I just followed some tips to make OpenOffice run faster on my slightly underpowered laptop. These tweaks generally amount to increasing the size of memory caches, reducing the number of undo levels and turning off Java. I really can’t tell if it has helped or not, but I don’t use OpenOffice with graphics in documents very often. One of the suggestions was to enable the OpenOffice quickstarter, but I didn’t do this since while it definitely increases the speed at which OpenOffice pops up, it also slows down logins, which I don’t like. I’m happy to wait for OpenOffice to load on the occasions that I use it, but I really don’t want my logins to take any longer than they have to.
I recently bought a new PC. Specs are: Intel Core2 Duo E6750, Asus P5K-E Wifi/AP motherboard (using the new Intel P35 chipset), two 320 Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drives. Video is a PCI-E Nvidia 7900GS based card (FORSA), which I bought from a friendly ebayer since the price/performance is better than the 8600 series cards, and I have no need for DirectX 10.
Here are my experiences installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), amd64 Desktop version (yes, amd64 is the 64-bit version also used for Intel Core2 processors. I wish that was advertised more clearly, since it took a bit of hunting to confirm it was the right choice). Read the rest of this entry »
There are various reasons why it’s a good idea to stick with using four spaces instead of a tab character in Python code. I’m not going to rehash that particular flamewar inducing arguement here.
I like to use spaces to indent my Python code (and have set up Vim accordingly), but occasionally I have some old code (or other peoples code) which uses tab characters. Python tends to complain about files that mix up both tabs and spaces for indenting, so I need to make these files uniform.
Here’s a really simple way to replace tabs with four spaces using sed on the commandline:
sed 's/\\t/ /g' oldcode.py >newcode.py
This is really simple sed-101, but I’ve put it here just to remind myself it works.
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UPDATE: I’ve discovered an easier way !
Simply using the vim command,
:retab
I can replace all tabs in the current text to match my vim tab settings, which in effect turns each tab to four spaces.
Some search and replace like:
:%s/\\t/ /g
would have also done it, but then you have to explicitly specify the four spaces.
For the record, here is my current ~/.vimrc file:
set guifont=LiberationMono :colorscheme murphyset expandtab set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4
In addition to the tabs-to-spaces stuff, there is also some font and color scheme stuff in there, since I prefer green text on a black background.
I’ve just discovered Roberto Alsina’s blog .. he has a bunch of extremely clear and insightful articles about Linux (and *nix generally).
I particularly like “Making Linux systems that don’t suck: Part II” (and Part I and Part 0), which puts a critical eye to cron and at, and surveys a few good alternatives (some backward compatible, and some not). Read the rest of this entry »
Ever since I made the switch from Mandriva Linux to Ubuntu GNU/Linux as my primary desktop OS a few years back, I’ve used a program called Automatix to install various useful programs that, usually due to licensing incompatibilities, are not included in the official Ubuntu distributions. This includes things like Google Earth, Google Picasa, Skype, various audio and video codecs, as well as bits of ’sexy’ peer-to-peer filesharing and DVD ripping software that all the cool kids have gotta have these days. All these programs don’t require Automatix to install them, but Automatix has always made it simple - a no brainer. Well, turns out despite being simple from a users perspective, Automatix may not be the best thing if you value system stability. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve just skimmed through an article entitled “Tech Writers Think Ubuntu Is For Morons”, and while I expect that it is just flamebait, I was compelled to comment (below is basically what I wrote as a comment on the Digg posting).
The author whinges about how tech writers describe “how-tos” for simple, mundane tasks in Ubuntu, and because of the “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” tone often used, Ubuntu is getting a stigma that it is for morons.
I don’t see what the problem is. Read the rest of this entry »