Flying Seagull - Home

ctags with objective-c and css support

2010-03-25T14:48:00Z

The default ex-ctags package does not support css or obj-c tags.

I added the latest css and objective-c patches I could find to the current ctags trunk.

You can find it on my github page here

HTH

3G-Modding your eee 1000he hackintosh

2010-03-14T22:40:00Z

As some of you may know I’ve been using snow leopard on my eee 1000he for quite a while(You can still get the modded DSDT I use on my system from my github page)

Here’s a list of items I got myself:

a sim card(yeah, you’ll laugh, I actually forgot about this part… :P)
a 3G minipci card. i used an Option 378 which is quite cheap. I will explain later… Some people use a sierra wireless mc8775
a minipci socket, for example this one from farnell
a sim slot 8 pin

I won’t cover the details on soldering the sim and minipci socket as it’s explained on the eeepc user forum

A word of advice before trying to solder the sockets onto the board. You might wanna scrape of the surface of the solder pads on the mainboard first, as that will make it easier for you.

As described on the forum post you’ll need to short the 3.3V line the USB lines and a fourth one for powering up the minipci socket aside from soldering the sim slot.

The images below are a courtesy of dementho from the eee forums:

The real issue arose when I actually tried to initialize the card in MacOS. Turns out the Option cards start in ZeroCD mode and need to be initialized in modem mode prior to be usable. Well, normally you would just install the driver and be done with it but not so with normal unlocked GTM378 cards you buy on ebay.

My GTM378 card came with an old firmware. So the vendor id was 0×5c6(qualcomm) and product id 0×1000, whereas the vendorId should be 0×0af0(Option NV). Naturally the Globesurfer 7.2 osx drivers don’t work with this device. Not even if you hardcode the product and device id into the drivers plists.

The solution is to debrand your GTM378 by finding the superfire firmware of any GTM378 card and patching it to accept your card as target. That is Globesurfer ICON 7.2 and a whole bunch of others. The firmware I have here is 2.5.11hD I think.

Enable logging in the updater:

  8.144: CPagePreparation::Do, Zaltys detected properly
 14.618: CPagePreparation::Do, product:  GlobeSurfer ICON 7.2 E.
 14.618: CPagePreparation::Do, code:  MO0201-10959.
 14.618: CPagePreparation::Do: unsupported card (MO0201-10959).

MO0201-10959 is your target. search for

5400610068006f006d0061

which is essentially Tahoma in hex. The second occurance should lead you to your target. See below:

Open the installer in a hex editor and write your card id in the installer. I uploaded the firmware here. That should allow you to upgrade your card without problems. After that you can download the snow leopard drivers from the ICON 225 support page

Ironically they work fine with the GTM378 and fix a lot of issues the GTM378 and ICON 7.2 drivers have(since they’re essentially the same just newer).

HTH

... as for me, I’m enjoying the 3g mod on my hackintosh!

rabbitmq erlang crash

2009-06-25T20:29:00Z

So, we’ve been at the reboot:http://reboot.dk for a while now and it’s been a fun time until I decided to rename one of the nodes.

Guess what… suddenly rabbitmq stops working. Apparently the database stops working, when you change your hostname. Just running:

rabbitmq-server --install

will still crash with the same error.

The solution is to delete:

rm -rf /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia/rabbit

and rerun rabbitmq install.

rabbitmq-server --install

HTH

awesome with gentoo-prefix

2009-05-21T20:40:00Z

I just updated a whole bunch of ebuilds for gentoo-prefix you can find the overlay here.

Just clone it and put it somewhere in your $EPREFIX/usr/local/portage then add that folder to your make.conf

In my case the make.conf looks as follows:

USE="unicode nls ruby perl xterm-color X"
USE="$USE xcb svg"
USE="$USE png jpeg mmx bzip2"
CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -march=nocona"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY='/opt/local/gentoo/usr/local/portage/my-overlay'

Then simply doing a:

emerge hsetroot
USE=osx emerge awesome rxvt-unicode

Instead of USE=osx you could also do a:

mkdir -p $EPREFIX/etc/portage/package.use
echo 'x11-terms/rxvt-unicode osx' > $EPREFIX/etc/portage/package.use/rxvt

Anyway, that should be enough to install awesome 3.2.1 and rxvt-unicode with copy&paste support for osx.

gentoo osx

2009-05-20T09:46:00Z

Update: I also forgot to run the emerge -u world after the bootstrap. So you might want to do that yourself.

Update2: if libXt fails to build try

emerge '<automake-1.10'

So, I was growing more and more tired of fink and macports and hoping that there something portage like for osx.

