Jan 2, 2011

UPDATE: I realized I was doing a bad job of keeping this calendar comprehensive and have stopped maintaining it.

I’ve started maintaining a calendar of events and volunteer opportunities around GA involving linux and other free software. I’m currently subscribed to the ALE, CHUGALUG, LUG@GT, GA State’s Students for Open Source, GA Ubuntu LoCo, Atlanta “Pragmatic” Linux Meetup Group, and Free IT Athens mailing lists. I’m also subscribed to the LCLUE, MGALUG, SAVLUG, ATLOSUG, and OSSAtlanta rss feeds. Please leave a comment if you know of other places I should monitor for events or have an event you want publicized. Here are links to the calendar html, xml, and ical formats.

Apr 15, 2010

I published an update to the LibX extension for UGA for the first time in nearly a year today. I did some testing to ensure the basic functionality works. Now that I’m not a regular user of Firefox or UGA’s library [0], I can’t promise that it wont be another year before I think to publish a new version, or that I’ll be motivated to solve any problems that pop up when UGA switches off WebVoyage completely in favor of VuFind. Is anyone else interested in taking this extension over? Thanks to the hard work of the LibX maintainers at Virgina Tech keeping it up to date is an incredibly simple task.

Jan 31, 2010

The top google result for the search terms mysql, python, and unicode is a blog post that recommends using the init_command option to the construct a MySQLdb connection to run the SQL ‘SET NAMES utf8’. A better way is to set the charset option to ‘utf8’. This way MySQLdb realizes the connection is using utf8 and encodes things properly. For more explanation see MySQLDB’s user guide.

Oct 22, 2009

If you’ve ever found yourself trying to log the commands ran by your bash scripts (and cursed your failures to quote and escape them properly), then try using bash’s built in history functionality instead. Below is in example of how to turn it on within a script.