Category: FOSS

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Vim and spell checking

I just discovered Vim has spell checking. No more having to manually spell check in mutt with ispell when writing emails, Hurray!!

In your .vimrc file simply add

setlocal spell spelllang=en_au

Note: By default vim only installs en_us spell files. If you are running debian then there is a vim-spellfiles package. There is an ubuntu bug to do something about this as well. Since I’m using ubuntu I simply grabbed the en directory from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/ and dumped it in /usr/share/vim/vim71/spell

Vim will now highlight words it thinks are misspelled. The magic incarnations you will need are:

z= – Suggest alternatives for the word
zg – Add word to dictionary
zw – Remove word from dictionary

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linux.conf.au 2008 selling out

It’s 15:11pm and there are only 11 tickets left for linux.conf.au.

WARNING: If you have registered but haven’t gotten around to paying yet then you are going to miss out.

So hop to it. Otherwise you are going to be a sad panda.

Sad Banda

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Sad day for open standards

Its a sad day when one of the most open of standards bodies bows to corporate pressure.

Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: an outrageous disaster

Lift the cat who was amongst the pigeons up and put him back on his pedestal for now. (remove requirement on ogg for now)

The W3C Video on the Web Workshop starts tomorrow. Hopfully Silvia can help kick some heads back into shape.

Update: Possibly with a silver lining though, check out K’s take on the change HTML5 for free media: Today on #whatwg.

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Out of the wilderness

I took another step out of the wilderness today…

Those who have know me for a while will know that up until recently I exclusively used linux virtual consoles (ie what CTRL-ALT-F1 gives you from within X) to do all my work except for browsing the web. Recently I stopped using them all together and moved totally into the land of X and started using gnome-terminal instead.

Well I suppose it wasn’t that big a step as my processes havn’t changed that much. I simply have a gnome-terminal with tabs full screen in the monitor on my left and a full screen firefox in the monitor on my right đŸ™‚

I took another step today moving from centericq to pidgin for my IM needs. I’m quite liking it so far especially some of the pop up notification plugins since I can follow channel conversations without switching away from what I’m doing.

Now does anyone know if there is a plugin to sync all my configuration settings between different machines. That was the handiest thing about running centericq from inside a screen.

But have no fear I’m still using mutt for mail and doubt that will ever change.

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SFD2006 – Return to sender

Pia posting about Software freedom day, software freedom day online shop is up, reminded me about something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

When you send in the address to get your team’s t-shirts and goodies, make sure you get it right!

Last year I helped pack all the goodies that we sent overseas, this was sometime in August if I remember correctly. We needed to put a return address on the packages so I offered the use of Bulletproof’s address.

6 months later the following turned up on our doorstep.





Notice the use of hemp rope and wax seal. This box has been through a lot!