Nigel Babu

Blog

  • Embedding a terminal with byobu

    The other day I blogged about how I was looking for embedded terminal in vim and found something hilarious. This post is about how I solved what I was trying to do.

    Typing this blog post on the kind of setup I'm writing about

    I know I can do :shell, but that’s quite not what I wanted. Here’s how I got it working the way I want with byobu:

    • Open a terminal and start byobu.
    • Type C-a S, basically, Ctrl followed by a, and then capital S.
    • Then, C-a :, so you can type commands to the screen.
    • Now you can type resize +15 to increase the size of the top split
    • C-a Tab, to switch to the other split
    • C-a c to create a new terminal there.
    • Use C-a Tab to switch between the splits.
    • ???
    • PROFIT!

    I’d love to make this into some kind of config that I can load, but I haven’t discovered that yet. If someone knows how, please do let me know in the comments!

  • Another Launchpad Bug Fixed!

    On Tuesday, I managed to land a fix for another Launchpad bug. This one probably was my first non-trivial bug fix and also older than any other bug I’ve attempted (4-digit bug!)

    Earlier, during page load, Launchpad would take each bug, search if its, valid, get the title, and show tooltips. This feature was removed to reduce page load times and timeouts. Instead, anything that matches the bug pattern gets linked whether the bug is valid or not. Obviously, less friendly, but much faster. One of the days, there was a general complaint about this in #launchpad-dev and Ian Booth mentioned that its probably trivial to fix with the link checking bits he wrote for branches. I jumped in when I saw a chance to get mentored for a bug.

    Yay by Grant Hutchinson

    Fixing the bug involved, first adding a class to all the bug URLs, then grabbing all the URLs with that class and posting it as JSON to check-links internal API, which uses the search to verify valid/invalid bugs. Then, it returns a list of invalid bugs. Fixing this including writing python and JavaScript code; a first, for my fixes to Launchpad. I broke a gazillion tests with my fixes though. Twice, I submitted it to ec2 and failed thanks to b0rked tests. Finally, on third try, I caught all of them and its now merged to devel. It is working on QA Staging if you want to give it a try.

  • Looking for vim

    Yesterday, I was trying to find how to get a terminal inside vim, like the embedded terminal in gEdit and Kate. Look what I found out instead!

    Facebook: Looking for vim?

    I have no words.

  • E_TOO_MANY_CHANNELS

    For the past year or so, irssi has been my primary IRC client. At first, I joined just one channel on one server. Then, it started growing. The more projects I participated in, the more channels I had. Currently, I’m on 3 networks and a lot of channels. Recently, I crossed the 100-window mark on irssi and I realized I’m missing people leaving a message or pinging me.

    Now I’m using hilightwin.pl. Its a pretty rad script that lets you have a small split window with all your hilights. Hard to miss them that way! Installation is pretty simple too. Downloading the file, place it in ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun. Then run the following:

    /run autorun/hilightwin.pl /window new split /window name hilight /window size 5

  • Working from home

    This is how my desk looks on days when I’m working from home. The one of the left has the Nagios status page and the right has my chat client (The classic numb3rs snippet about IRC) 😉

    My table!