Tag: linux

I'm a big fan of good tools, however struggle to find products that fit me because there are some key constraints:

• I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu 14.10)

• I don't use a pointing device. At all. If I can't use a tool from the keyboard, I can't use it at all (as a side effect, I use keyboard enablers in my browser so if your website has "helper" keyboard shortcuts, I probably can't use that either)

• My other devices (phone, tablet, work phone) are all android

Taken together, this makes finding tools a challenge - but I've had good experiences with todotxt and the ecosystem around it.

In this series of posts about my screencasting toolchain, I've already written about using wmctrl to resize windows accurately and about using Kazam to capture snippets of video from various applications. This post describes my adventures in trying to glue the video snippets together.

If you've ever seen a live demo, you will know that these things are fraught with danger. Even if the wifi works, the presenter knows what they are doing, and nothing crashes, you'll often end up watching someone explaining something to their laptop in detail, or clearly demonstrating their inability to type. Either way, it doesn't make good, informative content, which is why I never ever demo in a conference talk - I'm there to entertain and time is always of the essence. At this point, you can probably guess why I'm writing a blog post about my screencasting toolchain - I simply pre-record whatever it is that I want to show in the talk.

On an ubuntu platform, I've had a few false starts with video over the years, and mostly avoided it. But now my "Debugging HTTP" talk really does make more sense if you can see the process of something broken, what the tools show, and how to understand that information and fix the problem.

I'm working on a bunch of screencasts at the moment (more posts to come) and one of the things that tripped me up the most was getting all the windows the same size, so that the resulting videos are the same size and can easily be put back together. Enter …

Today I'm working on a little tutorial (about writing RESTful services, for this site) and I used the tree command to illustrate the file and directory layout of the project. I love this little command and use it frequently, but it isn't very well known so here's a quick example.

I have been writing a bit about Gearman lately, including installing it for PHP and Ubuntu, actually using it from PHP and also how I use persistent storage with Gearman. I'm moving on to look at adding jobs of different priorities.

I use Gearman entirely as a point to introduce …

Apache on Debian. Ubuntu

When I first started using Ubuntu, I was coming from a distro journey that started with FreeBSD and took in Mandrake and Gentoo along the way; I hadn't worked with any Debian-based systems before and was new to the way that Apache is configured on those platforms.

I'm currently delivering all my talks with PDF format slides, using Jakob's PDF Presenter Console, which is awesome but lacks a "goto slide" button and is a little slow to click forward. It doesn't matter for a short talk but I had 200+ slides for my ZCE preparation tutorial at the Dutch PHP Conference and I was concerned about losing my place! Therefore I split my slides up into several decks, but still need to publish them as a whole.

For years I've used PDF Shuffler for this sort of thing but I wondered if there was an easy way of doing this from the command line this time, since I literally wanted to glue together a bunch of files one after another. Predictably, there is and it's called pdftk - the PDF Toolkit.

Recently I've switched how I prepare and deliver presentations, using LaTeX to mark up the content and producing PDF slides from that. Which is great but I miss having some of the during-presentation functionality of LibreOffice such as a timer and being able to see what's on the next slide …

I've been using Gearman lately in a project that I'm working on, and of course a month later when I came to deploy the code, I had to look up all over again what was required for a gearman server in order to put it on the new platform. Here is the short version for my future reference (and yours, if you like)

Last week I reinstalled my aspireone, which I've had for quite a while but which is really excellent for events. I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it and it installed like a dream, with peripherals and powersaving all working correctly. It says something about the positive experiences I've had with *buntu installs lately that I even did this over the wifi!

The weird thing was that I don't really use Gnome on other machines as I prefer KDE, and I hadn't seen the Unity desktop before (as I understand it, this is a lightweight gnome replacement - it still looks and smells like gnome to me), so there were a few things that were "missing" as far as I was concerned. Easily the most annoying is the Alt+F2 shortcut, I don't really care what GUI I'm using, I mostly just run things from that! I also realised that I now had workspaces, but that there was no keyboard shortcut to switch between them (I don't use a mouse, so it's keyboard or nothing for me).

Enter a wonderful utility called gnome-keybinding-properties.

I spend a lot of time at command line, and bash records the history of all the commands I've typed and puts it in .bash_history (there's a limit on how many it stores but for me it goes back a few days). I find it really useful to look back …

I'm an Opera user but I use a number of applications from the command line, and often I want to launch links from those applications into my web browser. I've just switched over to reading my feeds using canto (web applications are becoming decreasingly accessible these days, although I'm saving …

I was playing with pecl_oauth last week (more about that in a later post) and when I tried to install from PECL, it grabbed the files, ran the configure step but stopped with an error status during make. This is bad news for those of us who are ubuntu users …

Last week I was preparing a training course for a client, and I wanted to print the slides nicely for the attendees to refer to and make notes on etc. The slides were done, I'd talked to my friendly printers (Mailboxes etc in Leeds) and all I needed to do …

This is a trick I use when deploying websites so I thought I'd post it here for posterity. Actually, technically I stole it from someone else but for now let's pretend it's mine (thanks @__kb!)

