If you like simcity-like urban management games, give My Country a spin. Here’s a few tips for those of you starting out…

Looking for all the libraries passed to the linker in Makefiles or some other minus-L thing? The easiest way around this is to escape the minus sign.

Which is better? It’s so hard to find an unbiased opinion. Both games are full of newbs, bitter vets, and trolls, so don’t expect friendly public banter in either game’s public chat channels. It might all boil down to one question - What kind of player are you?

Install multiple avant window navigator dock panels on more than one display by editing gconf or change the source code for the more complete, but harder way. There may be a newer version of Avant Window Navigator (AWN) out that supports multiple docks across completely different displays, but I wanted to get this working in version 0.4.0 which relies upon a set of older libraries that I already have.

Can’t install new rpms using yum? Update won’t work? Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again. Chances are if you’re seeing this error message the repository files are not the problem.

ou can edit the profiles and change things like cursor shape, text font, colors, etc. But where’s the option to make the cursor blink? Nowhere to be found, thats where. Making your cursor blink in gnome terminal is easy enough… you can do it graphically through gconf-editor, the ‘regedit’ like interface for modifying gconf keys, or there’s a simple one-liner to handle it.

If you pass in the event when you enter a callback, you can look at event.type to determine which button was pushed and process the action accordingly. Make sure to check the event.type first for a button press as not all events will define an event.button.

You don’t need to install an RPM package just to get to the files. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for the default configuration files or docs from a package. You may have the package already installed and don’t want to reinstall it. It’s not pretty, and I wish rpm and yum provided a prettier method of extracting a file, but it works.

If you want to check for syntax errors without actually running your code, you can compile it with py_compile. You may want to do this if your code modifies files or interacts with the network or external hardware or applications.

If you need this, you’re probably doing it wrong. But if you really must check to see if a variable has been assigned yet, there’s nothing really stopping you. Here’s one way of implementing it.