Gnome 3 Desktop Tips

Gnome 3 was released today. \o/ . Here are a few of my favourite less than obvious tricks to make your trip into the new Gnome 3 desktop a pleasant one:

1. While in Activities Overview use the mousewheel to enlarge window previews to get a closer look
2. If you already have an instance of an app open (e.g. gnome-terminal) do a ctrl-mouse click on it's app icon in the Dash to open a new instance
3. Use alt-` to cycle through multiple instances of the currently running app (e.g. gnome-terminals)
4. Press alt-tab then use the mouse to select the app to switch to
5. Resart the desktop with alt-f2 then enter `r`

Update: More tips on the gnome help. And some more.

WiFi Tether Rogers HTC Magic

I own a Rogers HTC Magic, a reasonably capable first gen Android phone. Rogers was even nice enough to release an over the air update to Android 2.1 in the summer of 2010. Unfortunately 2.1 does not have tethering by USB or WiFi enabled. I thought my only option to get tethering working was by switching to a custom ROM like Cyanogen. However that process seemed daunting.

People who know me may find that strange because I'm keen to learn and use an alternate OS on my PC; Linux. However I see that as a completely different affair. For one thing to install Linux I don't have to "hack" my home PC. And I certainly don't have to sign a waiver or risk my internet connection being disconnected. Not only that but installing a custom ROM can be complicated business. If only it were as easy as it is to install a custom Linux distribution on my home PC.

To install a custom ROM on my phone the process goes something like (I've probably gotten this wrong because I've never done it); backup important data, root my phone, install a recovery image, flash the radio, flash a custom ROM (i.e. Cyanogen), and finally reinstall all my apps and data. By that point I'am saying to myself it_shouldn't_be_that_hard. But I digress.

I have found a solution to my tethering needs that will let me tether my phone to either my Windows or Linux (sorry PDANet but you're windows only) desktops and while still using the Rogers officially blessed software for my phone. And it's as simple as it_should_be! Here we go:

1. Install UniversalAndroot (not in the Android market)

2. Run UniversalAndroot and click "Root"

3. Install Barnacle Wifi Tether (should be in the Android market)

4. Start Barnacle and go to Settings

5. Set Custom Wifi Ad-hoc to Hero/Eris

6. Click Start

An ad-hoc wifi network named "barnacle" should appear on your PC for you to connect to. Done!

Maybe one day something will prompt me to I'll install a Cyanogen rom, but it won't be for tethering.

Acid 3 Test results are in

On Fedora 10...listing highest to lowest.

• midori 0.0.21 (webkit): 100/100
• epiphany 2.24.1 (gecko 1.9) : 71/100
• firefox 3.04 (gecko 1.9.0.4): 71/100
• firefox 2.0.0.18 (gecko 1.8.1.18): 53/100

Good work midori!

VMWare Remote Console for ESX on Linux

Face it, VMware Web Access sucks. As a linux user your options for controling a VM suck. The experimental Kodiak provides some hope but I found it slow and couldn't display a remote desktop. It's in beta so I'll give them a break. Anyways the sad fact is linux users had it better with vmware-server 1.x, which is free, but then again it's not ESX. Well, new shit has come to light my friends. The other day I was poking around with the vmware-server 2.x web plugin, that was installed on my system from an experiement months ago, and noticed it can be started outside of a web browser, connect to ESX, and even offer dynamic screen resizing!

Instructions:

1. Download a copy of VMware-server-2.0 tar for linux

2. Extract vmware-server-distrib/lib/webAccess/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi from the tarball

3. Using gnome file-roller open the .xpi and extract the contents

4. Now go into the plugins directory

5. Run ./vmware-vmrc and connect to your ESX!
   

Move aside ctags

When I first discovered ctags for VIM I started see the real potential of VIM as the only text editor a coder could ever need. ctags are great, you can quickly jump to declarations/definitions of functions, variables, macro's etc. However, today I realized cscope and it's described as ctags on steroids. Lets say you not only want to see where a function is defined, but you want to see where it gets called? No problem. Or what if you want to quickly jump to all files that #include a certain header? No problem. cscope builds a database from your projects source and header files not all that different then ctags. But it's the extra functionality that make this a keeper. From inside VIM type 'help cscope'.

Got wiki?

As this article agrees, wiki's are indeed hot. I will summarize and add some of my own reasons whyevery organization should have and use one.

What is a wiki?

* a website
* anyone can add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily
* term 'wiki wiki' is an ajective from the native language of Hawaii to denote something "quick" or "fast"

Benefits?

* facilitate internal team discussions
* maintain project documentation/FAQ
* reduce the amount of corporate e-mail
* single source of knowledge
* collaborative writing
* version controlled (easy reverts of changes)
* document changes are effective immediately to all viewing the wiki
* simple syntax
* support for tables, images, attachments, etc
* searchable

I have been using MoinMoin, a wiki engine, for ~8 months and it has proved amazingly useful and changes the way we share information in the office place.

FireFox 1.07 > 1.5

Ok FireFox 1.5 seems to crash when downloading files from FileShack. Dig up an earlier release from the mozilla ftp like FireFox 1.0.7 and put on a happy face.

And for the VIM lov3rs out there, some guy has created a graphical VIM cheat sheet. The images remind me of a periodic table of the elements...for hackers. Time to fire up the plotter at the office and print this sucker out high rez to pass around.