I looked around and found this article on gentoo-macos, which seemed bad. But after a quick visit in the #gentoo irc channel it turned out that gentoo-mac had been merged into gentoo prefix.

There is a nice tutorial on getting gentoo-prefix running on macosx. It’s pretty straightforward…

However, to save you guys some compilation and setup time, I packaged my “somewhat stage3” of the gentoo folder and uploaded it. You can download it here. It contains pretty much the base system and also mysql5, git, svn and git-svn. No ruby but just emerge it as you please.

Extract it and put something along these lines into your shell config:

export EPREFIX="/opt/local/gentoo"
export PATH="$EPREFIX/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/bin:$PATH"

I know /opt/local/gentoo wasn’t such a wise choice but well whatever.

A couple of caveats:

You need to be on leopard with a core2duo with my package
glib doesn’t get paste the automake on my system(which is obviously bad). However, looking into it. UPDATE if it still doesn’t work just emerge gtk-doc-am
Seems like xcb is masked. Will let you know if I find out why UPDATE xcb works fine
pango doesn’t detect Xquartz cairo. Ie. gentoo portage is not as tolerant as macports using pkgconfig files from whereever they’re installed on your system. Don’t get me wrong, this is actually a good thing. I’ll make an ebuild in time I guess. UPDATE no problem either, the pango package was broken, but its fixed now

Another useful link for ‘creating’ your own packages with ecopy is available here. For the tutorial on that page you will also need to install(emerge) the following:

emerge portage-utils
emerge gentoolkit-dev

Oh and… I think it’s already emerge’d in the “stage3” I uploaded…

hope you like it. I know I do.

open urxvt here and open in vim applescript

2009-04-26T17:43:00Z

Update: noticed a little bug in the script, the right way to do it should be this:

    set disp_no to do shell script "disp_no=($( ps -awx | grep -F 'bin/X' | awk '{print $(NF-2)}' | grep -e \":[0-9]\"  )); if [[ -n $disp_no ]];then DISPLAY=${disp_no}.0; else DISPLAY=:0.0; fi;echo $DISPLAY"

if you have tcp forward off, maybe without $NF if it’s enabled but anyway grep -F X11.app won’t work with newer X versions

If you don’t already know I use x11 and a selfcompiled terminal version of vim for all my work. If you’re in OS-X you might still want to run text files in your favorite editor, and have the ability to open the terminal in the current finder version for whatever reason.

I started using Fastscripts Light a long time ago and it’s a pretty nifty little app. The applescript is based a bit on the OpenInTerminal applescript.

However, for some reason when I run the scripts from Fastscripts via hotkey the DISPLAY variable is wrong as follows:

/tmp/launch-9el5tK/:0

I use the following in my shell config files(sorry, it’s not really mine, but I have no idea who I got it from)

# Set the DISPLAY variable -- works for Apple X11 with Fast User Switching

if [[ -z $DISPLAY && -z $SSH_CONNECTION ]]; then
    disp_no=($( ps -awx | grep -F X11.app | awk '{print $NF}' | grep -e ":[0-9]"  ))
    if [[ -n $disp_no ]];then
        export DISPLAY=${disp_no}.0
    else
        export DISPLAY=:0.0
    fi
    echo "DISPLAY has been set to $DISPLAY"
fi

Anyway, the to fix the openinrxvt all you need to do is change it the following way:

    disp_no=($( ps -awx | grep -F X11.app | awk '{print $NF}' | grep -e ":[0-9]"  ))
    if [[ -n $disp_no ]];then
        DISPLAY=${disp_no}.0
    else
        DISPLAY=:0.0
    fi
    echo $DISPLAY

compressed, the Applescript looks as follows:

    set disp_no to do shell script "disp_no=($( ps -awx | grep -F X11.app | awk '{print $NF}' | grep -e \":[0-9]\"  )); if [[ -n $disp_no ]];then DISPLAY=${disp_no}.0; else DISPLAY=:0.0; fi;echo $DISPLAY"

    do shell script "env DISPLAY=" & disp_no & " /opt/local/bin/urxvt -cd '" & the_path & "' &> /dev/null &"
    tell application "X11" to activate

Running vim is pretty much the same except that you will need to compile a console version with the server option, and then run the original instance with—servername VIM (or whatever servername you might want to use).

The relevant launch part of the Applescript looks like this:

    do shell script "env DISPLAY=" & disp_no & " /opt/local/vim/bin/vim --remote \"" & the_path & "\" &> /dev/null &"

You can get the complete openinrxvt script here and the run in vim script here

After you place them into your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder folder you can use Fastscripts:fastscripts to create Finder specific hotkeys.

