In lieu of writing about something useful, I'll spend some words on
this silly blog. I seem to spend more time maintaining it than adding
content, so that seems fitting.
Snap version 0.3 was released in
December. Unfortunately, I was too busy at the time to update this
site to use it. Perhaps that was fortunate, though, since version 0.4
was just released a few days ago. In celebration, I took a little
time and updated everything to use 0.4. Version 0.3 introduced the
feature that I had rea…
I am an XMonad user. There, I said it. I don't use any components of
the typical desktop environments except for one: notification-daemon.
Notifications from various applications are useful, even in a minimal
environment.
The Problem
Unfortunately, the normal notification daemon is rather unpleasant to
look at. The popups are intrusive and tend to appear wherever I am
looking. I've tried to configure them to appear in every corner of
both monitors at various times, and it seems that I just l…
This came up for the second time in five months yesterday, so I
thought I would record it so that I can remember what the deal is next
time it happens. If you have a binary that loads just fine and seems
to be normal according to tools like ldd, but GDB refuses to load it
stating that some shared library is missing, this post may be of
interest to you.
In certain environments (particularly those based on Red-Hat
Enterprise Linux), system libraries can be pretty out-of-date. If you
have more re…
I recently had to do some simple parsing in Python. Aside: the Python
requirement isn't particularly principled (I am actually not a huge
fan), but I go where matplotlib
is. I don't think that I have seen a more useful plotting library or
program yet. Having the full power of a programming language
available to munge data into an appropriate form is a major
improvement over ad-hoc data manipulation or selection primitives in
tools like gnuplot. My only complaint at this point is that showing…
Background
I bounce around between media players fairly often -- maybe two or
three times a year. Lately I have been using Banshee, which works
reasonably well. Unfortunately, the Last.fm support has been broken
for a while. Worse, judging by
bug 612929, there
don't seem to be any plans on fixing it (or even any ideas on what
might be wrong). For the curious, the problem is that Banshee will
start to play a stream perfectly well, but stop after the second song.
This is slightly functional bu…
A few days ago I was looking for a more robust type-aware
cross-reference helper macro for LaTeX. This type of macro lets you
specify something like:
\autoref{fig:tuna}
Assuming fig:tuna is the fifth figure, this macro will produce
"figure 5". This is very convenient if the type of a reference might
change. Previously I had used
hyperref
but it was a bit of a pain to customize and it was not obvious how to
get good list output.
I was pointed to
cleveref,
which is easily customiza…
Why a blog?
Due to popular demand, I am trying to move some of my ranting and
raving to more static and less visible media. At least here they are
persistent beyond server logs. This seems fairly handy, though, and I
think that I'll probably record some useful information here (if I
ever happen to find any).
Didn't we hear this before?
It is true. In the not too distant past, I claimed that I would start
a blog. I spent some time agonizing over choosing a platform, as you
might expect. I ha…