This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

LugRadio is ending. Yep. After 106 shows, two million downloads, five thousand emails, 134 hours of recorded material, five conferences, and fourteen presenters*, LugRadio is coming to an end. I've just released "More on that later", episode 21 of season 5, which is the antepenultimate (!) episode. We've got one more "ordinary" episode after this, and then the live show at LugRadio Live UK on the 19th and 20th July in Wolverhampton, and that's it. There'll be a certain amount of reminiscence at LRL in a couple of weeks, but this might be a good place for me to talk a bit about everything that's gone on. It's been a pretty cool ride, I have to say. We talked to loads of people, shone a spotlight on loads of projects, won an award for marketing and been elected best podcast in a magazine, done LRL in America and four times in the UK, and basically had a great laugh doing it. I'm really proud of what we've done. And now it's ending. A sad moment. I probably ought to say: it isn't because we've had a row or anything. We want the show to go out on a high -- always leave 'em wanting more, isn't that the showbiz mantra? -- and everyone can name programmes that have outstayed their welcome by stringing it out for just one more season. I would like to keep those people who don't think that we jumped the shark 104 shows ago to be still thinking that the show was good even after it's over. So, this is it, kids. This show, one more show, and then the live show at LugRadio Live. That's our chance to say thankyou to all the people who've made the show what it is, and your chance to see the last ever LugRadio recording live on stage. Drop us an email or post to the forums to tell us what you've liked and disliked about the last four years and what you want to see us talk about at LRL, and come and celebrate the end of an era with us. There's going to be rather a few drinks that weekend: make sure some of them are yours. I'll see you there. Other comments around the place: Jono's writeup, Adam's writeup, digg the end of the show

A fairly common design pattern in web forms is to have some explanatory help text for a textfield appear inside the text field, and then remove it when the user clicks into that field. It has the benefit of putting the help precisely where the user's looking. Labelify is a jQuery plugin that does this for you, as simply as possible. It handles a number of corner cases, and it's quite customisable if you need it to be, while still working as simply as possible out of the box. Enjoy.

Ian Lloyd's released browserversionicons.com, a set of icons for popular web browsers branded with the version number. This is useful for those of us who have fifteen web browsers installed at different versions for web testing.

It's a resource for Mac people -- the icons are in .icns format, which is some Mac-specific thing -- but I thought it'd be useful for Linux people too. So, I converted all the icns icons to PNG, using icns2png* and Ian kindly added those icons to the download pages. I've also done a brief screencast of how to change your browser icons to use different ones -- be gentle with me, it's my first screencast. Good work, Ian. Let's see more of that. (Oh, and if you get a chance to produce icons for versions of IE greater than 5.2, that'd be handy too.) (oh, strangely, there is an open bug for Gtk support for .icns format, and apparently Bastien committed the fix to trunk last November (so it should be there in my Gnome 2.22.2, right?), but you can't set a .icns file as an icon for a .desktop file/launcher. Not sure whether that's because I don't have the patch or because the patch doesn't do that; if someone can tell me, I'll file another bug.)

I've been a big fan of Tilda, the dropdown terminal window for Linux, for a long while; pressing F2 to grab a terminal is hardwired into my fingers now, and I'm crippled without it. However, Tilda's been getting steadily shitter as time's gone on; more crashy, more unresponsive. Recently, it stopped taking keyboard focus when you brought it up, which has led more than once to me pressing F2 and then typing half the shell command I wanted into my (still focused) Firefox window. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but at some point I'm going to type my password into an IRC channel. It's gotta stop. The obvious replacement is yakuake, the KDE dropdown terminal. However, I hate it. I don't even know why, to be honest; it just feels weird to me in a way that Tilda doesn't. So I looked around for alternatives, and found two: Guake, which is supposedly a better Tilda and Yakuake for the Gnome desktop, and yeahconsole. Sadly for the Guake team, I found yeahconsole first, so that's what I'm using. Actually, I rather like the out-and-out simplicity and bare-bones nature of yeahconsole, which is why I'm sticking with it; when I need to do shell things, I don't want flashy features, I want a shell. I don't use tabbed terminal windows, for example. Just simplicity, that's what I want. Yeahconsole is available in the Ubuntu repositories (click to install on Ubuntu). Here's how I set it up. First, it needs to run every time I log in. So, go to System > Preferences > Session, select Startup Programs, click Add, and add a new command, name "YeahConsole", command "yeahconsole". Next, it looks a bit rubbish when you start it up. Here's how bare-bones yeahconsole is: you configure it with X resources. Party like it's 1989! I had to go look up how to do this; for the more tender in years among us, X resources were a sort of central configuration for all your apps, round about the same time that humanity was fighting off sabre-toothed tigers and wondering whether that hot flamey thing in the corner could actually be useful. On Ubuntu, you need to edit (actually, you probably need to create) a file called .Xresources in your home folder*. In that file, you put the configuration for yeahconsole, like this:

yeahconsole*toggleKey: None+F2
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: 20
yeahconsole*aniDelay: 0
yeahconsole*stepSize: 10
yeahconsole*faceName: ProFontWindows:style=Regular
yeahconsole*faceSize: 9

