Today I released the first version of shellshape, a tiling window manager plugin for gnome-shell. It’s definitely pre-alpha software, and currently requires a custom fork of the mutter window manager. I’ve had some trouble getting it running due to awful packaging things (I now know far too much about dynamic linking path resolution on linux), but it should work, at least on Fedora 15. Please give it a go if you use gnome-shell - and if not, there’s more information and a demo video at the above link.

It’s got a long way to go - there are certainly bugs, and some features aren’t done right yet. But it works, and that’s pretty exciting to me after working towards it on and off for about four months.

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I just released daglink, a tiny program for managing your system configuration. The readme has most of the information, but as a quick overview daglink allows you to maintain symbolic links from well-known locations (e.g /etc/apt/sources.list.d/) into locations of your choosing (mine live in ~/dev/app-customisations/).

But more than just creating symlinks, it allows you to create the appropriate links based on tags of your choosing, for example distro, release and keyboard type (yes, I do actually have multiple of each of those that I frequently use).

I’ve seen others use git or puppet for this, and until now I just had a hand-rolled script and some well-named files. So I figured I might as well write something proper. Did I mention it has built-in support for zero install URLs instead of paths, if you’re into that sort of thing? I’m not sure how useful that is (or should be), but it could turn out useful for some very niche cases.

I recently came across this enlightening post on the changes to strings and encodings in ruby 1.9. As a python lover who has only used ruby 1.8 so far, it’s interesting to see the different approaches to very similar problems in python 3 and ruby 1.9.

I may be biased, but ruby’s implementation sounds like it will lead to a lot of pain and bugs, while python’s implementation will lead to a little more pain as you are forced to learn about encodings, and a lot less bugs (as you are forced to learn about encodings). Let me explain why:

Courtesy Ned.

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I recently moved from Ubuntu to Fedora. It seemed like the right time for it. I just got a new computer, so I’d have to do a fresh install of something anyway. And on the day that my computer arrived, the Fedora 15 beta was released. Perhaps it was meant to be?