Last Thursday weather.com changed their XML format. I am not a fan of weather.com however the adeskets weatherforecast desktop widget uses their XML service.

I dug in and fixed the widget. I have submitted the fix to the author but in the meantime if you are desperate you can grab the updated weatherforecast.py file here and copy it to the weatherforecast-0.2.0 directory where you house the desklet.

Update May 13: fixed broken link, sorry! Also the email to the author bounced back so I will submit to the project managers @ sourceforge.

Everybody is doing this history thing, so here is mine. I bet someone writes a daemon that tracks this on your machine, sends the info (pseudo-anonymously of course) to a web app that collates and displays the results. clistats.com is available. Anyone?

Work computer:

[bparsons@bpsun ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
132 ls
125 cd
28 sudo
20 cp
19 nano
18 makepkg
17 whois
15 rm
12 w
10 ps
10 more
8 scp
8 mv
7 tar
7 ssh
5 pwd
5 make
5 ./configure

Notebook:

[bparsons@eflat ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
224 sudo
152 cd
87 scp
44 ps
38 ls
23 more
23 dmesg
21 whois
21 nano
20 mount
17 w
17 tar
15 killall
15 cp
14 top
14 rm
14 ffmpeg
12 mutt
10 cat
9 pacman
9 grep
9 /usr/local/bin/mp4ize
8 whereis
8 ifconfig
7 ping
7 iwlist
6 makepkg
6 df
5 audacious

Home Computer:

[bparsons@blackops ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
130 cd
129 ls
42 sudo
18 ps
16 whois
15 more
14 scp
11 w
11 mount
8 nslookup
8 cp
7 nano
6 rm
6 df
5 umount
5 pwd
5 pacman

This server:

[root@server7 ~]# history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
226 ls
214 cd
76 nano
63 ps
33 whois
33 w
33 more
30 grep
24 tail
22 cp
16 ssh
16 nslookup
12 pwd
12 cat
11 /www/bin/apachectl
11 traceroute
11 top
9 chown
7 rpm
7 ping
6 tar
5 yum
5 mroe
5 diff

Handier than you’d think

Flash on linux has a problem. It is always the top layer. These days many web sites - including my bank and my airline, have flash windows that overlap their design boundaries in the style sheet and they rely on flash being cropped behind the other layers. Its bad design of course but I found a way to solve the issue on my own.

Out of desperation I sought out and found This Firefox extension that disables flash until you click on it. Originally I just needed it to access the Delta site as their flash was blocking the login box - but surprisingly this add-on has proven to be a real improvement - even on Windows.

You should install Flashblock and take it out for a spin. No more flash ads - everything is in its place. Your computer fan doesn’t kick up when you go to a web page that’s overburdened with flash. You really don’t even notice its there, but your browsing experience improves dramatically. If there is a flash thing you want to see (like a YouTube video) you can add YouTube to the whitelist or just click the “f” logo and watch.

You can grab it here.

I updated my computer this morning and upon rebooting my machine hit a kernel panic in both the optimized config and fallback config.

When I update I always log out of my KDE session, go to a console (Control+ALT+1), log in as root, init 3 to drop it down to level 3, then do the updates.

The gotcha today was that I have 2 SATA drives and an old IDE drive in my system. Formerly the SATA drives were sda and sdb while the IDE came up as hdd. After the update however the IDE drive became sda and then the other sata drives became sdb and sdc. This caused everything to blow up because Arch is not a stickler for label booting and boots by device names.

If this happens to you, the solution is here in the Arch wiki. It took me a while to find that.

Amazon has come out with an update for their Linux downloader.

Ze file: amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

Use pacman -U file if you previously installed the other version, pacman -A file if this is your first one.