Ken's Code Pit

sfullenwider on his blog talks about the kill command, often used to terminate rogue processes. It requires a PID however to be useful, and finding PIDs are too much of a pain for lazy people such as myself.

I use a much easier and powerful alternative named pkill. pkill allows you to pass the equivalent kill command without knowing the processes PID. Most notably I used pkill to kill processes by their process name such as:

pkill -9 fire

This of course matches any processes with ‘fire’ in them, specifically I am trying to kill firefox after it’s been possessed by a flash applet gone evil.

pkill is a lot more powerful than this simple example, although I’ve never bothered to try anything more than simple regex name matching.

If you are like me, you roam around with Wi-Fi or your ISP’s DNS servers just really suck. NetworkManager has the habit of ignoring /etc/conf.d/net here and uses the crappy DNS servers.

No more!

To use OpenDNS simply add this to your /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

supersede domain-name “opendns.com”;

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

Now OpenDNS should be working for any access point you connect to. Enjoy the freedom.

So I’m in the need of a laptop bag for when I leave for college. At the moment I can’t decide on any bookbag/backpack designed for a laptop to buy. Needs to hold a decent amount of garbage plus keep my 15.4” lappy safe.

If anyone has any recommendations please let me know!

The following error occurred while opening the database: Unknown error while loading database.

This is what I was just greeted to after trying to open my KeePassX database. The problem? I just recently emerged KeePassX 0.3.2 from portage. I’m glad whoever maintains this checked if you can even open an existing database…sigh.

My Solution?

Well I rescued the old ebuild from cvs and emerged it. Behold! The database opened right up after entering my password. So I’ll export this database as a KeePassX XML file. This should work hopefully…

Nope. After saving the new database it still ain’t working. Hrmm.. Let’s run a revdep-rebuild just in case something got broken along the way. It comes up clean, so this isn’t the option. OK, maybe TwoFish is simply broken with the new version. Let’s try with AES encryption…

Success. It seems for now TwoFish is broken on my Gentoo system with the new KeePassX. I wonder if this is an issue that is affecting others?

It seems there is a bug open at sourceforge about it.

Well I took and completed my required AlcoholEdu course yesterday online after messing around with getting flash working. It was pretty meh. Filled with surveys that mostly assumed you drink so you can’t really answer them if you are like me and don’t drink at all. Suddenly halfway throughout the course I randomly needed Java for an error page it seems which totally ticked me off, but I digress.

Apparently if you enable closed captioning (which I did as it’s easier to read and listen than simply listening to something) the course is broken around module 2, after you learn about BAC levels. Switching captions off let me proceed throughout the course.

All in all the course was easy albeit massively boring. Towards the latter part I just started blasting techno music to keep me occupied while I finished up the exam.

So apparently my kernel was correctly configured for sound all along. The only problem was the very last column in alsa mixer was a device called speaker with no volume, just “mute” or “unmute”.

I unmuted this column and sound started playing, yay!

So I’ve been looking for a calendar/organizer thing for my recent Gnome install as I am not using evolution as my mail client but am using claws-mail. Being that evolution’s calendar and friends is now out of the equation, I found Sunbird from Mozilla.

At first I was skeptical, as it was made my Mozilla. After using it for a few days I am fairly impressed with it and will continue using it. I was able to get a webdav disk to sync calendars across computers through the use of CPanel. CPanel being useful? I know …scary.

Sunbird supports the basics of events and tasks. Although there isn’t a real big difference between the two when confronted to explain the difference. I guess one has a checklist todo type interface and the other doesn’t. Both however appear in the calendar view.

hint: To view tasks on the calendar right click in monthly view or multi weekly and check show tasks.

One thing that was handy was I could import a google calendar into Sunbird. Yay, no more missed Gentoo events again.

Well, if I remember to look at Sunbird…

I finally got bluetooth working last night and playing friendly with gnome. It was surprisingly simple once you have your kernel setup correctly for your bluetooth device. All what was needed was a simple merge:

% emerge -av bluez-gnome bluez-utils gnome-bluetooth

Although gnome-bluetooth isn’t required, as bluez-gnome is the important package to emerge. bluez-gnome provides a handy applet that appears in the notification area allowing you to browse and send files to other bluetooth enabled devices. It’s fairly straight-forward.

note: I did have to logout of gnome and back in after emerging bluez-gnome for the applet to appear in the notification area.

So today I learned that emerge xorg-server with USE=hal is a very bad idea. When I relogged in for something else, it hit me. My entire keyboard layout was completely hosed.

Hit the up arrow, can you guess what it did? That’s right, up arrow takes a screenshot. what?. It was the only beginning of my woes. Luckily my desktop box was still connected to irc, so I asked around and was told that a workaround from total borkage is to install xorg-server without hal.

So with a magical:

USE=-hal emerge -av xorg-server

I was on my way typing normally. This was all brought on my wanting to use the windows key as a modifier key in gnome, but it was being reported as Super L. Eventually in the end I found where to set it as Hyper in Gnome and all is well.

I hope hal fixes this soon, that was annoying… However, I did find it neat gnome had a keyboard layout for IBM->T61. Yay!

So I wasn’t really feeling the dark theme anymore, and decided to go with this green one. It’s kinda random, so we shall see how long I actually stick with it.

If only MT4 was easier to theme…