Muffin Research Labs » Snippets

Insert a tab character in vim when expand tabs is on

Stuart Colville — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:00:10 +0000

I have vim set-up to use spaces in place of tabs. Sometimes you need to use an actual tab e.g. editing a Makefile. Now whilst it’s possible to change settings so that tabs are used for specific files, a quick tip to remember is to simply type in insert mode:

Ctrl+v tab

That is Ctrl and “V” and hit the tab key, et voila you’ve entered an actual tab.

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory

Stuart Colville — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:54:18 +0000

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir. bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M" bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found

Stuart Colville — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 01:10:37 +0000

When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Brewing with a French Press

Stuart Colville — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:26:33 +0000

My Coffee Brewing alter ego has been hard at work on a post about brewing the perfect French Press. Warning contains extreme coffee nerdery, though don’t let that put you off!

Using Loggerhead with mod_wsgi

Stuart Colville — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:09:37 +0000

Here’s a post I wrote over on the Project Fondue Blog about our use of Loggerhead with mod_wsgi under Apache. Loggerhead is the rather nice branch viewer for bazaar branches as used on Launchpad.net.

If you’re not already subscribed to the Project Fondue blog feed then I can recommend it, as there should be some interesting posts coming out of there in the coming months (yes I’m unashamedly biased!).

Ubuntu: Turn off changing workspace with mouse wheel

Stuart Colville — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:21:30 +0000

I found the changing with the workspace with the mouse wheel really annoying. To disable it go to System => Preferences => CompizConfig (available if the compizconfig-settings-manager package is installed) and uncheck “Viewport Switcher” which is under the “Desktop” heading.

Ubuntu: Mounting a TrueCrypt volume at startup or from the CLI

Stuart Colville — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:07:48 +0000

All you need is a mount point e.g: mkdir /media/ and then use the following: truecrypt /path/to/truecrypt/diskimage /media/. This is handy when you want to mount a truecrypt image at start-up or just do it quickly from a shell. It’s far more direct than using the GUI.

Mac OSX: Visor Development on Github

Stuart Colville — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:24:35 +0000

I’ve been using Visor (the drop-down Quake style terminal) for a little while and recently discovered the development of the project has moved to github from it’s original home at blacktree. The latest versions of the app fix a lot of the annoying niggles with the last blacktree versions. Well worth updating to the latest and greatest if you haven’t already http://github.com/darwin/visor/tree/master.

Install lxml on OSX

Stuart Colville — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:10:30 +0000

Thanks to this post on lxml from Ian Bicking I’ve found the following command is all that’s required to install lxml on Mac OSX:

STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install 'lxml>=2.2beta4' STATIC_DEPS=true sudo easy_install 'lxml>=2.2beta4'

The first run without “sudo” pulls down the necessary libxml and libxslt and then the second run provides the permissions to install the egg.

EuroDjangoCon Prague

Stuart Colville — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:55:09 +0000

Rob Lofthouse is putting on a European DjangoCon event in the beautiful city of Prague:

EuroDjangoCon is a Django conference that aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. We aim to educate, provoke thought and bring people together to turn ideas into working code.

For more info and to register see http://euro.djangocon.org/