MultiMarkdown on Ubuntu

Markdown has been around for years, 10 years to be exact. And I haven't really given it much thought until I started using my iPad as a lighter alternative to carrying around a laptop. I know I wouldn't be able to compile and stuff, and I do miss my computer habits from time to time.
So now I've started using Markdown, or MultiMarkdown to be precise since it does feature enhancements vanilla Markdown lacks. One of them is support for Tables. I know, a lot of my colleagues shy away from tables, but I do work in a technical field surrounded by smart engineers who works a lot with tabular data.

On my iPad I have Editorial and have been using it for a few days now that it's deeply ingrained into my daily workflow. But on my desktop... I use what's available. Depending on my mood, I use Mome, Retext, Uberwriter, or plain ole' Vim. But I do use Uberwriter the most especially when I'm drafting a long communiqué.

And then I started working on technical reports.... most of which requires tabular data. Damn!
So I started hunting down a MultiMarkdown application, and stumbled upon MdCharm. Yes, it does support tables. But there's a catch... there's no PPA, and it's no longer being updated/maintained. So if you have time, maybe you could fork the project and help out the community.

Just look at that! Looks great doesn't it?

And if, after installing, you can't seem to launch MdCharm, try launching it from the command line and check for errors. I got the following:

mdcharm: error while loading shared libraries: libhunspell.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It's weird since I already have libhunspell installed, but upon locate I found this: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0

So it's just a matter of symlinking it:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell.so

Diodon's dependency on Zeitgeist

So I disabled Zeitgeist since when it starts to scan, it takes up 1GB of RAM..... 1 fucking Gigabyte! I disabled from running it by issuing the following commands:

sudo sed 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' -i /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop
sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zeitgeist-fts
sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/zeitgeist-datahub
sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/zeitgeist-daemon

Then searched running zeitgeist processes (via ps command) and killed them.

So finally I got my 1GB of RAM back... whew! Until Diodon started to freeze. It's running, but it ain't keeping tabs of my clipboard, and it ain't clearing. I killed it, then launched from terminal hoping it spits out some error I could work with.

** (diodon:22122): CRITICAL **: file log.c: line 975: unexpected error: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.zeitgeist.Engine: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute program org.gnome.zeitgeist.Engine: Success (g-dbus-error-quark, 23)

Yup, it's dependent on Zeitgeist alright. And since there's no Zeitgeist plugin for Diodon, and I can't disable it from the application itself, I resorted to uninstalling Diodon and installing ClipIt. And...... I got my clipboard history back!

Yeah, alright it doesn't have an Ambiance theme making it an odd indicator. But I don't care, my clipboard history matters more than visual aesthetics.

Ubuntu/Unity and Conky does not work together

I'm not particularly happy with how Unity (or maybe Compiz) messes up my conky. It gets this way all the time and I have to restart conky every single time it happens. Apparently, I'm not the only one experiencing this problem and so far no definite solution exists (no, I don't want to give my conky it's own window).