Chris Jean
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Updating Multiple Git Repositories Easily Using Bash for Loop

by Chris Jean
September 15th, 2009

All of the WordPress themes that I work on for iThemes are managed as Git repositories. Recently, we moved past the 100 repositories mark. That’s a lot of repositories to manage, and unfortunately, too many of those repositories contain duplicated information.

Later on, I might delve into how we use Git to manage our theme repos. For today, however, I’d like to focus on how I quickly and easily pushed up changes to more than a dozen repos in a single, albeit long, Bash command.

I had finished making updates to 16 Flexx repos, and I needed to push all of those changes up. Since I had multiple working repos in that folder, I was lucky that each of these repos began with the text “Flexx”. Also, since they are all part of the same series and need to keep the same version number, that simplified the tagging as all could be tagged as 2.5.0.

Given this information, I simply ran the following command from the directory that contained all the repository directories:

for i in `ls|grep Flexx`; do echo “— Pushing $i”; cd $i; git commit -am ’2.5.0′ && git push && git tag 2.5.0 && git push –tags; cd ..; echo “— Finished $i”; done

There’s a lot going on here, so I’ll break it up and explain what I’m doing.

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Categories Development, Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Change Default Application When Opening Files in Ubuntu

by Chris Jean
April 21st, 2009

Now that I know how to do this, it seems so easy and straight-forward. To change the default application files of a specific type are opened with, do the following:

  1. Right-click a file that you wish to change the default application for and select Properties.
  2. Click the “Open With” tab.
  3. Select the desired application’s radio button.
    • Additional applications can be added if the one you want is not listed. Use the Add button to find the desired application.
    • You can also remove applications from the list by highlighting the application and clicking the Remove button.
    • Adding applications to or removing applications from this list changes which applications are available in the “Open With” option when you right-click a file.
  4. Click the Close button.

Again, it seems so easy and straight-forward now. Go figure. :)

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks, Videos, WordPress
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Gaarai is Back and the Jackalope is Jaunty

by Chris Jean
April 18th, 2009

It’s been a month since my last post. For all my regular readers, I’m very sorry for the absense.

There’s a lot of intersting stuff going on right now. Fortunately, with so much going on, I shouldn’t have a lack of topics to talk about.

To get the old post ball rolling again, how could I not start back up with Ubuntu 9.04?

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Categories Linux, Random Ramblings
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Changing When Daily Cron Jobs Run in Ubuntu

by Chris Jean
March 18th, 2009

Linux has many great tools built in that help maintain the system without user intervention. One such tool is Cron.

On my Ubuntu 8.10 system, there are many things that are set to run each day: locate database updates, misc cleanup utilities, automatic package updates, log rotations, etc. All of these are managed by the Cron system.

For a while, I needed to manually run the updatedb command to update the locate database, and I never thought about why. The problem is that my daily, weekly, and monthly Cron jobs never run. The reason for this is that these Cron jobs are scheduled to run very early in the morning, when my system is off. Thus, these job schedules never run.

The solution for this is easy. I simply need to change the times these run at to times when my system is on.

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Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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World of Goo

by Chris Jean
March 13th, 2009

There’s a very good chance that you have already heard of the game World of Goo. If not, check out this video to get a taste.

This game has a number of great things going for it:

  1. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to play.
  2. The world if very unique and has a fun feel to it.
  3. The music really sets the mood for the different areas.
  4. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  5. It’s DRM free.

These days, I find great favor in things that 1) have Linux support and 2) are DRM free. Since World of Goo looked like a ton of fun and had both of those, the $20 price tag was nothing. Frankly, the price is very small when you consider the many hours of fun that you can have with all the goo balls.

I ran World of Goo both on one of my Windows Vista machines and on my Ubuntu machine at home. It worked very well on both platforms. Even the Linux version was very smooth even though I’m running Compiz.

FYI: If you want to run this on Linux, you can get the software as a DEB or RPM package or as a tar.gz archive with all the application files. I recommend usingone of the package files. Since the packages are built for 32-bit, you will need to use these instructions if you have a 64-bit distro.

