Add a Separator Between Terminal Commands

After running many commands in the terminal, it sometime gets difficult to read the outputs. I've seen many people hitting 'Enter' repeatedly just to separate those outputs. This neat trick would add a nice separator between each command and also makes the command bold. In addition to that it also adds a time-stamp at the end. The time-stamp is useful in knowing when a particular long-running command completed.

So the final result would look like this.

Easily Enable/Disable SVN Proxy

To configure SVN proxy settings you need to edit the servers file in svn. In Linux, this can be found at ~/.subversion/servers.

Open this file in a text editor and change the settings as following by including the proxy host and port under the [global] section. Uncomment those two lines and remove any leading spaces.

[global]
# http-proxy-exceptions = *.exception.com, www.internal-site.org
http-proxy-host = proxy.host.com
http-proxy-port = 1234
# http-proxy-username = defaultusername
# http-proxy-password = defaultpassword
# http-compression = no
# http-auth-types = basic;digest;negotiate
# No http-timeout, so just use the builtin default.
# No neon-debug-mask, so neon debugging is disabled.
# ssl-authority-files = /path/to/CAcert.pem;/path/to/CAcert2.pem

If you get any errors, make sure that there are no spaces at the start of those lines.

For most of us, proxy is used only at school/university/work. Everywhere else you don't use proxy. So Most of the time you need configure the settings once. But you will have to enable/disable proxy every time. That means opening this file in an editor and commenting/uncommenting manually every single time.

After getting fed up with doing this every time I move to and from university, I came up with a better way to do this.

Custom Launcher for IntelliJ IDEA in Ubuntu Unity

IntelliJ IDEA does not install a program launcher during installation. You only get a start-up script. So you need to create a custom launcher to quickly and easily run the program without going to the terminal.

In previous versions of Ubuntu we had this to quickly create a launcher.

But in Unity it is not so easy.

Install Firefox 4 final version in Ubuntu

The final version of Firefox 4 was released on March 22nd. Windows users can download an installer directly from Firefox homepage and just run the installer. But for Ubuntu users it's not that simple. The best thing for them is using the package manager.

Most of the instructions for installation of Firefox 4 in Ubuntu point you to the Mozilla - Ubuntu daily build repository, which actually installs Minefield. Minefield is the unstable nightly build of Firefox. Of course those of us who are ardent Firefox fans have been using Minefield to get the latest betas and RCs and to feel the awe of Firefox 4. But now that the final version is out you can get rid of Minefield and upgrade the default Firefox installation in Ubuntu to version 4.