Mikey Boldt

What am I doing?

VirtualBox Guest Resolution Auto-Resize

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I’ve been tinkering off-and-on for a while to get my VirtualBox Windows 7 guest resolution auto-resize working. While not mission-critical, it smooths my workflow, and perhaps most importantly, it bugged the heck out of me when it wasn’t working.

The problem was that when I’d resize the guest’s window (or, more specifically, when I shuffled windows in xmonad), it would revert the resolution to 640×480. Some tinkering revealed that auto-resize behaved properly up to a certain window height, then would revert to 640×480.

Some things I tried, which didn’t work (googling shows this is a common problem):

  • Increase video RAM.
  • Install (experimental) 3d acceleration guest additions feature.
  • Set global max UI size to “any”.

But, I believe the thing that worked for me was (in the guest):

  1. Right-click the desktop, select “Screen resolution”.
  2. Click “Advanced Settings” (on right, middle of screen).
  3. Click “Monitor” tab.
  4. Uncheck “Hide modes that this monitor cannot display”.
  5. Click “OK”.

I tried changing the resolution to 1920 x 1440 (though fullscreen for me is 1900 x 1200, I didn’t see this option). The guest screen seemed to virtually flicker a bit, until I changed the window size, at which point it auto-resized as it should.

Emacs: open-line with fill-prefix

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This has happened to me one-too-many times, so I figure I’d post it:

I’m writing a longish comment in some code. I write it on a single line at first, then call fill-paragraph to let Emacs break it up into multiple lines of sane width. But, it prefixes each line with some text I’ve recently killed. The same prefix pops up when I call open-line as well.

I dug into this a bit, and found that I must have accidentally set the variable fill-prefix (which is bound to C-x .). To undo this, just call set-variable and set fill-prefix to nil, and go back to happily opening lines and filling paragraphs.

Execute Code via Org-mode Links

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I was recently browsing the org-mode link documentation to see how I could link to my Gnus email inbox1. Looking through, I noticed a couple of interesting link capabilities I had not known about before:

shell:ls *.org A shell command
elisp:org-agenda Interactive Elisp command
elisp:(find-file-other-frame "Elisp.org") Elisp form to evaluate

Having the ability to run arbitrary shell commands and Elisp code via an Org-mode link seems very powerful. This is mainly a note-to-self to remember this capability. I will report back if/when I find a good practical application for this.

Footnotes:

1 The format is gnus:group.

SOPA Revisited

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A family member sent out an email with information on the new petition to veto SOPA, and he asked for my take from the technical side. This is based on my reply.

I am aware of SOPA, and the senate version called PROTECT IP. They are bad. There’s a good video at http://vimeo.com/31100268 that explains a bit.

I don’t know a lot about the technical details, but on a high-level, “The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.”1

Frankly, I find the scary part to be giving US government and copyright holders the right to control what websites we can access. As if our media isn’t controlled enough already (see this for an example), this would remove the main open exchange of ideas and information we currently have. Sounds like China.

Since you asked about technical details, here is an article that looks at some of the ways SOPA could be implemented by ISPs. Pretty technical (I wouldn’t bother reading it if “DNS” doesn’t mean anything to you), but it gives a nice concise overview if you have the background.

Though I have admittedly not followed this very closely, and I’m typically not much of an activist, I have signed a prior petition and contacted my representatives, blogged about it, and posted on twitter and facebook about it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good resources for doing more.

So, yes, I will be signing this new petition and contacting my representatives. Thank you for sharing the update and the new petition!

Disciplined Email via Emacs Gnus

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I’m a believer in the Inbox Zero philosophy; that is, I don’t like my brain to be in my inbox. If I have more than about 5 read emails sitting around, I get uncomfortable. I recently noticed myself getting sloppy with email, so I watched the Merlin Mann’s original Inbox Zero video for a refresher. The part of the video where Mann describes typical email processing as a deli chef who reads the orders multiple times, organizes them in different ways, but never actually makes a sandwich. Email is a support tool to help us actually do things. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

So, I took a look at the tools and processes I use for email. Since email is text, IMHO it belongs in emacs. I have been using emacs mew for a while now, since I like how it allows you to keep using emacs when it’s doing IMAP operations. I also use k9mail on my Android phone to check email hourly. My plan was to process email in mew daily, and keep in touch with the rest on my phone.

My analysis is I got sloppy in three aspects:

  • I read too much email on my phone. I was e.g. catching up on mailing lists on my phone, when really that should be done at my daily mew session.
  • In my daily mew check, I would leave mail for processing later.

To combat this, I started using Gnus instead of mew. The key feature of Gnus is that it reads email like a newsgroup reader–that is, once an email is marked is “read,” by default it no longer shows up in your inbox. This provides a constant reminder that email should be read once and processed, not left in the inbox to reread and process later.