The toggleKey one is the important one: it sets which key you use to summon the terminal. I like F2, myself, but pick whatever. What all this stuff means is documented in the man page (man yeahconsole), apart from which font to use. This is the faceName and faceSize options above, and here you have to delve a bit (I told you this was old-fashioned; I started writing a yeahconsole-properties configuration utility that did all this for you, but couldn't be bothered). In a terminal, run fc-list. This lists all the TrueType fonts that you can use in an xterm. Choose one, and put it in faceName above. Now, simply start yeahconsole for the first time (press Alt+F2, type yeahconsole), and then press F2 (or your key of choice). Pow, a dropdown terminal, like Tilda, but one that won't keep crashing and make you cry. One other thing: if you hit Ctrl-D to log out by mistake, it'll close yeahconsole (tilda did this too), and that's really irritating. To fix this, put the following in a file called bashloop in your home folder:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do bash; done

and change your Startup Programs command above to be yeahconsole -e /home/username/bashloop. Now Ctrl-D won't close yeahconsole. Win.

Bridge to engine room, geek factor nine. Those of you who read this for musings about the world, stop reading now. Alex at work has just alerted me to the existence of non-capturing groups in regular expressions. I had no idea these existed, and they're pretty useful if you're doing RE matching. If you're trying to match a string which might be "fish, chips and ketchup", might be "fish, chips and peas", and might not contain the "and chips" at all, and what you care about is what's last on the list (the "peas" or "ketchup") then I'd have used a regexp like /fish(, chips)? and (.*)$/. Matching that against "fish, chips and peas" will give you back a three-item tuple, ("fish, chips and peas", ", chips", "peas"). (Test with JavaScript) You need the brackets around ", chips" in the regexp because you want to treat it as a group. However, it ends up in the results, and that's really irritating. Now I know about non-capturing groups, I'd do this: /fish(?:, chips)? and (.*)$/. The ?: after the opening bracket of the group means "don't capture this group". So now the results you get back are ("fish, chips and peas", "peas") -- the chips, which we don't care about, are not mentioned! (Test with JavaScript) Another useful little trick to add to my toolbox. Cheers, Alex. Everyone who is reading this and thinking "I knew about this ages ago", why didn't you tell me?

I've just released episode 20 of season 5 of LugRadio, which is always a fun process (remind me to write about the actual release process for these things at some point; after over a hundred shows I'm starting to nail down precisely how to publish a show in four formats and to ten mirrors with the minimum of effort!). It was a pretty fun show to record, and recording it reminded me that I haven't written much about this year's LugRadio Live UK. Now, there are going to be some of you reading this who already listen to LugRadio and who therefore know about it: this post is for the rest of you (well, mainly those of you in the UK or in close-ish parts of Europe). If you do know about LugRadio Live UK already, then you should go and digg it and post one of the LRL UK buttons to your blog. If not...read on! Basically, it's gonna be brilliant. This is the fourth year of LugRadio Live in the UK -- we did the live event in the US as well for the first time in April this year, and it was pretty damned cool -- and we're really looking forward to it. It's always a jolly good laugh putting together LRL; looking through people's speaker submissions (if you submitted a paper, I'll be sending you details of when you're speaking or whether you weren't accepted in the next few days, I promise), thinking up cool stuff to do, and planning the live show. This year, I'm really looking forward to seeing the speaker lineup -- we've got some ultra-cool people talking about technology and culture and open source, and we've got some ultra-cool people exhibiting their projects and their products and their companies as well. The thing that really gets me about LRL every year is the vibe -- we got described as a "rock conference" a couple of years ago, and it really summed up the feel of the whole event for me. It's about having a laugh. We originally set up LugRadio Live because the fun bit at all the other conferences was the evening when you hung out with a bunch of cool people and had a beer and chatted about everything -- our thought was, why can't we just take that feeling, that experience, and make a whole weekend out of it? And lo and behold, that's what we've done for four years now, which I'm really quite proud of! Enough of why you should come and of back-slapping. How can you be part of LRL? It's in Wolverhampton on Saturday the 19th and Sunday 20th July (see the travel info for how to get to the venue). We've got deals with local hotels, too -- LRL is a true grassroots event (that's why it's five quid for a two day conference), so we don't want to make it expensive, because people pay themselves. Your company probably won't send you to LugRadio Live...but they should. You'll find out more there than in a month of listening to people in suits. :) Anyway, come to LRL and be part of it. You can digg it, but more importantly tell your friends that you're coming and get them to come too! You can pick one of the I'm coming to LugRadio Live buttons to put on your site, or design your own custom button if you don't like ours! So...get involved! See you in July!

I probably shouldn't be laughing as much as I am about having just created this, because it's not the most mature thing I've ever done. Hey, what can I tell you; it's been a long week.

<a href="http://adactio.com" rel="enemy">Jeremy Keith</a>

This year, for the first time in a few years, I'm not going to be able to make it to Guadec. I'm pretty sad about this -- it's always a fantastic time -- but I'm not going to be there. It looks like it's going to be insanely great, though, as ever, so have a laugh, all. I shall try and write up the things I was going to talk about into a guide to cool things that you can do in gedit (which I was planning to do anyway, before deciding to turn it into a Guadec talk!)

Alright, I give in. Everyone's using the bloody thing.

http://twitter.com/sil

Beyond 404, the talk I did at @media 2008 and BarCamp London. On the horribly ponderous subject of HTTP response codes, but I suspect that if you think you already know this stuff, you may be surprised at what you don't know.