Open Source

Fix the button layout in Ubuntu 10.04

Posted by gkurts on April 20, 2010 at 9:21 pm

Love the new button layout in Ubuntu 10.04? Yeah, me neither. Thankfully, it’s absurdly easy to fix it. You can run this from a terminal window or from the Run dialog (Alt+F2).

gconftool-2 –type string –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Bada-bing!

Crawling web sites with Perl WWW::Mechanize (and Moose)

Posted by gkurts on March 22, 2010 at 2:51 pm

My bank, while I’m very pleased with them overall, has a not-so-hot online banking system. My biggest (and simplest) gripe is the inability to get a daily email with the balance of my checking account. I’ve tried multiple ways with limited success, until I did it in Perl.
First, I outlined the steps required to log [...]

Getting current track information from VLC (using Perl!)

Posted by gkurts on February 9, 2010 at 7:16 pm

So I’ve already done a post on getting track information from Rythmbox, but VLC felt cold and left out, so here it is. The process is pretty much the same, just tweaked a bit for VLC.
First, go into VLC, Tools -> Preferences, click the “All” radio button (near the bottom), Interface, click “Main interfaces” and [...]

Linkage for 1/1/2010

Posted by gkurts on December 31, 2009 at 11:53 am

Save MySQL and the Internet
So Oracle is buying Sun, and in-turn, is getting MySQL… Something they’ve tried to aquire several times in the past. Monty Widenus, the original founder of MySQL, is pleading for people to sign a petition for Sun to structure the sale agreement in such a way to prevent Oracle from getting [...]