Easy search of Stackoverflow in Chrome (and Firefox)

To easily search opensearch enabled sites (like StackOverflow) in Chrome, just start typing the name of the site in Chromes address bar, when the site name is matched, press TAB, it will then convert into a site search for that site and you can then keep typing in your search query.

To do something simliar with Firefox "awesome bar" using a feature called  "Add a keyword for this search" its a slightly different procedure. Thought the nice thing with firefoxes method is it works with any search input field and not just opensearch enabled sites.

And don't forget that if you want to access your local dev machine from an app running in the emulator, you need to use 10.0.2.2.

Android testing with ant

When running android tests using ant, you can specify a specific device to run the tests on when you have more than 1 device available to adb on your system. The property is: adb.device.arg so you can do:

ant -Dadb.device.arg="-s emulator-5554"

Or even better use a script like this gist.

Jenkins, adb, ant, oh my!

So this bug, who's root cause is this bug (yes reported in Jul '09 and still not fixed!), means that if you want to have a unit test failure cause your whole Ant build to fail and thus show up on your Jenkins/Hudson CI server, you need to do put this macro override into your build.xml.

Missing /dev/cdrom in Xubuntu 11.10

So for some unknown reason the /dev/cdrom symlink to my actual dvd device was missing, causing things like abcde not to work because thats what I had in my config to tell it which drive to use.
This fixes it:

> sudo lshw -C disk
*-disk                  
       description: ATA Disk
       product: ST95005620AS
       vendor: Seagate
       physical id: 0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: SD23
       serial: 5YX0B265
       size: 465GiB (500GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=00074110
  *-cdrom
       description: DVD-RAM writer
       product: DVD+-RW DU-8A3S
       vendor: PLDS
       physical id: 1
       bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/dvd
       logical name: /dev/scd0
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: KD12
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=open

> ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom
> ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd 

gmusicbrowser

Gmusicbrowser, Xubuntus default music player has a nice simple fifo for controlling basic playback functions.

Xubuntu...

Switched to using Xubuntu 11.10 - first time running non stock Ubuntu in almost 5 years.
Things so far:

Enabling SMB and network browsing. I actually like using FUSE much more than Nautilus own (gnome-based?) vfs.

Triming video with ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i video.avi -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:04 trimmed_video.avi


source.