Tales From The Geek Side

At work I generally use Windows XP. For a recent project I needed to use a full blown Fedora installation. I would have preferred to use Debian but it wasn’t my choice.

I tried using Evolution at home but I didn’t like it. I used the recent version in Debian unstable. It would crash very often when I closed the app. There was a lot about it that I didn’t like including the feeling that it was over engineered (GLOVES!). I am now trying out Thunderbird. I’ve been a longtime user of mutt but I want to try new clients.

Anyhow, running Fedora at work gave me the opportunity to try Evolution connecting to an Exchange server. This is integral to many businesses and if I’m ever going to run Debian at work I need this ability from a mail client.

Generally it went well. I was able to send and recieve messages and even edit my calendar without problems. The one stumbling block that I ran into was that the global address book wasn’t available to me. Even after entering in the hostname of the global catalog server I still couldn’t access the GAL.

Finally this post gave me the information I needed to get it to work. The trick is to enter your domain name with your username. The format of this field does not follow typical Microsoft notation. The Microsoft notation for this is $DOMAIN_NAME>\$USER_NAME. The Evolution developers chose to use a forward slash. In addition it never occurred to me that I would need to enter the domain name information. I was able to access my email using just my username but I couldn’t access the Global Address List without the domain name. The username field in Evolution is located in the Account Editor on the Receiving Email tab. You also need to enter the hostname of your global catalog server (often the domain controller) on the receiving options page.

After entering the above information correctly and suffering a couple of crashes from Evolution things started to work right. Now I have address completion for every contact in the company as well as my personal contact list. I’m impressed that the Evolution developers were able to interoperate with Exchange but I would prefer something that isn’t such a blatant clone of Outlook.

I’m an emacs user, there I said it.

As an emacs user I use the ctrl key a lot. I don’t know the history of it all but at some point someone decided it would be a good idea to put Caps Lock next to the ‘a’ key and move the ctrl key way down to the bottom of the board forcing emacs users to scrunch their pinky fingers like a contortionist. I don’t like the person that made this decision.

I usually just use xmodmap to make Caps Lock become a second ctrl key. However I’ve become increasingly annoyed when I’m on a console. I finally took the time to learn how to change the keymap in the console. I used the information in the previous link (at the bottom of the page) to make Caps Lock go away because Caps Lock is useful only to those who wish to annoy people to death via email, forums, or usenet.

On my Debian systems I edit ‘/usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz’. I change ‘keycode 58 = Caps_Lock’ to be ‘keycode 58 = Control’. And then life is good again.

keycode  58 = Ca

Gnome and KDE implement a recyle bin for the innevitable times when you delete something on accident. I feel more comfortable using a command line shell and so when I make these mistakes it hurts…a lot.

Last week I deleted a couple days worth of work. I had nearly finished implementing a driver and was working on organizing my subversion project for it. I hadn’t commited the code yet (big mistake) because I wanted to change file names before I imported it. That was really stupid because SVN allows you to efficiently and reasily change names of versioned files and to retain their change history.

I issued `svn add` to my directory of code. I noticed quite a few files that I didn’t want in the tree so I issued `svn rm`. SVN informed me that there were local modifications and so it was refusing to remove the directory. I then issued `svn rm –force` and the directory was deleted! I should have issued `svn revert` but I didn’t. I made a lot of mistakes that led to the lost of a few days of work.

I tried to use midnight commander to recover the files. Midnight Commander allows file recovery by changing to a special directory (cd /#undel:/dev/hda1 for example). Unfortunately Fedora Core used LVM and the actual block device was /dev/mapper/blah-blah-blah and Midnight Commander requires the device to be exactly under dev. I made a sym-link and tried again. I could see deleted inodes but I couldn’t view the contents nor could I save the inodes. Another mistake I made was that I didn’t immediately unmount the affected file system.

Next I rebooted using Fedora’s Rescue CD (disc 1 of the install set, bott using `linux rescue`). That included a copy of debugfs which also allows you to list, view, and copy deleted inodes. I was able to view the inodes with debugfs but unfortunately the files I needed were nowhere to be seen. I stayed late on a Friday night to redo the work I had lost.

On Saturday a friend reminded me just how stupid I was. I’m an emacs user and I have emacs configured to keep multiple backup copies of files. I can’t stand the default behavior of leaving the backup files in the current directory so I save them to ~/.saves. On Sunday I went into work and found the file(s) that I needed. In the end most of the lost time was me trying to undelete files.

The code relevant to have emacs save files in ~/.saves is:

(setq
backup-by-copying t
;; don't litter ~ backup files all over the place
backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.saves"))
;; get rid of old crap with out bugging me
delete-old-versions t
;; a little version control, keep 2 most recent
kept-new-versions 2
;; version control for backup files
version-control t)

I can’t figure out why yet but my PCHDTV 3000 card stops working.  I suspect it’s the cx88 or related modules because I can get the system working again by removing the modules and then inserting them again.  Twice I’ve gone to watch some recordings to find Myth reporting that it “can’t find the file associated with the recording.”

Luckily I rarely record using the HD3000 card.  I don’t have an HDTV yet so I don’t have a huge reason to record in HD except for the perfect bit-for-bit recordings that result.  I’m happy with the analog recordings on my current TV and it’ll be a couple of years before I upgrade my TV.