As a side benefit, I find Gnus to display email beautifully. HTML emails show inline images properly. It displays messages properly threaded. I love the overall look-and-feel.

This is my current plan for disciplined email. In a month or two of using Gnus, I’ll check in to see how my email processing is going.

Fight SOPA and PROTECT IP

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For better or worse, I don’t get into political action much. However, this strikes a chord with me. Current legislation, namely the Stop Online Privacy Act (bill) and PROTECT IP (bill), aim to extend the reach of the US government and copyright holders against websites they believe to be in violation of intellectual property rights. Here’s a video explaining some of the details–watch it to the end, where there are some notes on more recent versions of the bills.  The EFF has some great resources to fight SOPA and PROTECT IP.

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/31100268?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0″ width=”640″ height=”360″ frameborder=”0″]

Emacs: ssh with Tab Completion

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Something that’s bugged me is that when I ssh into another machine inside a shell in emacs, tab completion gets still behaves as if I’m on the local machine. Just by chance, I once started a shell when using TRAMP to edit a remote file via scp, and noticed that the shell was on the remote machine and tab completion worked! So, I used this little in a function to start a remote with tab completion without manually opening a file on the remote machine first:

(defun remote-shell (&optional host)
  "Open a remote shell to a host."
  (interactive)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (let ((host (or host (read-string "Host: "))))
      (cd (concat "/scp:" host ":"))
      (shell (concat "*" host "*")))))

(defun myserver-shell () (interactive) (remote-shell "myserver"))

Install Emacs 24 in Ubuntu

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[2012-07-19] Update: Please see Damien Cassou’s comment describing his emacs snapshot PPA moving forward.

After reading several good things about emacs 24, I decided to give it a shot. A little googling led me to Damien Cassou’s emacs snapshot PPA. Simply ran the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
emacs-snapshot

Everything works great so far, specifically email in mew, chatting with jabber.el, my org files, and org2blog/wp. Played with the built-in ELPA package manager a little, and I really thing it will be nice to avoid manual package management.

Haven’t decided if/how often I’ll update my snapshot. Maybe until emacs 24 comes out in the Canonical packages? But then will I want to stay on the bleeding edge? Thoughts/suggestions/experiences?

A Year of the Lord: Liturgical Bible Studies (Review)

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Having followed the daily Bible readings and saints of the Orthodox Church Liturgical Calendar, I felt like I was too far down in the weeds. I know that there is deep meaning to the broader organization of the Church calendar, so I was looking for something to help me understand it better. Around the Liturgical New Year, after hearing a couple of good snippets and recommendations of The Year of Grace of the Lord (non-affiliate link), that seemed like a logical choice, so I ordered it. However, the order got mixed up, and instead I got the series A Year of the Lord: Liturgical Bible Studies by Theodore Stylianopoulos. I’m a pretty laid-back guy, so I figured I’d give this series a shot.

Each week of the Church calendar corresponds to a chapter in the book. Each chapter contains sections discussing a topic in the week’s calendar: the Sunday Bible readings, important saints, feasts, fasts, etc. Sections provide a discussion of the topic, a relevant Bible passage, study questions, and questions that direct the application of the section to one’s life. Meditations, prayers, and hymns occasionally appear at the end of a section or chapter.

I’ve been reading one section each morning, which fits well into my day. The sections are short enough to be a reasonable daily devotional for busy people, while long enough to contain a good lesson. The study questions reinforce the Bible passage for the topic, and often highlight aspects of the reading I had glossed over. The application questions, while good though exercises, will probably not stick with me or change my life–simply because making such a change would require a stronger focus over a longer time, rather than something new each day.

My favorite part of this series is the weaving together of the topics, the Bible, and the Church calendar. This has started to show me the depth of the Church calendar, more so than the daily readings I was doing before. The book ordering mix-up that brought me this series has given me exactly what I was looking for. Perhaps next year I’ll actually get The Year of Grace of the Lord, but until then, I’m happy with what I have.

A Morning Prayer for Geeks

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I love the Morning Prayer of St. Philaret of Moscow. It contains petitions applicable to all people, while seeming particularly relevant to the work of a spiritual father, receiving guests and providing spiritual guidance. I think I would benefit from a morning prayer targeted towards the type of work I do. I don’t mean something tongue-in-cheek, like The Book of Uncommon Prayer, but a genuine prayer for we who work with our minds. While I do not consider myself to have any particular gift for prayer writing, I humbly present my stab at a morning prayer for geeks:

Glory to you, O God, who has provided me with work to do.
As I focus my mind on this work, let me pray without ceasing in my heart.
Grant me the wisdom and power to successfully perform my tasks, that this effort and its results may be to Your glory.
Amen