undertakingyou

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.

So, I tried zsh. On whim really, I know one person (atoponce) that uses it always, but other than that I just read a blog post by someone else who loves it.

It seems just like bash except two things: it has a % at the prompt instead of a $ (e.g. will-laptop% as opposed to will@will-laptop:~$) and I am used to bash in that when I hit the up arrow and start using the history if I need to edit the command all I do is arrow over, backspace, delete, type as needed and hit enter. In zsh I changed an ‘ls’ to ‘las’ and tried to delete the ‘s’. It just changed the ‘as’ to an ‘AS’ and wouldn’t let me type or backspace any more on that line. I have no idea what it was doing.

So, two questions: does anyone else out there use zsh regularly and why? and what in the world was the shell doing when it kept messing up my commands?