The Completely Unofficial Beer of Ubuntu Natty

The only picture I took at UDS-N in Orlando, FL.

Only for the brave. Or the tasteless. Or those who appreciate good old fashion poignant humor.

I am at least one of the above.

:-Dustin

Ubuntu, The Restaurant, 10.10.10

My wife, Kim, and I were recently in the California wine country, in Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

While there, we had a lovely dinner one night at the Ubuntu Restaurant and Yoga Studio.

The Ubuntu restaurant has nothing to do with the software I write, other than we share a name and actually have a similar set of principles. While we apply the tennets of Ubuntu to software, they apply it to food. The inside of the restaurant is really quite chic (like much of Napa). It really reminded me of the set from Joss Whedon's Dollhouse TV series :-)

All of the food is vegetarian, and it's ordered and served tapas style. Everything we had was delicious.

The portions looked small, but neither of us were hungry at all by the time we left.

We did have cookies for dessert, just to make sure we wouldn't leave hungry.

We did leave our waitress with a stack of Ubuntu CDs.

Their menus are custom printed every day, so in exchange, she mailed me a copy of Sunday's 10.10.10 Ubuntu restaurant menu (at the top of this post). Check out the date in the top corner:

Cheers to the Ubuntu restaurant, and the Ubuntu 10.10.10 release!

:-Dustin

Bikeshed: dman (download manpages from the web)

I have kept a little shell script called dman in my $HOME/bin ever since manpages.ubuntu.com came online, in 2008.

It's a really convenient way to read manpages in your terminal, for packages that you don't have installed locally. Assuming you're internet connected, it's a really handy tool, saving lots of disk space, while giving you access to many gigabytes of excellent system level documentation.

For example:

  dman wtf

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

:-Dustin

Bikeshed: wifi-status (monitor your wifi connection)

I work from coffee shops, pubs, and conferences quite a bit. That means lots and lots and lots of of WiFi.

Modern Ubuntu desktops have a handsome indicator applet with an animation that shows the connection process.

But I'm a geek, and I need to know in more detail what's happening with my wireless connection, especially when it seems like it's taking forever to get a wireless connection.

For this, I wrote a utility called wifi-status that's now in bikeshed. Run this from a terminal and you'll see both the iwconfig and ifconfig status of your wireless interface.

wifi-status

Every 1.0s: iwconfig wlan0; ifconfig wlan0                                                                                                                  Fri Oct 15 14:07:49 2010

wlan0     IEEE 802.11abg  ESSID:"CampusCoffeeBean1"
      Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:24:7B:21:90:A0
      Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=14 dBm
      Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
      Power Management:off
      Link Quality=64/70  Signal level=-46 dBm
      Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
      Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:22:33:44:55
      inet addr:192.168.0.2  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      inet6 addr: fe80::221:6aff:fe50:a606/64 Scope:Link
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:1820355 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:2068354 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
      RX bytes:620541137 (620.5 MB)  TX bytes:1581840633 (1.5 GB)

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

:-Dustin

Bikeshed: bch (seed and edit bzr changelog)

Here's another tool I use every single day, many times per day: bch.

I maintain all of my projects/packages in bzr itself, using debian/changelog to describe changes to both the source code and the packaging.

I used to use dch to edit the current changelog entry, starting a new line with an asterisk, and then listing each path of each file I've changed, followed by a colon, and then a description of my changes.

However, I can easily use bzr diff to get a good list of the files I've changed, use sort to arrange them in alphabetical order, print a comma-separated lists, and use dch to insert that list into debian/changelog. All I have to do is describe the change, save, and close the file.

Note that I typically follow bch with debcommit, which uses that same changelog entry when committing to bzr. It's really, really handy and convenient!

Try it:

1. Grab some source code
   bzr branch lp:bikeshed
   
   
2. Make some changes
   cd bikeshed
   echo foo > bar
   bzr add bar
   echo "" >> pbput
   
   
3. Add a changelog entry
   bch

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

Cheers,

:-Dustin

Bikeshed: 1 .. 9 (wicked convenient awk)

I previously introduced the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 utilities here in my blog as useful awk hacks a few months ago.

Basically, there's one script, installed at /usr/bin/1 and all of the rest are symbolic links back to this one.

The net effect of each of these is to print the Nth column of whatever comes in on standard input. In this way, "1" is sort of an alias for:

  awk '{print $1}'

Each of these accept a single option argument. By default, whitespace is assumed to be the input field separator. You can specify a different character or string here.

For example:

  ls -alF | 5
cat /etc/passwd | 7 :

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

Cheers,

:-Dustin

Bikeshed: bzrp (bzr with a sensible-pager)

I'll admit it ... I'm a huge fan of bzr. I'm conversational in git, but I really love the ease of use of bzr. It's friendly, convenient, and well documented.

I really only have one complaint... I really wish it paged output to sensible-pager, when running in an interactive terminal and the output is more than one screen-full.

I talked to Robert Collins about this in Wellington at LCA2010 earlier this year. He was lukewarm to the idea, asking me why don't I just pipe the output to sensible-pager. Heh. Sure, I can do that.

Okay, okay, so I created a simple alias, and eventually this wrapper script, bzrp, which basically has that effect.

Try it for yourself!

bzrp log --include-merges
bzrp diff
bzrp cdiff

This works with any bzr command that has output on standard out.

For what it's worth, I'm pronouncing this "ba-zerp" for now :-)

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

:-Dustin