waldyrious's questions

I've attempted to create a new .lang file for getting Gedit to recognize the Julia programming language. I have read the tutorial, the reference document and the wiki page Gedit/NewLanguage, and I believe the file to be correct. However, upon restarting gedit after copying the new julia.lang file to /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/, a .jl file is indeed recognized and the syntax highlighting menu is set to julia, but no actual highlighting occurs.

Thinking that I might have done something wrong, I tried instead using an existent language file, for a similar language (Matlab), and only changed the header metadata into:

<language id="julia" _name="Julia" version="2.0" _section="Scientific">
  <metadata>
    <property name="mimetypes">text/x-julia;application/x-julia</property>
    <property name="globs">*.jl</property>
    <property name="line-comment-start">#</property>
  </metadata>

Everything else was kept exactly as-is, and I saved the file as julia.lang. Still, when reopening gedit the same issue occurs. What's more, if I select the Matlab entry from the syntax highlighting menu, the formatting is made correctly (according to Matlab rules), even though both matlab.lang and julia.lang have exactly the same syntax definitions!

What could I be doing wrong? This guy seemed to have the same problem, but it was never revealed in that thread how he solved it (if he ever did). Any ideas?

Update: my mistake was indeed not changing the context id as pointed out by @carandraug in his answer. I did, however, have other issues which I'll note here in case they're of help to anyone:

1. I reused the "shell-like-comment" definition from def.lang for Julia's single-line comments, but that was getting me a lot of errors. It turns out when a reference context is used, the id attribute cannot be set. Changing from <context id="comment" ref="def:shell-like-comment" /> to <context ref="def:shell-like-comment" /> made the errors go away. I think the reference document (and the tutorial as well) should mention this caveat. I've edited the wiki page to point this out.
2. Before I figured the problem with the comments context, I commented out its definition, but then I started getting a "style 'def:string' not defined" error. When I uncommented the definition, this error disappeared. I'm not sure what caused it in the first place (considering that indeed a <style id="string"> was defined in def.lang). Any clarifications about this are welcome in the comments :-)

A final suggestion to anyone developing new language highlight definitions for gedit: don't forget to run gedit from the command line and look at the console output!

I've been using the following command to list the ten largest files, at any depth, under the current directory:

find -type f -size +10M -exec ls -gGsSh1 {} + | awk 'NR<=10 {print $0}'

(I use awk instead of head to prevent a broken pipe error when the list is too long)

It works well, but it's evidently hard to remember and type every time. I tried putting this in .bash_aliases, but it doesn't work then (it prints 10 empty lines).

If I use less instead of awk, the output is presented correctly, but that means showing the whole list of files bigger than 10MB (my lower threshold), sorted by size, rather than only the top ones.

So, what's making awk choke as part of an aliased command here (assuming that's indeed the problem), and what can I do to fix it?

I am in Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) 64bit and downloaded the btsync executable from http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync/ but running it doesn't seem to have any effect. Double-clicking the executable does nothing, and running ./btsync in the terminal also exits immediately without any output.

Has anyone successfully ran this under Ubuntu, and if so, is there any special configuration changes that need to be made to make it work?

I can't figure out why I'm getting the following results:

ls -l tells me the size of a given file (HISTORY) is "581944":

$ ls -l HISTORY 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 waldyrious waldyrious 581944 Feb 22 10:59 HISTORY

ls -s says it is "572":

$ ls -s HISTORY
572 HISTORY

I obviously need to make the values use a comparable scale. So first I confirm that using --block-size 1 in ls -l gives me the same result as before:

$ ls -l --block-size 1 HISTORY 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 waldyrious waldyrious 581944 Feb 22 10:59 HISTORY

Then I do the same to ls -s to get a value in the same scale:

$ ls -s --block-size 1 HISTORY 
585728 HISTORY

Different results! 581944 ≠ 585728.

I tried generating comparable values the other way around, using -k, but I get:

$ ls -lk HISTORY 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 waldyrious waldyrious 569 Feb 22 10:59 HISTORY
$ ls -sk HISTORY 
572 HISTORY

Again, different results, 569 ≠ 572.

I tried specifying --si to make sure both options were using the same scale, to no avail:

$ ls -lk --si HISTORY 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 waldyrious waldyrious 582k Feb 22 10:59 HISTORY
$ ls -sk --si HISTORY 
586k HISTORY

...again, different values: 582k ≠ 586k.

I tried searching the web but the only thing I could find that seemed relevant was this:

Some files have "holes" in them, so that the usage listed by ls -s (...) is less than the file size listed by ls -l."

(note that in my results the opposite happens: ls -s returns sizes bigger than ls -l, not smaller.)

Meanwhile, this page says that

there is no elegant way to detect Unix file holes.

So, how can I deal with this discrepancy? Which of these values can be considered correct? Could this possibly be a bug in ls?

I have a dyndns account linked to my home computer and everything is set up so that I can SSH to it from my work (university) computer. I then connect it to the university VPN (using these steps) and proceed to attempt to use the Remote Desktop Viewer to access it graphically. However, this fails, I'm not sure why. I tried using the dyndns URL, and the local addresses returned by running ifconfig on the home laptop:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:f5:be:62:10  
          inet addr:192.168.1.78  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol  
          inet addr:192.168.94.81  P-t-P:192.168.94.21  Mask:255.255.255.255

but none of those worked, even after specifying the port 5900 (which I believe should be automatically selected). I am not sure which one I should be using (inet addr, P-t-P?)

The error I get is Connection to host <hostname> was closed, although sometimes it seems like a timeout, while others it fails immediately.

Here's the output of ifconfig in my work computer:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr bc:ae:c5:2d:3a:ef  
          inet addr:192.168.94.7  Bcast:192.168.94.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0

Sometimes my computer shuts down unexpectedly, usually when some process is taxing the CPU. This answer mentions that "when a system shuts down in a normal way, it is either a user with root privileges or an acpi script", and "an acpi shutdown can be caused by power button press, overheating or low battery (laptop)." So my guess is that it was overheating, but I'd like to be sure.

A comment in the question linked above says that /var/log/acpid would contain some information, but that file doesn't exist on my machine. Does that log get placed somewhere else in Ubuntu? Do I need to configure something to make it show up?

• Note: the methods suggested here didn't return any relevant information (dmesg | grep -i acpi didn't return timestamps, and /var/log/kern.log didn't have any entries for the period when the computer shut down). I found these relevant entries in /var/log/syslog, but would like something cleaner/more informative, which I assume acpid would provide — if I could find it...

Soon after installing Xubuntu, I moved the default dock from the bottom of the screen to the left, and added a regular panel in the bottom with the window list.

However, as I open windows, the window list doesn't show them in order. I expected them to be sorted from left to right, newer ones on the right, but this doesn't happen.

How can I make the panel sort the windows correctly?

When the files being moved or copied are images, bigger thumbnails would make it easier to see the file contents and decide on how to solve conflicts. Is there any way the default thumbnail size in the filename conflict dialog can be increased?

Sometimes I get the error that seems to be described in this thread (see this post for an image). However, despite it being an error, I actually enjoy the theme (or lack thereof) with it's carved buttons, no rounded corners and clear boundaries between elements. Maybe it just feels nostalgic, but anyway -- I want to know how to keep that theme (non-theme?) permanently.

Btw, it doesn't seem to be the Clearlooks theme, which according to what I read is the default Gnome theme, so I'm inclined to believe that it is Gnome unthemed.