*n*x

HP gave us hplip linux drivers for their printers, so when I needed to buy new computer stuff I bought HP (laptop and color laser network printer). Everything (screen resolution, graphics hardware acceleration, wifi, etc) works out of the box. No surprise really, as all these components are Intel with known open source drivers.

Anyway, there is one little thing you need to do make of this laptop a dream GNU/Linux laptop. (more…)

I love perl. Really. This is not a post inspired by “5 things I hate about Perl“, but rather a question for the wider perl community out there (hi perlshere!). How do you write your OO perl code?

I have some code out there that follows the inside-out objects methodology of Perl Best Practices. Lately I have been writing java code, and inside-out objects feel like a lot of extra - not very intuitive - work to create your classes. I have been looking at Moose, but again it looks pretty cumbersome to create classes (constructors, named parameters for methods, returns, etc.). I am just probably missing a good howto (besides the cookbooks on cpan) or even a printed book on Moose. Any tips out there to get into Moose fast or a nice complete and intuitive alternative (extra points if it’s similar to java’s OO framework)? Thanks.

These days my desk at home is full of books and articles. That’s why I bought a cheap logitech ultra-flat keyboard. So far, pretty nice once you get used to the efficient use of space. Anyway, I seem to hit the Caps Lock to often, and because I don’t see any use in WRITING LIKE THIS, I disabled it.

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Nowadays, the GNOME screen resolution setting allows you to configure multiple screens pretty easy. It seems to work just fine. However, it’s a front-end to the X config an as such it has some problems. In my case, it allows me to clone my main monitor (is that useful to anyone?), but not to extend my desktop over both monitors.

The problem is related to the frontend not passing the errors from the underlying system (xrandr), so you don’t get any hints why it does not work. Maybe my home setup is kind of strange as I use two different resolutions (an LCD 1280×1024 connected though vga and the laptop 1024×768 screen as a second monitor), but still it shouldn’t be that uncommon. I enable the dual monitor setup when useful (gimp), but most of the time I find the different resoltion annoying. At work I use two 1680 x 1050 LCDS.

Anyway, the solution to enable a dual monitor is pretty simple. (more…)

It’s nice that firefox 3 can directly create pdfs (print, select print to file). However, while doing research and creating pdfs of articles, some were split in different pages (or needed additional information, like citation information). Here’s how to merge those pdfs from the command line:

$ gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=result.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf input3.pdf

Change the PAPERSIZE value to “letter” if you live where the use that format. “result.pdf” is the result of merging “input1.pdf”, “input1.pdf” and “input1.pdf”. Change the values to fit your files.

Virtual is a great product for a developer (or even a regular user) to run several OSes simultaneously. I run Linux on my laptop, but I need a Windows partition with certain software and updates to connect to the work network. A virtual machine is a fine solution. Specially when running in seamless mode (only the program is open in your Linux desktop and not the complete Windows desktop).

Installing Windows from cd on a VirtualBox instance is really easy. However, I need an *specific* windows installation that can only be installed from a Windows PXE server at work. Sadly, the virtualbox open source edition delivered with Ubuntu is unable to do this. This is what I did: (more…)

Using nano as the default shell editor is probably a great choice for a Gnu/Linux distribution (also) aimed for Unix newbies. If you know your way on the command line however, you’ll scream from frustration for every “i”, “:wq!” or “ZZ” you type and you see the characters in the text you are editing. Specially frustrating in cron. If you don’t know what “i”, “:wq!” or “ZZ” do, don’t worry, nano is working fine for you. (more…)

Don’t forget to download firefox tomorrow today (June 17, 2008; release of Firefox 3). I cite from the “Firefox Download day site”:

“Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.”

Netbeans has a killer feature: it’s graphical Swing builder (aka Matisse). It’s fast, flexible and it works. GUI application in no time. Great.

However, when not creating the GUI by hand, it can be difficult to track some bugs. I found out that when using different JDialogs in the same application, resulting in the dialogs having the same size as the first dialog opened. Pretty annoying. This is how to solve it. (more…)

Forgetting the root password (or being replaced without you knowing it). Pretty silly when it happens, but it does happen. Follow this steps if you need to reset the root password of a Solaris system. (more…)