Archive for November 2010


Getting rid of a Ubuntu resource hog

November 17th, 2010 — 11:03 am

While graphical package managers like Synaptic or KPackageKit certainly are great tools for the novice Ubuntu user, I personally don’t see any benefit against the various apt CLI bindings. For one, I’m not a big fan of using GUIs where not needed and secondly, the graphical package managers’ search features come with extra baggage – they use Xapian in a cron job for indexing, which can be quite a CPU hog.

Even though Ubuntu has good defaults and uses ionice to schedule for IO priority, this setup caused my system to hang completely. To be fair, I should mention that I run VirtualBox instances in parallel.

To disable the regular indexing, you can remove execute permission on the cron job:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index

Or you can completely uninstall the tools:

sudo aptitude purge apt-xapian-index

You can also uninstall KPackageKit or Synaptic completely, but you would lose your update manager reminding you of new packages.

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Fullscreen for GVIM in Linux

November 11th, 2010 — 11:34 am

To me, fullscreen does magic in terms of gained productivity – there’s no distraction anywhere; I can perfectly focus on the work ahead. MacVim has a nice fullscreen feature(CMD+SHIFT+F). I don’t want to miss it in my Linux environments, though.

In GVIM, there is a little manual labour involved, because in Linux, the window manager is responsible for, well.. managing windows – GVIM itself can’t implement “fullscreen”.

To achieve true fullscreen capabilities in GVIM and Linux, there are two steps involved:

  • Make a shortcut in your window manager for fullscreen
  • Get rid of GVIMs’ menu and toolbar

I’ll demo #1 for KDE:

Get rid of the menu:

And the toolbar:

Of course, you could edit your vimrc and set those flags globally.

Now, enjoy your editing with SHIFT+ALT+F.

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Redirect system sound to Airport Express

November 6th, 2010 — 01:50 pm

The Airport Express is a great device when used in combination with iTunes – I thought. I could sit on my couch on my MBA, do some coding work while listening to my streamed Library (Mac Mini) not through internal speakers, but through my Harman-Kardon Hifi system.

Well, this setup has its flaws. What if I wanted to listen to Grooveshark for example? I would be stuck with the internal speakers. But no longer so, Airfoil comes to the rescue. This application can hook into system audio and redirect everything to Airport Express. There is added benefit for the old setup, too. Using the volume toggles on the keyboard will have impact on iTunes, now.

Setting this up is dead simple – like four clicks. You’ll figure it out.

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