RMS Talk

I went to the Richard Stallman talk tonight on `Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks’ which was held at Sussex University.   I must say I was impress, I was entertained for the 2hr duration and questions afterwards.

After a brief introduction on what is free and non-free software, part of which how he introduced the concept of the 4 software freedom rules, and then how things such DVD and Blu-Ray take away these freedoms from us.  Following this he discussed the history of copyright and how it used to be applied when it was invented and through the ages to today.  Proposed his own solutions to how long copyright should last for as well as how to provide funding for entertainment.

If you catch a chance to see him I would really recommend it.

UPDATE:

More in depth review and audio recording here – https://www.martineve.com/2011/03/09/richard-stallman-at-the-university-of-sussex/

CLI onliners: Changing my email address in multiple files

Just sharing a one line I’ve used to change the domain for my email address throughout the various source code files I’ve contributed to at work.

First of all I get a list of all the files which match my old email address, which I then strip of svn specific files and binaries.

grep -HR "<david.morris@greenacre.no-ip.com>" * | grep -v Binary | grep -v .svn

Then for every result I grab the filename with

cut -f1 -d:

For every filename I use sed to replace the email domain, which I then redirect to a temp file.

sed 's/greenacre.no-ip.com/code-fish.co.uk/g' "$file" > "$file".new

Then we need to move the new file over the old file with

mv "$file".new "$file"

So all combined and in a for loop it looks like

for file in `grep -HR "<david.morris@greenacre.no-ip.com>" * | grep -v Binary |
grep -v .svn | cut -f1 -d:`; do sed 's/greenacre.no-ip.com/code-fish.co.uk/g'
"$file" > "$file".new; mv "$file".new "$file"; done

sussex@mailman.lug.org.uk

Reinstalling everything on Ubuntu

So I finally made the mistake which happens when your playing around with sudo and manually deleting development libraries, I manged to delete the entire contents of /usr/lib

Luckily a co-worker was running the same system and I had a couple of terminals open so I was able to restore the key libs for me to restore basic functionality.  Now I have the problem of fixing the packages which are broken, without knowing what are broken.

Does anyone know of a nice simple way to get everything reinstalled?