You might also be interested in a modified version of the script that uses the client/daemon set up of urxvt, which I talked about earlier.

    do shell script "env RXVT_SOCKET=$HOME/.rxvt_socket DISPLAY=" & disp_no & " /opt/local/bin/urxvtc -cd '" & the_path & "' &> /dev/null &"

cutehg in OSX

2009-04-25T16:43:00Z

UPDATE: murky native osx mercurial client is out

sed -i '' -e 's/port:tk//' /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/lang/python26/Portfile

sudo port install python26
sudo port install py26-sip

Pyqt4 seemed to have problems with qt4.5 so I installed it with the QT available from the Trolltech website.

wget http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/static/Downloads/PyQt4/PyQt-mac-gpl-4.4.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf PyQt-mac-gpl-4.4.4.tar.gz
cd PyQt-mac-gpl-4.4.4
python2.6 ./configure.py -q /Developer/Tools/Qt/qmake
make install

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/bfrog/cutehg-stable/
cd cutehg-stable
python2.6 setup.py install

After you install everything you might get an annoying bug looking as follows while using the annotate or history command:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128) pyqt4

checking the python shell gives this:

python2.6
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'

This is easily fixed by doing:

echo "import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')" > /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/sitecustomize.py

What i don’t really get is why python won’t just use my LC_LOCALE/ALL but whatever.

HTH

ViInutMate on github

2009-04-09T20:16:00Z

I noticed some people try to reach that viinputmate page, which was supposed to be a better vi plugin for textmate but there’s nothing on it…

Well, I never bothered “finishing” it. I did just push what I had on github though. However, since I didn’t version anything it’s just a big blob difference from the sourceforge thing. Maybe you’ll have some use for it, but I pretty much abandoned it a long time ago.

Anyway, long story short here it is: http://github.com/fishman/viinputmate/tree/viinputmate

Vim & Rails

2009-04-09T09:53:00Z

I did a little write up on my general vim workflow and presented it at the hamburg rails user group meeting . I didn’t quite manage to get it as smooth as I originally planned, but anyway you can find the slides here

It was intended to be more like Andrei Zmievski VIM for (PHP) programmers but well, maybe next time.

I’ll probably focus more on getting a fast WOW! effect on the listeners and then let them ask the questions themselves, instead of trying to explain everything and failing because I keep finding new, interesting things to show…

Organizing Entourage in Threads

2009-03-31T10:29:00Z

UPDATE: it’s a lot easier in outlook 2003 since group by conversation actually works as advertised

Everybody knows Outlook and most people know Entourage(the crappy osx version of Outlook). I call them the worst possible way of managing your email.

Why? Because by default the grouped email view does not group them by threads!

I’ve had some lengthy discussions with a good friend of mine I’m working with about he should group his mails by threads. But guess what, turns out I’m wrong. Entourage doesn’t even allow you to do that out of the box. But fear not young padawan there is a way(well at least somewhat …)

Default Entourage looks like this:

After adding a custom sort condition it looks like this:

It’s quite simple:

click on the arrange and click on Edit Custom Arrangements…
click on New to create a new arrangement
Name it threaded view or whatever
set group items by: Conversation
set sort groups by Received Newest on top
set sort items within groups by Conversation Index Newest on top
set default display for groups: Collapsed
click ok
right click on arrange again and select threaded view

The only thing you need to do now is convince your coworkers to set their reply header to not append infinite amounts of AW: in front of their messages since this crappy outlook clone will make a thread for each one of them, meaning that you can actually have a thead with AW: AW: AW: random trash RE: AW: AW: AW: random trash thanks to outlook or outlook express users.

Have fun

Blog redesign...

2009-03-02T23:21:00Z

As you can see I changed a lot on the site. It’s not yet completely working but it’s coming, so bear with me please…

A prettier Terminal in OS-X Part 3 (urxvt and screen)

2009-02-21T07:04:00Z

I was a bit annoyed of having to set TERM=xterm-256color. A more or less proper solution can be found on the rxvt-unicode ml from John Eikenberry.

cd ~
infocmp -L rxvt-unicode > rxvt-unicode.terminfo
sed -i '' 's/#256/#32767/' rxvt-unicode.terminfo
sed -i '' 's/#88/#256/' rxvt-unicode.terminfo
if [ ! -e .terminfo ]; then
mkdir .terminfo
fi
tic -o .terminfo/ rxvt-unicode.terminfo
rm rxvt-unicode.terminfo

I’ve also largely assimilated Bart’s configs. You can find them and the screenrc here .

A prettier Terminal in OS-X Part 2 (urxvt and more awesomeness)

2009-02-14T08:54:00Z

Update: thanks to Sung Pae you don’t need to rename perl, you can just set the environment variable:

    PERL=/usr/bin/perl ./configure --foo --bar ...

