I’ve tried various web based solutions for the obvious benefit that I can access them everywhere, however since I spend a lot of my time in Vim, I wanted something that doesn’t involve a browser, yet offers the same flexibility and access-everywhere (well, where there’s Vim) that a web based wiki offers.

That’s where Vimwiki comes in. Vimwik is a Vimball that, once installed, allows you to create linked documents using a similar syntax to Markdown, Restructed Text etc. By default, it creates a ‘vimwiki’ directory in your home directory. I simply moved that directory to my Dropbox and created a symlink to my home directory.

It also features commands to export one or all pages to linked, local HTML files and allows you to create multiple separate wikis if you want. If, like me, you’re a fan of Vim and wikis, give it a shot!

2012 should have been the year that Open Source Scotland was added to that list, but unfortunately events conspired against its organiser, Kevinjohn Gallagher, to prematurely put a stop to OSS2012.  Kevinjohn recounts in his own blog, the reasons that necessitated the cancellation.

A few weeks after hearing that OSS2012 had been cancelled, I overheard Juozas “Joe” Kaziukėnas and Michael Maclean discussing an idea on Twitter,  to organise an alternative web conference.  I knew that I wanted to help in any way I could to make their plan a success.  Shortly after, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis were on board.  With the help of collaborative tools such as HackPad and Trello, and more traditional email and Google Groups we quickly agreed on a fitting name for the conference, and launched a web site to promote it.  Whisky Web was born.

Our goal is to organise an affordable, fun, language- and platform-agnostic conference that is focused on the Web.  With just a month left until the big day, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, but all concerned are confident that we will succeed in organising an awesome conference to put Edinburgh, and indeed Scotland, firmly on the tech conference map.

We’ve been fortunate enough to receive generous sponsorship from such big names as Engine Yard / Orchestra and Ibuildings, not to mention a master-class in whisky courtesy of @WhiskyCraig from Bruichladdich.  We would of course gladly accept further sponsorship; despite our goal of minimising costs there are necessarily going to be certain unavoidable costs that must be met.  Whisky Web is formally sponsored/organised by Joe’s company, Web Species.  More details, including our list of speakers, can be found on the Whisky Web site.

The event spans two days in Scotland’s capital on the 13th and 14th of April.  The first day will see a two-track schedule of speakers presenting at The Hub.  We’ll end the day with the aforementioned introduction to Scotch whisky, and I’m sure there will be more partying in to the night.  Day two will involve a hackathon event at Edinbrugh’s exclusive Our Dynamic Earth exhibition and conference centre at the other end of the historic Royal Mile.  The precise details and schedule for the second day are still being discussed, but it will definitely involve socialising with like-minded people and hacking some code on a few open source projects.

We are very pleased with the progress made thus far, and look forward to providing all of our delegates with a conference experience they won’t forget.  However, I’d be remiss were I not to point out that from inception to execution Whisky Web will have been organised in just four short months.  Should the conference be as successful as we hope then we fully expect to offer a bigger and better Whisky Web in future years.

So, if you haven’t bought a ticket yet and want to see what Edinburgh and the Scottish web community has to offer, don’t hesitate; act now and get your ticket while they’re still available, at the attractive price of just £50!

• http://www.webupd8.org/2010/10/what-to-do-after-fresh-ubuntu-1010.html
• http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/10-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat/
• http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/linux-distributions/linux-distributions4-ubuntu/1158-top-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-1010-marevick-meerkat
• http://debianhelp.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/to-do-list-after-installing-ubuntu-10-10-aka-maverick-meerkat/
• https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized
• http://www.n00bsonubuntu.net/content/install-bisigi-and-equinox-themes-on-ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat/
• http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/10/nautilus-elementary-in-ubuntu-maverick.html
• http://www.webupd8.org/2010/10/medibuntu-repository-is-available-for.html
• http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/10/9-things-i-did-after-installing-brand.html

And some extra apps that I find uesful:

• Vim
• Shutter
• LAMP, PHPUnit, Pear, XDebug, Phing
• SQLite3
• Ubuntu Tweak
• Firefox (from Mozilla, not Maverick repo)
• Thunderbird (from Mozilla, not Maverick repo)
•  Dropbox
• Chrome
• Bamsamiq
• Adobe Air
• Flash Plugins
• Solarized Vim Scheme
• Adobe Acrobat
• LaTeX (texlive-full)
• Spotify
• Virtualbox

I also keep my key dot files in a Subversion repository that I can check out, and symlink into place.  There may be more streamlined approaches, but this serves my purposes.

I had restored the laptop in this manner at least once in the past, I can’t recall the reason, but I am sure I’d done it.  As with most laptops bought these days, you don’t get a proper Windows 7 installation disk, instead you get some form of cut-down shonky recovery solution.  In my case, this was a combination of a recover partition and an HP utility that could be run from Windows to create recovery disks from that partition.  I have since discovered (too late) that the recovery can be started from within Windows without the need to reboot with the first of the recovery disks inserted.  This option makes the disks redundant, unless you’re in my position where you no longer have a bootable Windows installation.

