The fog

It was a beautiful foggy day today, so I decided to take a few pictures on the way to work.

Recursively remove .svn directories

It seems I regularly need to remove all the .svn directories from a directory structure. It would be nice if this function to disconnect a directory structure was built into svn, but since it is not, I usually use this command from the root of the project directory structure:

rm -rf `find . -name .svn`

You talk better than you fool

One of my favorite Simpson's quotes:

Bart: You're going down, Homer. I'm gonna fool you!
Homer: You talk better than you fool.
Bart: I'll fool you up real nice.
Homer: You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.

Finding stuff in jars

My coworker gave me a nice command to use when looking for certain classes in a set of jar files. This will recursively process each jar file in the current directory, and list the contents in search_jars.txt

find . -name \*jar -exec unzip -l {} \; > search_jars.txt

Then you can look in search_jars to find out where class files or other stuff is coming from.

Setting local maven repository

Maven has a convenient property that can be used to set the location of the local maven repository. It can be passed as a parameter using the "-D" option.

mvn -Dmaven.repo.local=/home/path/to/local/repo install

Accented Characters in Linux

I normally use Fedora for my day to day work, and I wanted to be able to type accented characters, specifically French accent marks like in the words "très" and "ça va". It took me a good bit of searching before I found an easy way to do this so I thought I could share the information here.

I found this page on Accented_Characters, but the "Alt Gr" didn't seem to work for me. Eventually I found a hint on the ubuntu forums and was able to find the Fedora equivalent.

So here is the solution (using Fedora 7):

Go to System -> Preferences -> Hardware -> Keyboard, select the Layout Options tab, expand "Compose key position" and choose your preference (I chose the right Alt-key). This seems to make the compose key into the "Alt Gr" key on the other page I found.

So now things like (Alt + `, e) will give me è. Have a look at the wikipedia entry for additional information on using the compose key.