Update2: you also no longer need the system perl at all along with the double free patch. since my own macosx-clipboard got released with urxvt 9.07 see the changelog here it does depend on Mac-Pasteboard though.

Last time I explained a bit on how to get awesome going. There is a few tuning settings you can do for better awesome usage…

First of all I like the snap font frome the artwiz package for my title bar:

mkdir ~/.fonts
wget http://www.flyingseagull.de/blog/assets/artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2
tar xjvf artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2
mv artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3/snap.pcf ~/.fonts
fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts

Second you might like to have the right apple key as mod and the left one as alt. That way you can have awesome use it’s hotkeys using mod2 and have programs like irssi hook the left apple key as alt while letting your option key work for apostrophes and the like. Note that I use us dvorak as default layout and thus don’t have äöü etc. directly on the keyboard… So YMMV and you might want to adjust the following to your needs. I use the following in my ~/.xmodmap

! left apple key becomes alt 
! and right one stays meta
clear mod1
clear mod2
keycode 71 = Alt_L
add mod2 = Alt_L
keycode 63 = Meta_L
add mod1 = Meta_L

I have attached my Xdefaults and awesomerc. After disabling the “Enable key equivalents under X11” in Xquartz preferences you can bind awesome keys the way you want them. With my config, leaving X11 would be apple-shift-w. The reason I don’t use Apple-Q is that there is no prompt on exit and in very rare cases the Apple-Q gets passed through from another app you close on top of Xquartz. Apple-W properly closes windows and so on. You should just check the config for the hotkeys.

Oh and don’t forget to do a:

sed -i '' 's/timebomb/YOURUSER/g' ~/.Xdefaults

if you decide to use my Xdefaults.

You should also disable the xterm autolaunch in Xquartz. As the UserFAQ states the following should do the trick:

defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true

Personally I use terminus-font for coding and terminal activity. You can install it with:

sudo port install terminus-font

Again, you might, or might not like it, in which case you will probably like to change your terminals font in the Xdefaults after copying it to ~/.Xdefaults.

Now if you look at my past post, I launch urxvtd in my xinitrc and my awesomerc refers to urxvtc and you might wonder wtf is does, as I did. Well, basically it will just launch one urxvt daemon and many clients. That way the memory usage gets cut down by a lot and the launch times drop a lot too.

Now there is a little issue with urxvt in osx. If you install it through macports it will use macports perl. Why is that such a problem? As far as I know it doesn’t include the obj-c bindings. Which means that you won’t be able to copy and paste without mouse or shift-insert(which wouldn’t be such a problem if we had insert keys on our mac keyboards). I admit there is other ways to handle it, but I settled with the following solution… Basically all you do is compile urxvt with stock perl and patch it.

Before you do the thing below you will probably want to backup ports perl5

#!/bin/sh

mv /opt/local/bin/perl5 /opt/local/bin/perl5bak
ln -s /usr/bin/perl /opt/local/bin/perl5
wget http://dist.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/rxvt-unicode-9.06.tar.bz2
tar xjvf rxvt-unicode-9.06.tar.bz2
cd rxvt-unicode-9.06
patch -p1 < doc/urxvt-8.2-256color.patch
patch -p0 < ../rxvtperl-objc-doublefree.diff
./configure --prefix=/opt/local --enable-xterm-colors=256
find . -name Makefile -exec sed -i '' 's/-arch ppc//g' '{}' \;
cd src 
make install
cd ../doc
make install
mv /opt/local/bin/perl5bak /opt/local/bin/perl5

Of course you need to replace ppc with i386 on a g4. Stock perl will make the configure try to build urxvt as universal build and fail (rxvtperl-objc-doublefree.diff is available here).

You might wonder why the double free patch is not included in the distribution of urxvt. Well apparently it’s not that common. I haven’t tried it on other systems, but it seems to be only happening when the objc bridge is loaded in urxvt(i.e. the macosx-clipboard plugin included in urxvt).

Another nice thing I use in urxvt is Barts url-yanking plugin. You can change the hotkeys in the Xdefaults I posted above. Just copy mark-and-yank into ~/.urxvt and you’re set. Basically I can cycle through urls in my console with M-U and launch them in the default browser upon pressing enter…. nifty!

Proper snippets for vim... wooohoooo!

2009-02-13T05:37:00Z

For a very long time vim has had only snippets plugins, which were using nasty regex hacks to get TextMate like snippets going…

Also related to the fact that vim for example does not move marks when you do any editing action. I.e. try putting a mark on a specific position in vim, then start deleting in front of the mark and the mark will still stay on the same column. Thus it’s not really trivial to track where the next position of the snippet should start when you want to jump to it.

