blog

Dune2 on Linux

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:30:00 +1000

Download it from here (with a browser, it does some redirect crap). Install dosbox:

sudo aptitude install dosbox

It is a self-extracting zip file, so you can either use wine to unzip (holy nuclear option, batman) or install unzip:

sudo aptitude install unzip

Create a directory that we can ask dosbox to mount as ‘C:’, then unzip it:

mkdir -p ~/.dos/Dune2
cd ~/.dos/Dune2
unzip ~/Downloads/Dune2.exe

Get a default config file by starting up dosbox:

dosbox

and (in dosbox) ask it to write out a config file for you:

config -writeconf /home/you/.dosbox.conf

type ‘exit’ in the dosbox window to, er, exit. Add the line to mount the directory we created:

echo "mount c /home/you/.dos" >> ~/.dosbox.conf

and start dosbox again (with that config):

dosbox -conf ~/.dosbox.conf

and run Dune2 in the dosbox window (dosbox’s shell has tab completion, yay):

cd Dune2
Dune2.exe

Clicking in the window will make dosbox grab your mouse and keyboard - ctrl-f10 to escape.

Highlighting trailing whitespace in vim

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:10:00 +1000

This config snippet configures vim to highlight trailing whitespace in a horrendous red, making it easy to spot and remove.

:highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
autocmd Syntax * syn match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$\| \+\ze\t/

Even better would be to only highlight it on lines that have been otherwise modified since the last commit…

Using your iphone as a modem under Debian

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:39:00 +1000

Thanks to the awesome work of Diego Giagio (for writing it) and Paul McEnery (for packaging it for Debian), using your iPhone as a modem under Debian is about 60 seconds work:

Install ipheth-dkms (the kernel module side of things) and ipheth-utils (the userspace pairing daemon).
watch the postinst build the kernel driver for your current kernel
plug your phone in
dmesg|grep iPhone should show something like:

[867025.370421] ipheth 3-2:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached

and you’ll find you have a new Ethernet interface
enable tethering on the phone (Settings -> General -> Network -> Internet Tethering)
now the ethernet interface is running a DHCP server - select it with nm-applet or ifup it or whatever you normally do

Custom User-Agent with twisted.web.client.getPage

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:10:00 +1100

Since getPage just passes most of its’ args through to HTTPClientFactory, you can just make a simple wrapper to set the user-agent:

    from twisted.web.client import getPage
    ...
    def my_page_getter(*args, **kwargs):
        if 'agent' not in kwargs:
            kwargs['agent'] = 'your user agent/1.2'
        return getPage(*args, **kwargs)

Excluding draft posts from your feeds

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:47:00 +1100

Since feeds in ikiwiki are just the result of the [[inline]] directive generation a list of pages, you can use the combination of a pagespec and the tag plugin to stop ikiwiki from syndicating draft pages. Just include “!tagged(draft)” in your page spec for the page that generates the feed (e.g. blog.mdwn):

[[!inline  pages="./blog/* and !*/Discussion and !tagged(draft)" show="100" ]]

then for each article you’d like to hide for now, simply add the ‘draft’ tag:

[[!tag  foo bar baz draft]]