March 2010 – Neal's Computing Notes

irssi, skype, pulseaudio, and wacom on vista

did a few things today. found irssi again, for some reason it wasn’t in aptitude for a while. now it is. great, i can ask questions on irc.debian.org again. by the way i tried logging into that and irssi was failing ,and i found it was about clearing the hostname. googleable whatever it was.

then i was having a problem since skype wasn’t working with pulseaudio which somehow installed itself. i was worried that maybe squeeze had standardized on pulseaudio. asked (using irssi) and got the helpful advice to aptitude purge pulseaudio. with a little hesitation i did it, it had a bunch of dependencies all with “pulse” in their names so i purged all of them. and then ALSA and skype were back, and i was glad. i need skype a lot more than i need pulseaudio.

finally got to the vista laptop and the wacom bamboo was not moving the cursor. did another 15min of goofing and found that you can remove the “preference” file which resets the driver. (i dl’d and reinstalled the driver and it didn’t help.) and now the wacom is working. whew.

2 unrelated things which I fixed up today. First, a few days ago my Fujitsu P7320, which I am very fond of, had its HD fail. So it’s off being repaired, presumably returning with a fresh HD. I used it often to transfer files between my various machines using git – although git is a dvcs, i was also using it to sync machines, leading to lots of illogical commits, which I’m sure some purist would say is appalling, but it works and works fast, and so far I haven’t had trouble. But now that the Fujitsu is out, I needed to use a thumbdrive. Last time I used one for syncing, i lost it for some time, then weeks later found when the snow in my driveway melted. (Amazingly, it still worked.) But while it was lost I was always worried about whether there were any important passwords cc’s etc on the drive. I determined to never use an unencrypted thumbdrive again. So today I had to get it encrypted in a hurry, and I found the relevant commands and they were simple, so here they are:
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdX
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdX thumbdrive
# enter password
mkfs.ext2 /dev/mapper/thumbdrive
mount /dev/mapper/thumbdrive /media/thumbdrive
# do whatever
[/sourcecode]

Much easier than I was expecting.

The second thing I rediscovered was quickfix on vim with g++. I was doing some simple editing of a single C++ file, and I wanted quickfix working again but I forgot everything. Here’s the lines from the .vimrc that make it go:

[sourcecode lang=”vim”]
set errorformat=%f:%l:\ %m,In\ file\ included\ from\ %f:%l:,\^I\^Ifrom\ %f:%l%m
set makeprg=g++\ -Wall\ -pedantic\ %\ -lm\ -lgsl\ -lgslcblas\ -o\ %<
[/sourcecode]

That’s it. obviously later when using a makefile for real, I’ll have to modify the makeprg and make it.. just make.. but this works quick and dirty.