Conky in Enlightenment 17

I’ve been following Enlightenment for the last few years, hoping that it would finally stabilise enough to be suitable for daily use. And of course, I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try to use it after a stable 0.17 has been released. But apparently, Conky behaves differently on E17 and Openbox. And what would life become without Conky, may I ask?

There are actually two aspects here. We need to ensure that Conky looks and behaves properly, and we need to find a way to launch it after logging in.

A fairytail about Ruby on Rails, Heroku and migrating data to a new database schema

Since I like testing new stuff, and this website serves me very well as a nice small guinea pig for any kind of experimentation (mostly trying out web frameworks and different deployment options), I ended up needing to migrate website’s data to a new database schema. And this time I switched from Play Framework 1.2 to Ruby on Rails 3.2. Of course, I could have modified my models to use the old schema, but that would be less interesting and probably not worth the hassle for a not-critical-so-let’s-have-fun application.

Speed up and clean up Gajim's history

After a few years of using Gajim, the history of all messages, statuses, etc. can grow up to quite large size. In my case the logs.db file consumed 128MB of disk space.

Searching through the conversation history (in the Conversation History window) can take up to few seconds for each query. And after removing and adding various XMPP/Jabber (or Facebook Chat) accounts, there’s a lot of unnecessary Jabber IDs left in the database.

So let’s take a look at how to speed things up and remove unnecessary data form logs.db (but whether it will work for you or not, substantially depends on how you’ve been using Gajim and what you keep in Gajim’s history).

Volume change notifications in Openbox

If you’re here, you probably want to know how to configure notifications for volume change actions, just like it is in most of current less-geeky GNU/Linux distributions and window managers.

So if you press the volume up/volume down button, you want to see some notification with a beautiful icon and current volume percentage, like this:

And if you press the mute button you are expecting something comparable to:

Let's Play! (...for free!)

This is a little story about Play Framework, Google App Engine and Heroku. And it’s also a story about this very web page, because it is written in Play, was hosted on GAE, and is now being hosted on Heroku.

Use "cd" from within a Bash script

Why the need of this?

Let’s assume you want to write a script that would allow you to navigate faster between your most frequently used directories. And let’s take my everyday problems as an example. I have a similar directory structure:

~/studies/
     semester1/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     semester2/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     ...

Every time I want to cd to one of these directories I have to write something like:

cd ~/studies/semester4/subject2

which is a little pain in the arse if I have to do this many times (and I have to). And no, using Nautilus or Thunar or Dolphin or any other graphical tool doesn’t help - clicking is still slower than writing.