When I deploy an application, which is almost invariably a PHP application, I like to …

A couple of years ago, I attended ZendCon for the first time. At that time, the only laptop I had was a work machine weighing 5kg, and I was staying in a different hotel from the main conference - so I hastily bought pretty much the first non-ee netbook on the …

Here is a quick howto on using a config file to associate an SSH connection with a particular identity file. When I ssh directly from the command line, I can specify the port, identity file to use, and a whole raft of other options. However these options aren't available when …

I've been having issues with the presenter console on both my ubuntu machines since upgrading to Karmic (9.10). One is a Thinkpad T400 running kubuntu and the other is an aspireone netbook running ubuntu netbook remix. Neither wanted had a working installation after upgrade and I couldn't get the …

There's a little command line utility on *nix which I use a lot - it's wc or "word count". This is especially useful to because I live in a world where everything is plain text right up until I have to send it to someone else (and sometimes not even then …

I have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default …

Since upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I've noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this …

I wrote a while ago about the new version of screen in Ubuntu Jaunty. Screen is an application which lets you run lots of tabs inside one terminal window, then disconnect from screen and reconnect again later. You can turn on and off a whole bunch of notifications which appear …

I've been working with memcache-related things lately and ran into a problem where the library I was using just didn't seem to do what its documentation said it would. It turned out that it was making a "gets" call rather than a "get" call - and this functionality wasn't introduced to …

I have recently been giving a talk entitled "Linux-Fu for PHP Developers" (slides are here) and although it includes some really basic commands, even some quite experienced people have thanked me for particular bits that they picked up. I'm considering dropping some of the sections from this talk so here …

The slides from my talk at php|tek are now online - Linux-Fu for PHP Developers. Thanks to everyone who attended and left feed back for me on joind.in. Feel free to leave a comment if you were there or if you have any questions about the slides!*

* Unless the …

This is a mini-primer on using xrandr to configure a second screen under Linux, but first I'll start with some background.

I've been a linux user for a few years now but when I started working for Ibuildings I started giving presentations, either as a speaker or when delivering training …

Today I upgraded a bunch of machines to the latest Kubuntu offering, version 9.04, or "Jaunty Jackalope". Well, it was all going a bit too well and when I came to upgrade my main work machine, a thinkpad T400, I ran into problems. There are a couple more kinks …

I recently saw a problem that we were having difficulty replicating, despite assurances that both the code base we were replicating on and the one that exhibited the error were identical. They are large codebases and when I got copies of them both I tried to check for differences:

diff …

I've been using KDE full-time long enough that I ought to know this, but I had to look it up! I was working in a shared location and I wanted to lock my session when I walked away from my machine. There's an option in the start menu but the …

Since I started using Linux on the desktop, I've always used katapult to launch applications. However I have another machine that doesn't have katapult and (since I don't use a mouse) I've always used Alt+F2 to launch appilcations on there. Well, since installing Kubuntu Hardy Heron I notice it …

A while ago I posted about screen, and included my .screenrc file. I got some teasing for this, since the tabs show up pink. In fact this .screenrc file is one I stole from somewhere a few years ago and didn't really think much about the colours. Since then I've …

I use a lot of apps from the command-line, partly because command-line stuff is the same on every system, and partly because I struggle to use a mouse for RSI reasons. Unsurprisingly, the best keyboard-navigable apps are ones that only use the keyboard in the first place! One app that …

rsnapshot is a great tool that I use for all my backup stuff, its really easy and seems pretty robust (or rather, I haven't broken it yet!). When I set it up most recently, I discovered that it has a very useful flag, no_create_root. The problem I often have is …

I can't remember another post which was in both the "tech" and "craft" categories - so no complaints from either camp please! Last week I became the new owner of an acer aspire one netbook/ultra mobile PC. Its little, blue, and very cute! If you want to skip the tech …

I'm attending LUGRadio Live UK this weekend, in sunny Wolverhampton! I'm slightly concerned that this might be too geeky for me and I might be scared but there are people I'd like to meet, the talks look interesting, and I can imagine it will be a pretty good crowd. If …

When development teams have people working on a variety of platforms, its pretty common to end up with wrong line endings. In vim these will look like ^M at the end of each line. To get rid of these line endings you can use the following command (in command mode …