I just released daglink, a tiny program for managing your system configuration. The readme has most of the information, but as a quick overview daglink allows you to maintain symbolic links from well-known locations (e.g /etc/apt/sources.list.d/) into locations of your choosing (mine live in ~/dev/app-customisations/).

But more than just creating symlinks, it allows you to create the appropriate links based on tags of your choosing, for example distro, release and keyboard type (yes, I do actually have multiple of each of those that I frequently use).

I’ve seen others use git or puppet for this, and until now I just had a hand-rolled script and some well-named files. So I figured I might as well write something proper. Did I mention it has built-in support for zero install URLs instead of paths, if you’re into that sort of thing? I’m not sure how useful that is (or should be), but it could turn out useful for some very niche cases.

I recently came across this enlightening post on the changes to strings and encodings in ruby 1.9. As a python lover who has only used ruby 1.8 so far, it’s interesting to see the different approaches to very similar problems in python 3 and ruby 1.9.

I may be biased, but ruby’s implementation sounds like it will lead to a lot of pain and bugs, while python’s implementation will lead to a little more pain as you are forced to learn about encodings, and a lot less bugs (as you are forced to learn about encodings). Let me explain why:

Courtesy Ned.

I recently moved from Ubuntu to Fedora. It seemed like the right time for it. I just got a new computer, so I’d have to do a fresh install of something anyway. And on the day that my computer arrived, the Fedora 15 beta was released. Perhaps it was meant to be?

In gnome-shell (and in contrast to Ubuntu), notifications are persistent by default - they don’t go away until you dismiss them.

I have been using notify-send for some time to pop up quick messages that do not need to stick around, so I’m happy to have found how you can make individual notifications transient. If you want to make a transient notify-send message, you can do the following:

notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 [standard-arguments ...]

I’ve created a notify-send script in my ~/bin directory that sets this by default, although that depends on you having added ~/bin before /usr/bin in your $PATH

The official gvim icon (left) is showing its age. The palette seems to be from the days of 256color, there is no anti-aliasing to speak of in many variants, and it’s just generally bland. I have found a few more modern variants, most notably the tango version, but none of them looked terribly great to me.

So I set out to create a more modern rendering of the classic logo. I exchanged the round serifs for a round diamond, added some psuedo-3d shading, gradients and shadows. All in all I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out: 128px / svg

If you’d like to use this for gvim, you should do something like this¹:

mkdir -p ~/.icons
cd ~/.icons
wget http://gfxmonk.net/misc/gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
tar zxf gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
rm gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz

Then go to your system’s theme selector and pick the “gfxmonk” icon theme.

If all the other (non-gvim) icons have now reverted to the system default and you didn’t want that, you will need to edit ~/.icons/gfxmonk/index.theme and set the inherits value to the name of your preferred icon set².

Note: the svg icon may need the norasi font installed to display properly.