I followed what I thought to be the appropriate procedure of booting from the first disk, following the instructions and eventually being told to remove disk three and restart the machine.  When the machine restarted, some sort of Windows 7 had started, with a full screen window titled ‘Restoration Incomplete’.  I was unable to start the task manager or launch any other applications to investigate further.

The window had three buttons: ‘Save Log’, ‘View Details’ and ‘Retry’.  Clicking ‘Save Log’ saved a password-protected zip file to the first available USB storage device — I wasn’t given an option of where I’d like to save the file.  I also had no idea why the file was password-protected, nor what the password was.

The next option, ‘View Details’, appeared to do nothing.  The final ‘Retry’ button asked me to re-insert the first disk.  Upon doing so, the disk was ejected and the message was redisplayed.  I tried the restore three times to be sure the problem was consistent and not a fluke.  Having booted from an Ubuntu disk, I used cfdisk and gparted to find out what had actually been done to the disk after the apparent failure.  The previously pristine disk now had three partitions, one of which was flagged as bootable.  Mounting this partition revealed a file that was named so as to suggest it was some sort of error flag.  I deleted the file and rebooted.

I still got the error, but I was also able to start the task manager.  I killed the process responsible for the recovery error window, and the setup continued as hoped.  A progress window suggested files were being installed, and at one point I even caught a glimpse of a Windows 7 task bar!  However, close to the end, the error window appeared again and I was denied access to the task manager.  Subsequent attempts at rebooting consistently failed with the same error.

I tried calling HP to see if they could offer any help.  The representative I spoke to suggested that I’d need to create the recovery disks — the ones I had already explained that I had created.  I told the representative that I had previously used these disks without error, so clearly the HP utility that was originally run didn’t create faulty disks.  However, now absent a working Windows 7 installation I couldn’t try again.  The only option that the HP representative offered me was to pay for them to send me a set of the same disks for my particular machine, at a cost of £50 and with no guarantee that they would work.  No thanks!

Microsoft next.  The license sticker on the bottom of my laptop has worn away, and perhaps I should have noted the number down somewhere.  I tried calling Microsoft to see if they could tell me my license number given a laptop model and serial number.  I was told that nobody kept that information, and that in my particular case I’d have no option but to buy a new copy.

So, in summary a laptop that I purchased came pre-installed with an operating system and a method for restoring that operating system to its original state;  however, that restoration process isn’t fit for purpose.  Despite Windows 7 — and in my mind that ability to rebuild the laptop to it’s original state — being included in the cost of the laptop, I now have to fork out a third of my anticipated sale price to have a shot of selling.

This post isn’t meant to be pro-Linux rhetoric or a piece of Windows- or Microsoft-bashing, but it highlights quite nicely one of the non-technical reasons I choose Linux over Windows.  I feel utterly frustrated having no recourse, no way to reinstall Windows.  Maybe I should pirate a copy?

Thankfully, the TexLive installation is quite modular, and it’s relatively straight forward to install new environments and packages. Through trial and error, I’ve discovered the missing packages required to use glossaries are: glossary, glossaries, xfor and etoolbox.

Firstly, we need to find the location to install local tex packages

[max@dolphin ~] $ kpsewhich -expand-var "\$TEXMFLOCAL"
/usr/local/share/texmf

Now that we know where to install the packages, we can download and install them. The following redacted typescript will download and extract the packages to the appropriate local location and rebuild the LaTeX package map.

[max@dolphin ~] $ wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/glossary.zip -P /tmp/
[max@dolphin ~] $ wget http://mirrors.ctan.org/install/macros/latex/contrib/glossaries.tds.zip -P /tmp/
[max@dolphin ~] $ wget http://mirrors.ctan.org/install/macros/latex/contrib/xfor.tds.zip -P /tmp/
[max@dolphin ~] $ wget http://mirrors.ctan.org/install/macros/latex/contrib/etoolbox.tds.zip -P /tmp/
[max@dolphin ~] $ sudo unzip /tmp/glossaries.tds.zip -d /usr/local/share/texmf
[max@dolphin ~] $ sudo unzip /tmp/xfor.tds.zip -d /usr/local/share/texmf
[max@dolphin ~] $ sudo unzip /tmp/etoolbox.tds.zip -d /usr/local/share/texmf
[max@dolphin ~] $ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/{contrib,html}
[max@dolphin ~] $ cd /tmp/
[max@dolphin ~] $ unzip glossary.zip && cd glossary
[max@dolphin glossary] $ latex glossary.ins
[max@dolphin glossary] $ sudo cp glossary.sty /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/contrib/
[max@dolphin glossary] $ sudo cp glossary.perl /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/html/
[max@dolphin glossary] $ cd /usr/local/share/texmf/
[max@dolphin glossary] $ sudo texhash