Displaying useful information in your GNU screen
My working desktop setup used XMonad as a window manager and a terminal using GNU screen. In XMonad, I was using dzen as a small panel in the top corner for displaying useful information (mail, clock, battery status, etc). Dzen just display a text string. This can also be printed by a program. I wrote myself a simple python script, for doing that part like the example shows below:
gocept:INBOX(1) private: -- | Friday, 19.12.2008 10:44:15 (AUS 20:44, CAN 3:44)
Now I switched to use XMonad in GNOME. Dzen is gone and I was looking for an alternative to display the information printed by my script. After a bit of googling, I found a very nice howto about GNU screen. Screen offers a harstatus and a caption line to display information. I tweaked my screenrc to use the python script in the caption line.
Have a look at my simple python script or my screenrc. Use it on your own risk of course 
svn merge weirdness
I stumbled over a strange svn problem today, while merging the xml2po branch into TRUNK:
svn: Working copy path 'ChangeLog.pre-2-4' does not exist in repository
photo by zen Sutherland on flickr.com
I found two possible solutions in the net, but none of them seemed to work:
- “edit the “.svn/entries” file, and look for an incorrect revision=”0″ attribute, and set it to the correct value.” ( see http://www.axlrosen.net/stuff/svnproblem.html)
- “At this point, the only way I found to repair my working copy was to delete the directory containing the problematic file, check it out again [...]” (see http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2006-03/0795.shtml)
I checked the ‘entries’ file, but couldn’t spot a ‘revision’ attribute at all. Solution two wouldn’t work, or I had to wipe out the whole gimp-help-2 module.
What I did now is to remove the files temporary (aprox. 10 files) and try again. I got the merge working afterwards. Although it is cumbersome, because you won’t spot the erroneus file in a dry run.
