Software tip of the day: Pidgin has a notification plugin.
Notifications are disappearing messages that are usually displayed at the right bottom corner of the desktop, near the tray. The point of notifications is to allow a nice preview of events (e-mails, IMs, etc) without having to interrupt what you are doing to check what the message was about. Very useful once you get used to it.
Mostly for my own reference, a good summary about the changes:
http://who-t.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-keyboard-configuration-handling.html
There is now a gitstats package for gentoo, maintained by Justin Lecher 
I just realized the enlistments of neither GitStats nor ViewGit on Ohloh have updated during the last five (!) months.
The web branch for GitStats says “Ohloh update completed 5 months ago.”, master branch “(Failed 5 months ago.)”. Ditto for ViewGit, except the other way around.
No wonder the commit count hasn’t been going up after pushing out commits
Based on some Help! [1,2] posts on Ohloh forums, they seem to be updating failed projects manually. Ouch!
Update 2010-06-08: I got this reply from Ohloh pretty quickly:
It looks like these repositories were rebased, or had their commit history somehow changed. When this happens, Ohloh is unable to perform an incremental update to our reports.
I’ve started clean clones of these repositories, which should clear up the issue. I’ll keep an eye on them.
Okay, so there’s an explanation.
(Of course, it would be nice if Ohloh could recover from that situation automatically)
Sometimes Debian Unstable users may find it useful to upgrade all dependencies of a package (missing version dependencies etc). The following command can be used to do it:
$ aptitude safe-upgrade ~Rpackage~U
Now that Facebook is providing a “service” for sites to allow showing an iframe that allows you to like any URL (and see friends who have liked it as well), it is coincidentally collecting data on your browsing habits. Opt-out can be done using Adblock Plus with the following URL:
http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?*
From privacy point of view Facebook’s iframe is a bit like Google Analytics, except that the data of your browsing habits is in the hands of a company that has consistently demonstrated that it is incapable of writing secure code and could not care less about privacy of their users.
Naturally, most of the sites out there care only about increasing incoming visitors, so they are happy to jump on the bandwagon, ignoring all the privacy issues for their users. Sigh.
The full history of ViewSVN (2004-2007) is now public and hosted in a gitorious repository. Ohloh statistics are also available.
Most people probably already know that it’s possible to merge histories of multiple repositories by using the subtree merge strategy [1]. However, sometimes you also need to separate/decouple the history of a repository’s subdirectory into a stand-alone repository. This post outlines how.
In case you have wondered how to find out which files to delete to free up disk space, wonder no more. JDiskReport can easily visualize the disk usage of a directory tree with pie charts and other diagrams. Very useful for having a quick look at what is eating up the space, and since it supports Java Web Start, you don’t really need to install it if you have Java properly configured.
git status and other commands display utf-8 filenames containing umlauts (äö etc) differently from the shell, eg. as escaped (\266, \303 etc). So in case you are having problems with umlauts, the following command should help:
$ git config core.quotepath false
From man git-config(1) for core.quotepath:
The commands that output paths (e.g. ls-files, diff), when not
given the -z option, will quote “unusual” characters in the
pathname by enclosing the pathname in a double-quote pair and with
backslashes the same way strings in C source code are quoted. If
this variable is set to false, the bytes higher than 0×80 are not
quoted but output as verbatim. Note that double quote, backslash
and control characters are always quoted without -z regardless of
the setting of this variable.
