The Standard Output

This is off-topic for this venue and the fact that I decided to include it says a lot about how strongly I feel: I just watched the trailer for the upcoming movie Hyde Park on Hudson, starring Bill Murray as F.D.R., and based on that alone, I am hereby predicting that Mr. Murray will win an Academy Award for the performance.

If you aren’t willing to learn,
No one can help you.
If you are determined to learn,
No one can stop you.

Ted Neward (@tedneward), [+] Wed 22 Aug 2012 14:52

Visual Studio 2008 used to have a Emacs key mapping scheme that you could pick from the Options dialog under the Keyboard options. Visual Studio 2010 did away with that key mapping scheme.

But those emacs enthusiasts among us who use Visual Studio should not fear… There is now an Emacs Emulation extension available for VS2010 that you can install via the Extensions Manager under the Tools menu.

Installation

To install the Emacs Emulation extension, follow these steps:

1. Open Visual Studio 2010
2. Go to the Tools menu
3. Select the Extension Manager
4. On the Extension Manager dialog, select Online Gallery
5. Search the Online Gallery for Emacs (top right)
6. Select and install the Emacs Emulation package
7. Restart Visual Studio 2010
8. From the Options dialog, the Emacs key mapping scheme is now available

Beyond the default Emacs key bindings, the ones that I find most useful are the following:

… and that’s all, folks!

There is a little known amusement in Emacs that you can use on your loved ones:

1. For maximum effect, ensure the loved one is looking over your shoulder.
2. Open emacs
3. Enter the command: M-x animate-birthday-present
4. Provide your loved one’s name and …
5. Voila! Watch the magic happen…

To find out more about it, describe the function (C-h v animate-birthday-present) or look in animate.el. Have lots of fun…

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A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

– Einstein

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There is a really great write up on how to install and maintain the latest Oracle VirtualBox package on a Debian-based Linux distribution.

Here are the steps in a nutshell:

1. Add a line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

   deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lucid contrib non-free
   

2. Download and add the Oracle public key:

   wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
   

3. Install VirtualBox:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.0
   

That’s basically it… Do refer to the link above for extra details and some caveats.

I have an older laptop that runs Ubuntu Linux and one of the issues that comes up regularly is that Ubuntu releases a new version every 6 months and I usually flatten the disks on that machine and do a fresh install. The base system is great and very usable, but there are several packages that I install manually after the fact, most of them being programming tools. There is a quick way for you to list out all installed packages and then restore them after upgrading and I will cover that technique here.

Note: The instructions listed here are for Debian based distributions that use .deb based packages.

Backing up a list of installed packages

In order to list out all installed packages and save them to a text file, you can do this from the shell:

$ dpkg --get-selections > installed-packages.txt

Let’s deconstruct the above command:

• dpkg is the Debian package manager
• --get-selections is the parameter or action that lists all the currently installed packages. You can also pass a pattern to this action to generate different types of package lists. Look at the man pages for details.
• > textfilename.txt will redirect the standard output to the text file specified.

Restoring the list of installed packages

When you need to restore the installed packages from a previous state, you can run the following command from the shell:

$ dpkg --set-selections < installed-packages.txt

The command above is a little different and those differences mean:

• --set-selections is the action that sets the package selections using a file read in from standard in.
• < textfilename.txt will read the contents of the file and send them to standard in.

Conclusion

Backing up and restoring your package installation list is a really simple procedure in Debian based distributions. You can even script it out and run it on a schedule and then save it to a cloud storage service such as Dropbox. Let me know what you think and if you have a better process.