DEPRECIATED: Setting the hostname in gnome terminal

If you SSH to another host you might want to display the hostname of the remote host in the gnome terminal title bar

Put this code in your ~/.bashrc file;

case $TERM in
(xterm*)
PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}($(id -ng))@${HOSTNAME}:
${PWD}\007"'
;;
esac

Oblivion

So, I've been playing Oblivion a lot lately. What's that? A Windows game? Well, don't panic, I've been playing under Wine. It works perfectly with only the occasional crash. I've never played it under Windows so I don't know if this is usual or not but it wouldn't be the first windows game to have "issues".

Anyway, here a few tricks I've discovered.

1) Inventory woes

You don't need to play for long before you realise that you can't carry around anywhere near as much stuff as you want to and you are forced to discard stuff. This sucks.

Apparently, you can get around this by purchasing a house which is great but what about early in the game when you don't have the funds to do this? Well, what I've been doing is this;

Follow the main quest straight away until you get to the point where you have delivered the Amulet Of Kings to Jauffre. Go through the dialog and make sure you click on "Assistance". He will show you a chest full of stuff and invite you to take what you like. Well, I thought, I have some stuff that I am carrying around that I don't need right now so maybe I'll just pop that stuff in the chest. So far I've played for several hours with multiple saves and everything is still there, so I reckon that this will do as a storage facility until such a time that I can buy myself a house!

2) Invincible Meat Shield

Still on the main quest, you need to complete those up to the point where you are tasked with delivering Brother Martin to the Cloud Ruler Temple. Martin will start following you from that point. Cool, so now you can go dungeon exploring with Martin tagging along. He can't die and he will fight pretty well. You can keep this up for as long as you like I reckon as long as you don't go to the Cloud Ruler Temple.

OOPS!

It seems someone at Telstra Bigpond is not managing their SSL cert's properly . . .

Posting code to blogspot

I just found out how to post code snippets to blogspot

Use the (pre) & (code) tags to denote code segments (using normal html <> style tag brackets instead of the round ones used here)

(pre)(code)
Source code goes here
(/code)(/pre)


Once we replace the round tags we get output like this

Source code goes here

The End Of An Era

Sad news.

It seems the inmates have taken over the asylum over at my favourite tech news site, "The Register".

After nearly ten years of reading their site on a daily basis their horrendous new fixed width format is so utterly terrible that the site is no longer pleasant to read and I have to give up reading it.

They received a torrent of complaints to the comments section of their explanatory article entitled "OMFG what have you done?" and this is despite actively censoring many commenters. I myself was censored three times before I gave up and resorted to impotently whining about it on a blog that nobody reads. Other posters complained of the same censorship too, but maybe their moderators were so inundated with comments that many of them just fell into the bit-bucket at the end of the conveyer.

It doesn't matter anyway. It's their site, they can fcuk it up any way they please. It's hard to imagine why they would want to inflict such an appalling design on their readers but it seems they're quite willing to do so.

I have no idea what their motives are, other than change for change sake.

Idiots.

apt-get update GPG errors

I have a small network and I use apt-cacher as an apt proxy to save having to download the same thing multiple times. I also use an unofficial Ubuntu mirror that my ISP provides because I am on a capped plan and use of their repository does not count towards my downloads.

Unfortunately I have an occasional problem where aptitude decides that my GPG key is bad and I get errors like this on my local proxy;

W: A error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used.GPG error: http://apt-proxy hardy-backports Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key

Now, I'm not sure whether the problem is with my local proxy or the ISP's mirror but to fix it I need to issue the following command;

sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::BrokenProxy=true

Everything should be OK from there. If you still have problems, I have also sometimes found that if 'sudo apt-get update' fails, using 'sudo aptitude update' instead works.

I have no idea why.

Speeding up Firefox 3

1. Type “about:config” into the Firefox address bar and hit Enter.

2. Alter the following entries like so:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to "30"

3. Right-click within the browser and select New-> Integer.

Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0".

For more info check out this site.