Category Archives: FreeBSD

Powerful Regular Expressions Combined with Lisp in Emacs

Posted on 2013-05-16 by

Regular expressions are a powerful text transformation tool. Any UNIX geek will tell you that. It’s so deeply ingrained into our culture, that we even make jokes about it. Another thing that we also love is having a powerful extension … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fixing Shifted-Arrow Keys in 256-Color Terminals on Linux

Posted on 2013-03-22 by

The terminfo entry for “xterm-256color” that ships by default as part of ncurses-base on Debian Linux and its derivatives is a bit annoying. In particular, shifted up-arrow key presses work fine in some programs, but fail in others. It’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Mutt-like Scrolling for Gnus

Posted on 2013-03-11 by

Mutt scrolls the index of email folders up or down, one line at a time, with the press of a single key: ‘<’ or ‘>’. This is a very convenient way to skim through email folder listings, so I wrote … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Programming, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux, Gnus, Email | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Concatenating Video Files with MPlayer

Posted on 2011-05-20 by

I found out how to concatenate the parts of a video to a single file with MPlayer. It’s relatively easy, so this is just a mini-post to save it for posterity: $ cat video_part1.avi video_part2.avi … > temp.avi $ mencoder … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, Linux, Open source, Software | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Unit Testing Uncovers Bugs

Posted on 2010-03-09 by

As part of the ‘utility’ library in one of the projects we are using at work, I wrote two small wrappers around strtol() and strtoul(). These two functions support a much more useful error reporting mechanism than the plain atoi() … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Linux, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Mercurial Clones without a Working Copy

Posted on 2010-01-11 by

Mercurial repository clones can have two parts: An .hg/ subdirectory, where all the repository metadata is stored A “working copy” area, where checked out files may live The .hg/ subdirectory stores the repository metadata of the specific clone, including the … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, Mercurial, Open source, Programming, SCM, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

FOSDEM 2010

Posted on 2009-12-08 by

Earlier tonight, on December 7 2009, a friend and me booked our flight tickets for FOSDEM 2010. I am really excited that I am going to attend another open source & free software conference. It has been a while since … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Conferences, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Be Careful With SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash

Posted on 2009-11-18 by

One of the things I often do on FreeBSD machines is to install shells/mksh or shells/bash and work most of the time with a bourne-compatible shell.

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, Software | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Using the Condensed DejaVu Font-Family Variant by Default

Posted on 2009-11-07 by

The DejaVu font family is a very popular font collection for Linux and BSD systems. The font package of DejaVu includes a condensed variant; a variation of the same basic font theme that sports narrower characters.

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Linux, Open source, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

fts(3) or Avoiding to Reinvent the Wheel

Posted on 2009-07-05 by

One of the C programs I was working on this weekend had to find all files that satisfy a certain predicate and add them to a list of “pending work”. The first thing that comes to mind is probably a … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Linux, NetBSD, Open source, OpenBSD, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments