After spending time on this, I am moving back to Google Chrome. I was hoping that apt-get updates would be a nice one to keep (since Google’s official repository is crappy right now).

I reckon Google has its own update tool, and additional features such as embedded PDF reader (ok, you can hack the chromium-browser (with plugins) it to make it work as well)… but the official Google version comes with all Google stuff ready, and some additions I find handy. So, I am handling this with:

# download the package (unstable, replace this if you want the stable version)
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb
# Install the package
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb
# fix missing desktop icon
sudo ln -s /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.desktop /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Done!

Simple installation and usage of phpdoc:

Install dependencies and phpdoc

# install dependencies
$ sudo apt-get -y install php-pear php5-xsl graphviz
 
# install phpdoc
$ sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpdoc.org
$ sudo pear install phpdoc/phpDocumentor-alpha
 
# run phpdoc
$ phpdoc --target ./docs --directory ./ --title 'PHP Documentation'

And that’s it!

Recently I have been using Skype for corporate communication, and one thing that happens quite often is the fact you do not want to mess your personal and work stuff.

Luckily, on Linux (and Windows, I presume), you can easily  run multiple instances (accounts) of Skype.

Here is how I do it:

1) Create a script to run the second (or N instances) of Skype:

create a file on an executable $PATH (such as /usr/local/bin/skype-username)

#!/bin/bash
echo username password | skype --pipelogin -- secondary

Usually it is a good approach to set this file to permissions 0700, if you want to leave the password hard-coded like the above. Handy, but you have the security trade-offs to think about. And replace the username/password with your own credentials (note the file has also executable permissions, and if you don’t need the credentials, just use 0755).

sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/skype-username

2) Create the desktop Icon

Save a file named: /usr/share/applications/skype-username.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Skype Username
Comment=Skype Internet Telephony (for Username)
Exec=skype-username %U
Icon=skype.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Network;Application;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/skype;
X-KDE-Protocols=skype

I basically use the desktop icon for Synapse, but you could just create on your desktop as well (or on Unity, if using Ubuntu).

For more advanced usage of Skype, I recommend looking at system commands you can type in:

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10042/what-are-chat-commands-and-roles

After days and days looking at these logs, I finally came to reason, and decided to put some colors on it. I found some people already doing this:

• http://jsharkey.org/blog/2009/04/22/modifying-the-android-logcat-stream-for-full-color-debugging/; and
  
• https://github.com/gjtorikian/ColoredLogcatPlusPlus (which is a slight improvement from the above)

But neither of them support new logcat formats (specially the time output, which I use a lot). So I built my own (quick work, really). Here it is:

https://bitbucket.org/brunobraga/logcat-colorize

If you are in the need to check how long a script takes, most people will just suggest time command, and that’s good enough in many cases.

But if you need to print out different elapsed times within a script, or even a simple overall elapsed time in a more human readable way (I often do this for email reports, etc), I reckon this is a very good approach:

# In your script, define when the timer starts
start_timer=$(date +%s.%N)
# do whatever
# print in seconds
echo "This script took [`echo "$(date +%s.%N) - $start_timer" | bc \
     | awk '{printf "%.2f\n", $0}'`] seconds to complete."
# print in milliseconds
echo "This script took [`echo "($(date +%s.%N) - $start_timer)*1000" | bc \
     | awk '{printf "%.2f\n", $0}'`] milliseconds to complete."

Note that the awk command is there just to cut off the decimal digits (by default, is 9 digits for nanosecond precision). Tweak that as needed.

This will produce an output like:

This script took [12.01] seconds to complete.

Neat!

Sorry folks,

Since the terrible news from Posterous, I am moving the site to WordPress installation, but this is still on going. Hopefully the site will be fully operational within a couple of days.

Sorry for the inconvenience (as most links pointing here will not work properly).

Sincerely,

– Bruno Braga