Installing "Glances" system monitor on ubuntu 12.04

Glances is a curses based tool for monitoring your system - kind of like top on steroids. There is a small issue with using the version in the PPA on Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically the 12.04.2 minimal install); it crashes on startup with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/glances", line 5, in
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources

To fix it I manually had to install the package python-pkg-resources.

SublimeText2 - A small tip

It can be difficult to find the correct internal name of a command when you want to add a keyboard shortcut to it in SublimeText2. Wouldn't it be neat if you could show all the commands you trigger in a window somewhere? Well, it turns out it is really simple:

• Open the console
• Type the command
• sublime.log_commands(True)
• Go do stuff in the editor or menus and see commands roll by. 

When you have the command name it is quite easy to add that to your personalized key-bindings from the Preferences menu.

i.e. my current personalizations:

[
   { "keys": ["ctrl+keypad_divide"], "command": "toggle_comment", "args": { "block": false } },
   { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+7"], "command": "toggle_comment", "args": { "block": false } },
   { "keys": ["ctrl+d"], "command": "reindent" },
   { "keys": ["shift+ctrl+s"], "command": "save_all" },
   { "keys": ["ctrl+d"], "command": "find_under_expand" }
]

Mercurial with Git Subrepository

I recently had some problems creating a Git sub-repository inside my Mercurial main repository using the guide I found here!

Problem

All is well and good up to that point, however when committing the added .hgsub file things started to head south.

From the commandline (cmd) I would get an error:

abort: The system cannot find the file specified

While from TortoiseHg I would not get an error. However, the expected .hgsubstate file did not get created, and thus the repository has in effect no valid sub-repositories if you try to clone it!

Workaround

The workaround is to do the commit of the .hgsub file from the GitBash shell instead of the regular shell or TortoiseHg, since then the .hgsubstate file will be generated. Using the GitBash shell is also mandatory for committing any change to the .hgsub file, or .hgsubstate file, as well as the initial clone of the repository.

Some googling around indicate that the issue is due to either Mercurial or TortoiseHg trying to execute the "git.exe" command (as opposed to just "git") and that this alias does not exist in the regular shell. I have not verified this, so YMMV!

Misc

Potentially relevant software that is installed on the computer:

• Windows 7 x64
• TortoiseHg (2.3.1)
• Mercurial (2.1.1)
• Git (1.7.6)
• Python (2.6.6)

Both the "git" and "hg" commands were included in the PATH.

Free Tail GUI for Windows

Need a tail replacement on your Windows box? Look no further than Log Expert.

It has lots of powerful features such as:

• regular expression highlighting
• "columnizer" for well-defined log file formats
• opensource
• unicode support
• plugin support

...to name a few!

The homepage for the source-code: http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

SVN Trouble

After upgrading to the latest TortoiseSVN I started getting trouble committing changes back to the server with the following error:

'\' is not a working copy.

Downloading and testing the latest SVN command-line client yielded much the same results, only with some different messages.

After much googling I got a sneaky suspicion that there was an issue with my working-copy actually being on the root of a drive; in my case U:.

Checking everything out again, but this time at U:\wc worked perfectly.

Versions used:

• TortoiseSVN 1.6.10, Build 19898 - 64 Bit
• Subversion 1.6.12

To sum it up: Don't upgrade if you have your working copy at the root of a drive and it is currently working!

TeamCity, Ant & DITA

Over the last few days I have been trying to get a CI server (aka build server) up and running. After trying out both CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET I landed on TeamCity since it is a bit simpler with a decent web GUI as well as being somewhat familiar from my work.

You can download TeamCity and try it out for yourself since they offer a free edition that supports up to 20 build configurations and 3 build agents.

One of the tasks I wished to accomplish in by CI server was to build the online help files (HTML) as well as the user manual (PDF). Having all the source material in DITA formatted XML files makes that pretty easy from the command line using the DITA Open Toolkit full easy install distribution. Getting it to run automatically from TeamCity proved to cost me some gray hairs though.

So as a note-to-self here is a short checklist of what to do after TeamCity has been installed:

1. Download DITA and unzip it. (Ex in: C:\DITA-OT1.4.3)
   
2. Create a new build configuration for you project, and set "Ant" as the "Build runner".
3. "Ant Home" should be the ant folder in your DITA installation. (Ex: c:\DITA-OT1.4.3\tools\ant\)
4. In "Additional Ant Command Line Options" input the classpath and any options for Ant or the DITA toolchain it spawns.
5. Add DITA_DIR environment variable to the build configuration and set it to the folder you unzipped DITA to in step 1.
6. Create a build.xml file for your targets and point TeamCity at it.
   

Note!
Setting the CLASSPATH environment variable had NO effect, neither had adding -classpath to the JVM command line options. Only adding it as a -cp option to the Ant command line did the trick. I did not find any mention of this in either DITA documentation or TeamCity documentation.
It might be obvious for someone more familiar with Ant, but for me it was a big hurdle I only discovered while (desperately) searching trought the Ant plugin configuration on my TeamCity server.

Disappearing GUI Elements in Visual Studio 2005

For some reason after updating to Visual Studio 2005, the Exception Window no longer had the "Break on Unhandled Exception" column (or whatever it's called).

Here is a link explaining how to get it back.