Nightly Tester Tools

Got sick of the Intel driver crashing X11, and Ubuntu releasing their upgraded packages only on the recent version (Horny Heron or something). Bit the bullet, did the upgrade, and...

...Firefox 3beta got installed! What the hell?!? Poof go all (well, most) of my extensions, you know those handy things I use for, oh, locking down Firefox, anonymous browsing, other small conveniences that make using such a poorly-performing browser worthwhile.

Included in these was Zotero, in which I have quite a number of documents stored for offline viewing, and which *still* has no independent UI for accessing them (even the Open Office plugin requires a running instance of Firefox). Suckfest à la mode, just what I ordered!

A search of the Zotero forums, though, turns up a link to the Nightly Tester Tools plugin, which can be used to run an extension for a previous version of Firefox. Zotero is now up and running on Firefox 3beta.

Version 3 does seem to be a bit faster than 2, and hasn't been too crashy. The theme/extension writers should really get their act together and update/port their stuff before this puppy hits the street.

Pulseaudio, Firefox, Flash 9

Upgrading to the latest flash plugin (9) kills audio in Firefox. Awesome!

Based on the PulseAudio information on http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
and the library provided by revolutionlinux, it took only a couple of steps to get things working:

cd /usr/src
git-clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/libflashsupport.git
cd libflashsupport
sudo ./bootstrap.sh
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr
sudo make
sudo make install

Then restart firefox.

It probably helps to have /etc/firefox/firefoxrc contain the line

FIREFOX_DSP="padsp"

...and to have /etc/asound.conf contain the lines

pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}

...but libflashsupport is the magic bit.

VimMate

Yet another Textmate-style extension to Vim:

http://vimmate.rubyforge.org/

This one integrates a project manager with Vim. Jury is still out on whether it will prove useful, but coupled with the Vim Debugger plugin it could prove quite useful for the dynamic languages.

Git as a backup tool

Recently migrated from CVS to GIT at work, and started to look at other uses of local GIT repositories. Backing up config files in home directories seemed a natural application, and as usual someone else has thought of it, implemented it, and abandoned it:

git-home-history

Getting this built is pretty straightforward:
cd /usr/src
git clone http://jean-francois.richard.name/ghh.git
cd ghh
./autogen.sh
make
make install
cd ~
git-home-history init
vi .gitignore
git commit -a
crontab -e
* */4 * * * /usr/local/bin/git-home-history commit >/dev/null 2>&1

The last line is what should be added to crontab to run this every 4 hours.

There are similar projects for /etc and for general backup:
etckeeper
gibak

Other useful GITisms:
* install tgit
* install qgit
* get vim syntax and filetype plugins from vim-mode-for-git-commits; also check out the GitDiff plugin
* add the following to ~/.bashrc or equivalent:
GIT_PAGER=`which tig`
export GIT_PAGER
* add the following to ~/.vimrc or equivalent:
let git_diff_spawn_mode=1
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead COMMIT_EDITMSG set filetype=git