Pixelastic

This morning I started reading a lot of online blog post, framework description and other webdev material online I had in my bookmarks. After reading them, I saved them on my pinboard account to find them easily later.

Lot of good JS and CSS framework/libraries in there, I hope to be able to test them soon.

I also check my mailbox and respond to mails from my normal job. I shouldn't. I'm on a day off, I have to force myself to completly cut out those external calls.

Now, let's the work begin

Anyway, I finally finished the vimtutor. I still have a some difficulties to remember the mapping of the basic hjkl movement keys (I always want use k to move down instead of j). However, I feel confident enough in it to try writing my new code in it.

So, I headed to the Rails for Zombies tutorial. I thought it was free but the "win $5 worth of online teaching" / "next course costs $5" make me doubt it a little. Well, we'll see.

After registering to it, I wanted to save my login and password to KeePass as I always do.

Unfortunatly, KeePass on my Ubuntu machine works by using mono, and the keyboard interaction weren't that good (caret is slightly misplaced, inputs lags before getting displayed, text selection is weird). So I thought "Hey, let's see if there is a new version". Big mistake.

It appears that there was indeed a new version, a real one, with apt-get and stuff while mine was some hackish install I manually made a few month ago.

But wait, this means manually adding a ppa directory. No big deal, I trust the author. What ? Still doesn't work ? Hmm, I see. I need mono 2.6, and I only have 2.4.

What ? 2.4 is the latest available version on Ubuntu 10.10 ? You mean I must upgrade to 11.04 ? Hmm. Why not. I'll have to do it eventually, so let's go.

So I ran all my updates, to have the most up to date system. Unfortunatly, language-pack-gnome-fr doesn't want to upgrade so the OS upgrade isn't displayed.

Wait, what am I doing ?

And that's when I remember that my initial wish was to learn Ruby on Rails and that I was now on the road to upgrading my whole operating system. That is not exactly speaking procrastination, but it makes me do so much other things that my initial goal that I really looks like it.

I finally managed to purge my packets, upgrade to 10.10 and then to 11.04. But this took me 4 hours, and now it's 11PM and I guess I won't start this rails tutorial today, after all.

I'm slowly trying to move my development machine from a desktop Windows Xp to a laptop running Ubuntu. This is quite a long task because there are so much softwares I depend on on my day to day work. Most of them are crossplatform but I often need o find a Ubuntu equivalent, and sometimes it does not exists and I have to run the Windows app using an emulator.

This is exactly the case with KeePass. KeePass 2.0 is an improved version of KeePass 1.0 (obviously), that allows one to save all password in one place. The 2.0 version also permit to save more than single password, virtually anything, and adding little icons to each entry (when you start having 200+ entries, icons are a must have).

Enter Ubuntu world

The official 2.0 version is not supported under linux. There is a linux port, named KeePassX, but it does not support the .kdbx file format used by the official 2.0 version.

So I tried to run the Windows .exe file with Wine at first (I already had Wine installed to run another app), but it wasn't working with KeePass. I tried instead an other emulator, Mono, and running mono KeePass.exe totally worked.

Little tweaks ahead

First of all, I had to install two additionnal packages to make it open without errors : System.Windows.Forms and System.Runtime. So far, so good.

But, I quickly discovered that one of the most usefull features of KeePass, auto-type (Ctrl+V automatically fills a login/password field) wasn't working correctly. There was one more missing dependency : xdotool.

If you are running Ubuntu like me, do not install it from the official packages, this version is completly outdated and won't work. Instead, you have to manually install the latest version. If you are lucky and running a 64bits system, you can download directly the .deb file from here.

If you are running under a 32bits system like me, you'll have to manually install it. First grab the files from this link. Then, install the libxtst-dev package (it is needed for the install to complete), export the content of the .tar.gz file into a temporary directory and execute sudo make install.

Finally !

Now, you got KeePass 2.0 working under Ubuntu, and installed all dependencies needed to run the auto-type feature.

In a Windows environment, one can change KeePass preferences so that closing it only send it to the tray bar.This option does not seem to be working under Linux, KeePass still shows in the task bar even when minimized. I spent some time trying to fix that too, tetsing AllTray and other tray softs for linux but didn't managed to get what I wanted.