March 2010 Archives

Last weekend was mostly spent fighting with Gnome/DBus/HAL/MumbleKit.

The story starts with me upgrading my laptop to Karmic. (Well, no, actually it starts a bit before that, but we’ll pretend.) After deciding that the new version of GDM blows goats (see Google passim: it seems that it got HFPed) I downgraded to the gdm-2.20 package, which actually has documentation and can be configured. It was about this time that I discovered a bug.

Groff mis-hyphenated an Xlib structure name. As a result, I noticed that it could have been re-camel-cased as ‘XGraphicSexPoseEvent’. Which is one I probably won’t be masking out.

(Hmm. $\mathrm{\TeX}$ makes the same hyphenation mistake.)

The other day, a colleague asked me how to multiplex lines from a number of asynchronous sources from a Unix shell script. Here’s what I came up with.

#! /bin/sh

set -e
for i; do
  while read line; do echo "$i: $line"; done <"$i"&
done | cat
wait