The solution found in most snippets plugins for vim is to use a region like <++> and to search for it on your snippet expansion trigger key. Imaps, snippetsemu all do it that way. While snippetsEmu used to be the closest to TextMate behavior it was also the most buggy.

On a sidenote vim actually does movement of marks when you join two lines with mark_col_adjust, but I found it to be far from trivial to just make all editing operations, have that behavior on marks. Anyway, now there’s a new contender called snipMate. It actually no longer relies on that regex expansion described above and from what I can tell it’s pretty nifty.

I suggest you give it a try. Here’s a comment on how it works by the author:

00:14 [  meese ] timebomb: well essentially, each snippet is stored
as a string with each tab stop being specified by "${1}", "${2}", etc., 
which are removed once the snippet is expanded. Before that, though, 
the plugin stores the position of each "${1}" according to its position
on the line in a list, and the count of "\n"'s before that to determine
which line number it's on via some regexes; then it keeps track of 
your position by updating the list each ti

On a side note the latest version properly honors expandtab options, however still reading the ts option, there’s a little fix below, but I bet Michael will incorporate it later today.

@@ -214,7 +214,7 @@
                let i += 1
            endw
            " expand tabs to spaces if 'expandtab' is set
-            if &et | let snippet = substitute(snippet, '\t', repeat(' ', &ts), 'g') | en
+            if &et | let snippet = substitute(snippet, '\t', repeat(' ', &sts), 'g') | en

            let snip = split(substitute(snippet, '$\d\|${\d.\{-}}', '', 'g'), "\n", 1)
            if afterCursor != '' | let snip[-1] .= afterCursor | en

Anyway, rock on. Happy vimming, I bet you’ll enjoy it.

A prettier Terminal in OS-X Part 1 (awesome is awesome!)

2009-01-18T09:24:00Z

o I recently switched over to awesomewm on my desktop because either the desktop wm’s suck(kde,gnome) or fluxbox,fvwm weren’t quite what I needed.

So I went looking for a good terminal that supports 256 colors. There’s mrxvt and whatnot, but again the Probleme with these is that either utf-8 is missing or they’re in some other way ugly, dependency wise or whatever.

Then there’s this nifty term called urxvt(apparently it doesn’t seem to follow ecma-48?). Anyway, I like it and although iTerm does support 256 colors, it’s rather slow imho.

The end result could look like this…

The dependencies I used for installing awesome look as follows:

pango
imlib2
libconfuse
XQuartz (2.3.2.1 at the time of this writing)

If you use macports 1.5 and XQuartz 2.3.2.1 you should remove the cairo dependency from pango. Otherwise awesome might link to XQuartz cairo while pango links to macports cairo causing an annoying crash while restarting, connecting the second head or closing X11.

sudo perl -ni -e 'print unless /pkgconfig\/cairo/' /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/x11/pango/Portfile

then you can probably do the following to install awesome(awesome.diff fixes a configure issue on osx, you can find it here ):

sudo port install pango imlib2 libconfuse

wget http://awesome.naquadah.org/download/awesome-2.3.4.tar.bz2
tar xjvf awesome-2.3.4.tar.bz2
cd awesome-2.3.4

patch -p1 < ../awesome.diff

./configure --prefix=/opt/local
make

The build will probably fail somewhere in between because of defconfig.h . If so you can use the following command to fix it:

# this can probably done much better but meh, i don't know sed syntax too well, -i '' means edit in place
sed -i '' -e 's/DEFAULT_CONFIG =.*$/DEFAULT_CONFIG = "\\/' -e 's/-n ".*$//' -e '/./!d' defconfig.h

Afterwards finishing the build you will probably want to create an ~/.xinitrc file and add the following to it:

#!/bin/sh

#unless you want the annoying bells or visual bells keep the following 2 lines
xset b off 
xset b 0 0 0 

# the fork switch won't work on osx, so no -f here
export RXVT_SOCKET=$HOME/.rxvt_socket
urxvtd -q -o &

awesome

Also if you use an exotic shell config(eg. with zsh) it might break X11 a bit unless you put the following in your ~/.x11run

#!/bin/bash

exec -l "bash" --login -c 'exec "${@}"' - "${@}"

Don’t forget to run

chmod +x ~/.x11run

afterwards(note this is a pretty new feature of XQuartz.

I’ll continue next time on how to setup urxvt. Meanwhile you can use xterm which also has 256 color support, however XQuartz xterm won’t detect terminus font if you decide to use a non antialiased font.