Although I cannot answer that question, I have a suggestion for alleviating your concerns: Use a meta search engine, if you can spend the additional waiting time (for me usually 2-3 times the search time of a single search engine). In search for the former I have stumpled accross Jux2 that combines searches from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Unfortunately it does not (yet?) include Ask which I think is also quite a nice search engine. Moreover, it has a slick interface (although I hate their selection of colors).
Is Google Evil?
June 11th, 2007Opera and Closing Tabs
June 10th, 2007Choice of of browsers is a delicate topic. While Firefox offers extremely good extensibiliy, it is somewhat slower than Opera. Therefore, I often switch back and forth between the two. One major annoyance of Opera has always been the behaviour of Ctrl-W that closes a tab and brings you back to the most recently used one. In Firefox you have a the choice of what will happen, and as I found out today, Opera does as well, although somewhat harder to “find”. You have to go into the shortcuts preference settings where you can change the behavior of ‘w ctrl’, as it is called there, to ‘Close Page & Switch to next page’.
Filling the Gap
June 7th, 2007Partly because it has again been a long time without a post and partly because there really might be something interesting for all of you (anyone?), you can follow a digest of newsfeeds I read with the information I deem interesting at my google reader shared items. By the way Google Reader might be worth a look as your feed reader too, as it allow you to browse your feeds from everywhere.
New Portage Features
June 26th, 2006Finally, portage supports hooks for executing abirtray functions during an emerge process. This is done through /etc/portage/bashrc and some knowledge about ebulid(1). I have created this little sample that finally frees me from making a backup of every going-to-be-unmerged package.
# file /etc/portage/bashrc
if [[ ${EBUILD_PHASE} == "setup" ]]; then
einfo “Running quickpkg…”
/usr/sbin/quickpkg `echo ${EBUILD} | rev | cut -f2 -d/ | rev`
fi
Better Listening Through Headphones
April 23rd, 2006After using Rockbox for some time I found out about some very cool features. It has so called crossfeed. This features sort of simulates the experience of listening to speakers when using headphones, by delaying and filtering part of the signal from one side and routing it to the other side. I had to have it for my laptop too. So I searched to web, without much successs. However, I found out that there is a very interesting plug-in architecture for linux (LADSPA) which is also natively supported by ALSA. So I set on to develop a little plugin. This can now be used to create a virtual sound card in ALSA that applies this headphone transformation. You can find the source and a sample ALSA-configuration here.
Battle for Wesnoth
April 6th, 2006While I am at it, I recently heard about Battle for Wesnoth a premium class open-source strategy game. You might want to take a look at it yourself:
dynamic window title for zsh session within screen
April 6th, 2006For quite some time I have now been using screen with a constantly visible window list. Up to now I had to manually set these window titles. Now I finally invested some time to get it working automatically with my favourite shell.
#.zshrc:
precmd () {
if [[ "$TERM" = "screen" ]]; then
local SHORTPWD=”`basename $PWD`”
echo -ne “\ek${SHORTPWD}/\e\\”
fi
}
preexec () {
if [[ "$TERM" = "screen" ]]; then
local CMD=”${1}”
if [[ ${#CMD} -ge 15 ]]; then
CMD=”${${(z)CMD}[1]} …”
fi
echo -ne “\ek${CMD}\e\\”
fi
}
#.screenrc
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string “%{= .W}%-Lw%{= C}%50>[%n* %t]%{-}%+Lw%= (%c)%< "
SIM History Merger
October 27th, 2005As I use SIM on several computers and wantet to escape the hassle of copying my history back and forth, I decided to write a small tool that can merge the history of two installations. Currently its a proof-of-concept implementation 
that will merge the SIM history files from two given directories into a third directory whose contents you can then copy over both installations.
Please find the source at historyMerge.cpp (after it has been moved there, capi: i could not upload the file or copy it there, so it’s still im my home-directory)
ck8+cko5
May 22nd, 2005I applied the patches of cko5 (which are on top ck6) to ck8, but I dropped supermount as I now use ivman.
series
patch-2.6.11-ck8+cko5.diff.bz2
split-out-2.6.11-ck8+cko5.tgz
The patches are to be applied on top of linux-2.6.11
References:
CK Homepage
CKO Homepage
ivman
May 19th, 2005Yesterday I stumbled across ivman, which has often been praised as the successor of supermount. I just emerge it and it worked witout any configuration. When I access the mount point (/media/cdrecorder) it automatically mounts the drive.
Sometime I will also find out how to prevent it from modifying fstab and mount the drives as non-root.
http://ivman.sourceforge.net/