Sunday, October 26, 2008

FacebookChat with pidgin

Simple!

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

Download the deb they have built, install it, then restart Pidgin! You will then have a FacebookChat option in your accounts manager dialog.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

75 days of #ubuntu-us stats

75 days ago, I opened an irssi session called ulog in #ubuntu-us and had pisg analyze and generate an HTML report hosted here:

http://www.volatileminds.net/files/ubuntu-us-stats/


I think after a 75-day reporting period, the details are pretty much averaged out.

I think my favorite thing to see is this:


Word Number of Uses Last Used by
1 ubuntu 132 tyche


The word 'ubuntu' has been used the most in the 75 days of reporting. :-) At least we know we are kind of dedicated.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Moving!

I am moving on Oct 30th to Cityplace in downtown Dallas! I have to start packing soon, so if you have some boxes I can have, that'd be great.

w00t!

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Winbind in Intrepid

We use winbind at work to auth our Ubuntu desktops to Active Directory. I am the first to upgrade to Intrepid, in which winbind seems to be broken. It fails at random intervals (or so it seems). The way I found easiest to get it back up is to run wbinfo -u. If you don't do this, you can't use sudo, pwd won't work (a lot of stuff breaks, essentially). So, to hack around it, I wrote a script called keepActiveDirectoryAlive and put it in $HOME/bin.

keepActiveDirectoryAlive:


#!/bin/bash

while true
do
sleep 30s; wbinfo -u;
done


Easy! This probably isn't the best or most efficient way to do this, so if you have a better idea, I am more than welcome to suggestions.

I set this to start with GNOME in my Sessions. I also had to set wbinfo -u to run in /etc/rc.local (though I seem to remember Ubuntu/Debian ignoring this file) so that I can login through GDM. It seems to be working as expected.

VMware 6.5 Workstation, Vista guest, Intrepid host

Weird. In my Vista VM, Vista thinks my down-arrow key is right-super, the enter key is the down arrow, left-arrow is right-alt, right-arrow is right-ctrl, etc...

Keyboard map on Vista is Standard 101/102 key and on Intrepid, the map is us pc105.

Any thoughts on this? It is really annoying...