google Navigation App Review

When on holiday recently I made extensive use of the Google Navigation app with my HTC Desire to provide satnav for our journey across France. Before we travelled I'd been using Navigation in the UK and was really quite impressed with it. The directions were accurate and I&

SDCards

Recovering Deleted Photos from an SD card with PhotoRec

Whilst on holiday recently I was using Shotwell [http://yorba.org/shotwell/] (the rather excellent photo manager for Ubuntu) to import some photos. After importing the photos Shotwell asks if you want to delete the imported photos from the card. Without thinking, I absently-mindedly said yes. What I'd

Work

Development Workflow

Photo CC licensed by oedipusphinx [http://www.flickr.com/photos/oedipusphinx/4425295409/] I've been working for canonical [http://canonical.com/] for about four and a half months now. One of the things that I've been really impressed with is the workflow for development and the process

Debugging

Debugging Elusive Puppet Errors

On working on some puppet manifests I hit this error message: $ sudo puppetd -t err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: undefined method `closed?' for nil:NilClass warning: Not using cache on failed catalog err: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run Certainly not the most enlightening error message.

ubuntu

Ubuntu: java.net.SocketException in ec2-api-tools

Having installed ec2-api-tools under my lucid dev environment I was trying to shut ec2 instances down with ec2stop [instance_id] and I was getting the following exception: $ ec2stop i-XXXXXXXX Unexpected error: java.net.SocketException: Invalid argument or cannot assign requested address at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.

BBCB

Ubuntu: Installing the Beebem BBC Micro Emulator

Ah the BBC Micro [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro]. I have very fond memories of our first computer, idling away countless hours attempting to load games from tape for them only to crash shortly after you started playing them. I also remember one hot summer spending epic amounts

Linux/Unix

Adding more disk space to a Linux Virtual Machine

There comes a time where you set-up a VM and don't set the hard-disk size to be big enough for what you are going to do. I hit that problem just the other day and I needed to increase the size of my home dir on a Ubuntu

ubuntu

Linux: Fix for apt-get update - Waiting for Headers

If you're a Google chrome user on Ubuntu you may have noticed apt-get update seems to wait around for two minutes sitting at 99%. The culprit is the google apt repo having issues with http/1.1 pipelining. Fortunately there's a bug for it on Launchpad

ubuntu

Solved: VirtualBox Ubuntu Karmic Server VM crashes

Had a weird issue when setting up an Ubuntu Karmic JEOS VM under VirtualBox. When it was installed it rebooted and then the VM window dissappeared. I tried to boot it a second time and it got to grub and then as soon as I selected the kernel I wanted

Virtualbox

Howto: SSH into VirtualBox 3 Linux Guests

In a previous post I wrote about using a TAP interface to be able to SSH into linux guests from the host [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2009/04/08/virtualbox-access-guests-via-a-virtual-interface/] . Since then changes in the newer versions of VirtualBox have seen the addition of a virtual interface on the

unicomp

Unicomp Customizer Keyboard Review

If you're someone who uses a computer for a living then having a decent keyboard is a very worthwhile investment. Earlier on this year I bought myself a couple of US layout "customizer" keyboards from Unicomp (one for work and one for home). Unicomp was founded

ubuntu

Ubuntu: Changing the default java binary

Since upgrading to Karmic I've had a weird issue with Charles Proxy [http://www.charlesproxy.com/] in that the windows for settings like rewrites seemed to get completely screwed up making it very difficult to see the boxes for entering information. Here's a screenshot of what

hardware

Updating Speedtouch 585 DNS settings

I'm currently trying out Google's new DNS service by altering the DNS settings of my Speedtouch 585. This is more a note to myself in case I need to refer to it in the future but might be useful to anyone else who has the same

Project Fondue

Using Loggerhead with mod_wsgi

Here's a post I wrote over on the Project Fondue Blog [http://blog.projectfondue.com/] about our use of Loggerhead with mod_wsgi under Apache [http://blog.projectfondue.com/2009/11/26/loggerhead-and-mod-wsgi]. Loggerhead is the rather nice branch viewer for bazaar branches as used on Launchpad.net.

Python

Spotify: Linking to a specific time in a track

For a while I've wanted to be able to share a link to a track on spotify so that it jumps the right place. An example is when learning covers for the band I play in; or just to point out a great part of the track. The