I highly recommend World of Goo, but you don’t have to have blind trust in my opinion. You can download the demo and try it out for yourself.

You might be interested in their post about the release of the Linux version. The day of the Linux release, sales were 40% higher than their previous highest-selling day. “There is a market for Linux games after all :) ,” said one of the developers after updating the post.

Categories Linux, Random Ramblings
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A Good Video on the History of the Open Source Movement

by Chris Jean
March 12th, 2009

I recently watched the entirety of the Revolution OS documentary. While it definitely is not a video that can be enjoyed by most people, nor even most computer users, it is a very intersting watch for a number of reasons.

Visiting the documentary’s site, you quickly gain a sense of what this documentary is aimed to be: “… the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.” However, that’s not what this video is about.

When I first started watching the documentary, I thought I would get this intimate insight into how people made calculated movements against the growing monopoly of Microsoft’s operating systems. In fact, this isn’t anything near what actually happened.

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Categories Linux, Random Ramblings, Videos
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Updating Daylight Saving Time on Linux

by Chris Jean
March 10th, 2009

A few days ago, I blogged about changing the timezone on a Linux server. In the post, I mentioned how the zoneinfo files needed to be updated in 2007 due to congress expanding the number of days that Daylight Saving Time covers. However, I did not go in depth about how to update the zoneinfo files.

Since then, I’ve received many search queries from people looking for information about why their server did not properly update when the Daylight Saving Time change hit. For instance, I got queries of “is daylight savings default in centos”, “daylight savings time didn’t change centos”, “dst timezone change centos”, and many more. It’s clear that there are server administrators out there that are very confused about the Daylight Saving Time situation on their server.

Today, I hope to remedy that problem and give server administrators the information they need to update these zoneinfo files. I typically focus in on specific platforms, but today, I’ll try to cover as many distros as I can as well as provide a universal solution.

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Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Command Line History in Ubuntu Terminal

by Chris Jean
March 9th, 2009

I’ve had a lot of fun recently posting about how to do stuff on the command line in Linux. My focus is specifically for Ubuntu users, but the information and techniques can be used for any Linux distro.

Since I’m probably going to end up with a lot of content under this topic, I’ve decided to create a dedicated tag: Mastering the Command Line. I’ve gone through my older posts on this topic and tagged them as well. So, make sure to check out Mastering the Command Line if you want to know how to become a command line power user.

Back to today’s topic. You’re starting to learn how to use the command line, but it’s annoying to always have to type in similar commands over and over. If only there were a way to pull up commands that you’ve already run to run again as is or to quickly modify. Today, I’m going to teach you how to do exactly this.

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Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Convert DOS-Formatted Files to Unix-Format in Ubuntu and CentOS

by Chris Jean
March 8th, 2009

Have you ever seen a bunch of ^M characters in a text file? This odd character at the end of a line can also be represented as a Ctrl+M or <CTRL>M. You don’t know what it is, and you want it to go away.

Today, I’ll help you understand what that odd ^M character is, why it is in some of your documents, and how to get rid of them.

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Categories Development, Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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Food For Thought

by Chris Jean
March 7th, 2009

I’m more or less taking the night off. I’ll leave you some good reading material that should cover just about any reader that comes here.

  • Make Linux: Harder – Better – Faster
    This page is a great compilation of links on how to improve security, speed, functionality, or appearance of your Linux system.
  • Firefox Minefield
    Very interesting version of Firefox that is in development. Apparently, it is capable of massive speed and gives Chrome a run for its money.
  • Conky
    A highly-customizable graphical system monitor for your Linux desktop.
  • Armed and Dangerous
    A blog I just happened upon today that has many great reads. The topics are varied, but there should be a little something for everyone. I was hooked with the My comment to the FCC on DRM post, as I share many of the feelings that the author does on the subject.
  • Swift Weasel
    This project builds Firefox from source to provide optimized builds for the Linux platform. It’s still in the early stages but has potential.

I hope that my big post yesterday makes up for my weak one today. :)

Categories Linux, Random Ramblings, Tips 'n Tricks
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