Terminator: Nice tool – huge potential

I’m quite pleased and impressed with Terminator, a tool to allow splitting a single window into multiple terminal windows.

I’m pleased with the existence of Terminator for a few reasons, the first of which is that it almost fits the bill of something I’ve been looking for for a while. In my day-to-day work I often find myself having to monitor a system by tailing a few log files at once. The way I’ve achieved this so far was by writing a script to open up multiple GNOME Terminal windows, each tailing a different log file, and position them around the desktop using the “–geometry” parameter, however, the whole construct, being built out of several unrelated windows is difficult to move around the desktop, minimize, and takes way too much space in the task bar.

Another reason for me to be pleased with Terminator is the fact that it is implemented with Python, this gives me the hope that while currently Terminator lacks a few features I need in order to use if for my purpose, I may be able to add those features in a timely manner.

Botched sources or the woes of sharing source code on WordPress

While nobody really asked, I noticed that WordPress terribly botches the scripts I post, replacing quotes with “smart” quotes, double-dashes with long dashes, etc.

That pretty much beats my purpose of sharing the scripts in the first place, since it makes it impractical to copy and paste them, so I’m looking for a different way of sharing my scripts.

I would have preferred to simply upload zipped tarballs to wordpress, however they do not seem allow uploading that file format (for security reasons?), nor do they allow uploading any other archive or plain-text format.

I will attempt to contact the WordPress support about this, in the meantime I’d love to hear suggestions of ways to solve this, id rather not resort to storing the files on a different site.

Fixing Thumbnails in Nautilus

If you are like me and many other internet users, you’ve probably downloaded movies with one P2P program or another.

If you did that downloading while using Nautilus and Gnome, you might have noticed that Nautilus fails to produce Thumbnails for downloaded movies, presenting the film-roll Icon instead.

What happens here, is that Nautilus attempts to generate thumbnails for files as soon as you enter the directory that contains them, when it comes to files that are only halfway-downloaded it fails for obvious reasons.

The problem is that when Nautilus fails to generate a thumbnail, that failure is noted down somewhere, and therefore Nautilus does not attempt to regenerate the thumbnail once the file is fully downloaded.

Viewing Nautilus script parameter values

I’ve been working on some Nautilus scripts recently, and I’ve found that it would be easier if I could inspect the values that Nautilus passes to the scripts, so I wrote a little script to achieve just that, I hope you’ll find it useful if you ever set out to write a Nautilus script.

Deleting files as root in Nautilus

I’ve just seen the title of this post in my blog stats as search-term hit to my blog, and while they guy searching didn’t find his answer here (He got directed to my Nautilus Garbage Bin post), I decided to make sure the next one searching for that will find a decent answer.

I must admit that I firmly believe that root’s work should be done from the command-line, however, if a guy insists on doing it this way, well so be it, this is, after all, Linux, the OS of the free…

So basically I can see 2 ways of going about deleting files as root with Nautilus:

Oracle prerequisites Puppet recipe published

I’ve been intending to do this for a while and finally found the time, without further ado, I present to you my Oracle prerequisites Puppet script.

I do hope someone out there will find this script useful, I know I do.

There are many ways this script could and should be improved:

VM Cloning script published

Trying to kickstart my “Sources” section, I just published a very simple script for cloning VirtualBox virtual machines, check it out.