undertakingyou

While this is not a complete set of the commands it is a recounting of my experience burning a CD while only using a shell. The full stuff can be found here. When installing debian at one point I found myself with a minimum system and desperatly needing to have the testing install CD. I had the CD downloaded, and could see the ISO, but I needed to go forward from there.  It was pretty easy.

cdrecord -v -pad speed=1 dev=0,0,0 src.iso

After that little command it was easy. All went well and I now had a CD that I could use. On the source website it says that you may need to adjust the dev parameter.

Ok, so really, why have a clock that is in binary. I can’t read it any faster. In fact there are enough timepieces around me that I really don’t need another clock at all. The only reason that I like to have it is because it is fun to brag to my friends and co-workers “hey, I can read the binary clock”.

Really though, there are some practical uses. I do have it in a dvtm session so I can see the current time at a glance. I also am getting way better at reading binary.

Install was fairly easy. I downloaded the tar from here and untared. Then run the binclock.py and you have the clock. A couple of side notes. I did have to edit binclock.py so that the begining read: #! /usr/bin/python. Prior to doing that I got an error. Also, so that I would not have to type the full path to the py file I did a symlink to it from /usr/local/bin and now I just have to run binclock.

I picked this binclock over the one in the ubuntu repos for one simple reason. Looks. Really, if you are going to have a binary clock so that you look cool to those that don’t read binary why not have one that looks good? I would even contend that it must look good lest you look like a dork. Gotta protect your image here.

At the Utah Open Source Conference I heard Jared
Bernards presentation on using the command line to do anything that you could
want to do. I found this intriguing and he showed how to even watch movies
using just a commandline system. Very cool.

One of the systems that he said to use was dvtm. dvtm is a ‘window
manager’ that allows you to view multiple ‘windows’ at once. It also gives you
a ‘maximize’ and ‘minimize’ ability.

The good:
* Gives you verticle and horizantol split unlike screen
* Captures mouse inputs to change ‘windows’

The bummer:
* Caputers mouse inputs. If you have a ncurses program that can use the
mouse you are SOL because you can’t use it. dvtm catches the mouse prior
to the underlying program. Got really agrivating when I couldn’t scroll.
* No easy way to kill a ‘window’ once you have made it.

So far dvtm doesn’t annoy me to the point that I stop using it. I don’t think
it is in my arsinal of must have programs though.

So, I have been playing around with zsh and even though there are some things
that I am not quite used to. It is still pretty cool. I had been using Phil’s zsh prompt but found it nearly overbearing. I thought at first it would be
really cool to have a line at every command. That I would be so much faster
having that visual delimitter in my shell. But really I wasn’t and it was just
distracting. But I live having both a right and left font so I stole a large
portion of Aaron
Toponce’s zshrc and have made my new prompt that I am rather
happy with. Check it out and share what you think.