Little things

First, a word of caution, beware your .asoundrc if alsa doesn't work. It should be obvious but it took me awhile to realize I had modified it and it was messing things up, so I removed it and alsa worked.

Next, a lot of people have been talking about moving over to this app or another. One example is people moving off of Firefox. Well, in the last week or two I tried Opera and Konqueror, the two leading contenders on Linux, and well both crashed on me so often I'd rather have Firefox's slowness. And believe me, next to crashing, slowness is the next worst thing in my mind. I swapped around terminals a bit too because gnome-terminal can be a bit slow too, but we'll see. I'm thinking about stripping out the "Gnome" part of gnome-terminal to see how much that would speed it up. If I did that then I'd probably move on to do the same thing to gdm. I may be wrong, but I think that would speed up both apps allot. Then again, I'd need to divest some time from doing other stuff to actually work on that (mainly watching TV, playing computer games, and working on the house).

One Gnome app I ran across recently that I really liked is gnomebaker for burning CDs. I decided to grab a GUI instead of looking up all the mkiso and cdrecord commands (yet again). Once I had myself in the cdrom group it worked great. (One thing is that it seems to puke and hang if you're not in the group, I should bug that as it should recover after telling you it bombed.)

This brings up how minimalist I am as far as the tools I use. I love clewn for debugging (clewn.sourceforge.net). It's the absolute best. A simple integration with Vi and the most stable interface to gdb I've used. I have managed to make Eclipse puke and others, but this one was allot better than pure command line debugging while giving up nothing on stability. I also use fluxbox for simmilar reasons. And yes, keyboard short cuts are your best friends.

Anyways, that's enough ranting on what's a good app.

ANSI Terminal Goodness and Sports

So this week I got around to one of those things I thought would be cool to do, but never had a good reason to get into. I started playing around with using ANSI Terminal escape codes in my bash script to stop scrolling so much text but update information. For what I needed, just 3 escape codes work, and it's good, I haven't used this in plain PERL prints but it should work from just about anything.

So to start, before I print anything on the line I print "[s" to save the cursor location. In vi (The only text editor of course.) I type [s to get it. The just actually puts the escape keycode into the text. While blogging this I looked it up and tested \e does the same thing. So in bash echo -en can be used for the commands. The other two I use to start every line after the first one is '\e[1K' followed by '\e8' . The first command clears the line from the cursor to the begginning, what you just typed, and the second moves the cursor to where it was when you did the '\e[s' . So to sum it up, here's a bash script to start you off

echo ; echo; echo -en '\e[s This is my first chunk.' ; sleep 2 ; echo -en '\e[1K\e8 This is my second chunk' ; sleep  2 ; echo -en '\e[1K\e8 This is the last chunk' ; sleep 2 ; echo ; echo

So that was my fun with ansi terminal stuff this week, it will dress up all the PERL scripts I whip up at a moment's notice to do some thing. So, for sport now.

Well, I watch football. It's the only SPORT I watch (That and Poker which is really a game anyways.). Now one of my friends is all about baseball and I can't stand it. I mean it's so boring. Maybe the hand-eye coordination to hit a ball from a MLB pitcher is the hardest thing to do, but I agree with a family member who said "that doesn't make them great atheletes". Now I could watch Hockey, Soccer, or Basketball, and if I do then I'm done with the NFL. Even the NFL just takes too much time out of my day. I like the sport of football though. Even if there is more variance in the players from week to week. I mean who really know Minnessota would be completely dominated by the Patriots. But I loved watching Brady pick apart the defense (Man, I'm not a PAts fan but I'm finally at a place where I can say Tom Brady's a great Qb. And I think Peyton will be the next Marino who everyone says is great but didn't have the mustard to finish things and carry a team to the championship. If he does it will ONLY be because he didn't have to get through a Defense who could get to him. So Indianapolis lives and dies by it's offensive line.)

Anyways, if the penalty / officials got to something reasonable, and I blam it SOLELY on the NFL heads who make the rules changes, so that pass interference and some other rules make sense, then I'd never watch anything else. But as it is, maybe I'll pick hockey back up as my sport.