John Hobbs

I’ve used a lot of twitter clients over the years, I even wrote one back in ’08. TweetDeck is pretty good, but Air is shoddy on 64-bit Linux, and so it didn’t integrate well and would crash.

I rejected Gwibber and Choqok, just not my style. My old web standby Brizzly seems pretty lame these days too. Then I found Hotot. It’s awesome. It’s like a Linux native TweetDeck, but with a friendlier, more welcoming feel.

If you are looking for a Linux twitter client, you have got to give Hotot a try.

Related posts:

1. Linux On The Desktop
2. DigiPro Tablet And Linux
3. Submitting Assignments In Blackboard With Linux

So I’m working on a little admin interface and I decided to tail some logs. It’s in PHP and Google came up with some stuff, but they were all a bit finickey and not well documented. So I wrote my own!

Here’s the basic concept:

1. Open File
2. Seek To End
3. Loop:
   1. Seek Back By Chunk Size
   2. Read Chunk
   3. Count Newlines
   4. Stash In Buffer
   5. Break If Enough Newlines Total
4. Trim Extra Line & Cruft
5. Done!

Here’s the code:

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function tail ( $file, $lines, $max_chunk_size = 4096 ) {
 
  // We actually want to look for +1 newline so we can get the whole first line
  $rows = $lines + 1;
 
  // Open up the file
  $fh = fopen( $file, 'r' );
 
  // Go to the end
  fseek( $fh, 0, SEEK_END );
  $position = ftell( $fh );
 
  $buffer = '';
  $found_newlines = 0;
 
  $break = false;
  while( ! $break ) {
    // If we are at the start then we are done.
    if( $position <= 0 ) { break; }
 
    // We can't seek past the 0 position obviously, so figure out a good chunk size
    $chunk_size = ( $max_chunk_size > $position ) ? $position : $max_chunk_size;
 
    // Okay, now seek there and read the chunk
    $position -= $chunk_size;
    fseek( $fh, $position );
    $chunk = fread( $fh, $chunk_size );
 
    // See if there are any newlines in this chunk, count them if there are
    if( false != strpos( $chunk, "\n" ) ) {
      if( substr( $chunk, -1 ) == "\n" ) { ++$found_newlines; }
      $found_newlines += count( explode( "\n", $chunk ) );
    }
 
    // Have we exceeded our desired rows?
    if( $found_newlines > $rows ) { $break = true; }
 
    // Prepend
    $buffer = $chunk . $buffer;
  }
 
  // Now extract only the lines we requested
  $buffer = explode( "\n", $buffer );
  return implode( "\n", array_slice( $buffer, count( $buffer ) - $lines ) );
}

You can give it a try on some junk data here: http://static.velvetcache.org/pages/2010/12/03/tail-in-php/

Related posts:

1. PHP/Cron Based IP Tracker
2. Simple PHP Caching
3. Making DCOP work with Apache and PHP

I did some tinkering with an Exim server today, and it’s been probably a year at least since I las touched one. Found an invaluable cheat sheet at http://bradthemad.org/tech/notes/exim_cheatsheet.php but it’s not terribly printer friendly.

I knocked up a more printable one for myself with Abiword, hope it can help you too.

• exim_cheat_sheet.pdf (53k)
• exim_cheat_sheet.rtf (14k)

No related posts.

I’ve been a KDE user for a long time now, and I love all the new changes (except the Aero snap thing, you can turn that off though). One thing I love is Kate. I usually have two or three Kate sessions open at once, borrowing code across projects or changing things in different modules.

My problem is that Kate now defaults to only one instance, so if I call Kate from the command line with a file name, it gets added to a running instance, not a new one. If I use the KRunner to start a session, it loads in place of the current session in a running instance. I understand the reasoning here, but I want to use it the way I always have.

Easy fix! Just always make sure it is called with kate -n

You can do this with a BASH alias,

alias kate='/usr/bin/kate -n'

or more thoroughly with a wrapper script like this one from a forum post:

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#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/kate -n $@ &> /dev/null &

Easy fix!

Related posts:

1. Why I Love Kate
2. F@h Init Script Additions: throttle & unthrottle
3. Bash Line For Constant Monitoring

We recently got back from a visit to Colorado and I had taken a few sets of photos that I intended to stitch into panoramas. This was new to me, but I figured it couldn’t be too hard, right?

With the help of Hugin, I figured right.

There is all sorts of cool tweaks you can do with Hugin, but I’m just going to touch on the basic process. There is a much more complete set of tutorials here.

The process boils down to these steps:

1. Load Images
2. Match Points
3. Tweak Exposure (if you want)
4. Render

Matching Points

Matching points is just a matter of clicking on a recognizable spot in one photo and then the matching spot on the next photo. You don’t have to be spot on, it will guess the right spot for you. Pretty cool. I did about four per photo pair.

Tweak Exposure

I used auto-exposure on my photos and, as a bonus, took a few pictures with direct sunlight. Not good for clean overlaps. Here’s my initial preview image.

Yuck, it’s all washed out and ugly. No problem, we can do some tweaking on the exposure tab and it should be all better.

Render

Once everything is set up, rendering is a snap, it just takes a while.

Enjoy

Once it’s done (not more than a few minutes) you should have your panorama. It’s going to be big though, my un-cropped panorama was 14587×2416 and weighed in at a hefty 19 megs as a high quality JPEG. Wow.

Overall Hugin is a super-easy and fun way to make awesome panoramic photos with any digital camera.

Related posts:

1. F-Spot
2. Making DCOP work with Apache and PHP
3. Linux And Western Digital

A week or two ago I bought this mutli-function to replace the loathsome Lexmark I’d had for several years. I didn’t have a chance to try it out until today. Since I’m home sick I drug it into the bedroom (yes, it is big and heavy) and tinkered from the comfort of bed.

All around it’s a nice machine. It copies fine without a computer attached, and it works like a dream with Kubuntu; scans and prints. It even shows up as an image source in Gimp. Nice.

For those you wanting to get it going on Linux, don’t bother looking for the drivers on the US support site, you have to hit the Europe one. Don’t ask me why, just go here: http://software.canon-europe.com/products/0010697.asp. They offer deb’s, rpm’s and source, so it should work pretty universally on a modern system. The debs went in flawlessly for me, and poof, the thing worked.

Print quality is good, crisp and clean. Scanning is another matter. I ran through some prints I got back the other day, and there is grain everywhere. It’s not unbearable, but check the next post to see what I mean.

All in all and good Linux compatible printer/scanner, for only $49 at Wal-Mart (oh the shame)

Also it has this weird thing called a “fax”. I’ve yet to figure out what that is or why you would want one.

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2. HowTo’s