Terminator will soon appear in GNOME's Preferred Applications preferences if you have it installed and as such I figure we need to support -x in the same way gnome-terminal does. What that basically means is that *anything* which occurs after -x on the command line is the command to execute and its arguments, so: terminator -x screen -U should cause terminator to execute screen -U. By default, most options parsers will see this as the -U being passed to terminator and screen being the argument to -x. After looking around the docs and asking on #python, optparse seemed to be a better option than getopts, so I switched it over and implemented a callback to extend the default argument processing for -x. It wasn't quite working, so after another quick foray into #python I ended up reading this page which provided everything I needed. More than I needed, in fact, since their while loop has conditionals which affect whether or not the next arguments are added. I just want to gobble them all up and stop them from being parsed :)

Terminator has been accepted on debian repositories, so now the debian users can install it using apt-get on the official repositories!!! xD

I just found an excellent post which includes some runes for getting the oh-so-ugly opensync to work with an n95. I just synced all my contacts to my laptop via Bluetooth \o/

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Some administrivia about my PPA builds of Terminator. Firstly, and somewhat late (for which I apologise), the 0.7 release should be available shortly from the PPA. It's just been accepted, so should be built for gutsy soon. Secondly, as some people may have noticed, Terminator is now included in the Universe repository of hardy (for which I humbly thank all involved in making it happen). When hardy is released, I will remove terminator from my PPA. at that point, we can consider publishing further gutsy packages in the Terminator team's PPA, however, I'm not hugely keen on supporting old distro releases that I don't run myself anymore.

As of this evening, Terminator is available in the Universe component of Ubuntu Hardy. What that means is that from April when the next Ubuntu release happens, millions of people around the world will be able to easily and quickly install Terminator!

I have a fair stack of data that I quite like, some of which is vitally important, stored in multiple places and generally not at concern for loss without some very bad things happening already. The rest I'd just like to keep. For example, I wouldn't cry if I lost all my uni work, but it would be a shame. Same for the working emulation of my trusty Amiga that I used for so long, but now barely remember how to use. So, not wanting to trust it all to a single hard disk, I bought a second so I can could clone the data onto two disks with RAID1. Not a problem in Linux thanks to software RAID. I knock up a RAID1 with a single partition on the new disk (which the tools like doing as much as they make sandwiches, grr). rsync across the existing / to the raid volume, modify fstab, grub and maybe something else and reboot expecting tenshu to finally live up to its name... Except that's not its name. Not when it's booting. It turns out that having created the RAID volume while fully booted, it had been tagged as being for a machine with a hostname of "tenshu". The initramfs does not know your hostname because your hostname is stored on your root partition, which is a RAID partition that hasn't been mounted yet. It is possible for the initramfs to have a hostname, and I expect it might even have a kernel commandline option to specify it, but either way it's not there by default. As any string comparison function will tell you, "tenshu" is not an acceptable match for "(none)". So to fix this, boot the system and it should sit for ages waiting for the RAID arrays to assem ble (this timeout is *far* too long. what the hell takes this long to be detected by the system?!). After a while it will get bored and give you an initramfs shell. Busybox to the rescue! I suspect you can run mdadm -A /dev/md0 --auto-update-homehost, although I ran mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb3 --update=homehost to be specific and because I found those options first. Reboot and bam, the orange bar of progress skips up merrily. Assured that my data is safe on the new partition, I can now proceed to trash the original disk and grow the RAID1 to include it.

Yes that's right, it's time for another advance in the endless march of that most robotic of terminals, Terminator. Head over to its homepage for all the links you need to ease yourself into the future!

The awesomeness of this phone continues... as well as a rash of cool apps I've installed, I also just tried out the "Home Network" features. What this actually refers to is uPnP, specifically DLNA. What does all that mean? It means I can view/copy the photos/movies/music from the phone with my PS3, which also means I can not only use the TV out to display arbitrary things, I can also view the media digitally, via wifi through a easily available/usable interface. This feels like the future!

I recently got a Nokia n95 from Orange and have been playing with it for a week or two. Overall I am most happy with the thing. It's a little bit slow and stranger than SonyEricsson's firmware in some ways, but it has some wicked features: * GPS * TV Out * Symbian GPS is obviously useful, you can bring up a map of where you are and look around. The TV Out was a total surprise though, and is incredibly cool. I figured it would just be used for things like image galleries, and while they are specifically tailored for TV output, it works everywhere! You can nagivate all the menus, run apps and so on. Symbian is just really handy because there are plenty of apps for it and a pretty open development environment. Short review, but all in all, I'm happy so far :)