Peter McNabb
Recent Entries
Blog
Projects
- nhfilter
- p-run
- tippy
- viss
Reference
City Info
- West Valley City, UT
- Provo, UT
- Champaign, IL
Links
Brita is Cute
Last week I was out of town for work. After getting back, I've been able to spend a lot of time with Andrea and Brita. They're a lot of fun to hang out with. Andrea today reminded me how cute Brita is, and I have to agree (because it's true, not because she's my daughter). Brita and I spent a few hours today wandering around Target and Lowe's. She was wearing her new (and slightly large) "Hello Kitty" shirt with purple pants. It was very stylish, especially with her logger jacket on top of everything.
Anyway, we got a picture of Brita today after waking up from her nap. Isn't she cute?
I love my family. :)
Shell Prompt
If you frequently use a shell (bash in my case), it's important to have a decent prompt statement. Modifying PS1 isn't new to a lot of folks, but I thought I'd share mine anyway:
export PS1="[ \[\e[33m\]\u@\h -- \w\[\e[0m\] ]\n? "
Note that this uses color (a yellow-gold, varying slightly from one machine to another) and only looks good with a white-on-black color scheme. The resulting layout is something like this:
[ peter@komodo -- ~/git ]
?
The reason I like using two lines is that my eyes naturally look to the beginning of a line when I start typing. I don't have to scan through the line to find where I am. This is particularly nice if you're deep in a filesystem and your pwd is 60 or 70-some characters long. Along with that, your command isn't wrapped immediately after you start typing ...
Ubiquity
There's a little bit of buzz going on about Ubiquity, a UI enhancement for Firefox. Firefox already has hundreds of UI enhancements, but this one is a little different. If you've used Quicksilver on Mac OS X, you may notice Ubiquity feels somewhat similar to it. Basically, you can take something (a piece of a web page) and quickly perform an command with/on it.
The commands are nothing more than javascript snippets. But, because usable web APIs are growing in number and usefulness, Ubiquity has the opportunity to create and fill a need we never knew we had. There are already Firefox extensions that do a lot of what Ubiquity can do now, but Ubiquity is a framework, like greasemonkey, that allows developers to quickly build usability tools for users.
For a 0.1 release, Ubiquity comes with lots of commands. Working with search engines, social web ...
ReST Formatting with vim
Restructured text (ReST) is a plaintext markup format. I find it great for documentation and note-taking, and it plays nice with revision control, such as git.
One thing that gets a little tedious is underlining for sections. When you create a section title, the number of (nonalphanumeric 7-bit ASCII) characters underlining the title must match the number of characters in the title. For example, a section called "My Section" would need 10 "-" on the next line, assuming you're using dashes.
Using vim as an editor, you have three options for inserting the dashes. You could:
- Hold down the '-' key until you get the right number.
-
Count how many characters you'll need and type
<esc>10i-<esc>(insert ten dashes). - Use this handy little function I whipped up:
(Naturally, it should be defined in your vimrc file)
function ReST_Extend_Line()
let cur = getline(".")
let prev = getline( line(".") - 1 )
return repeat ...Utah Drivers
Overall, living in Utah is not as bad as I had originally thought. The mountains are pretty, neighbors are friendly, and the Linux/OSS community (one of my big interests) is strong.
However, one thing I can't stand is driving here. I'm reminded of it every day when I drive to or home from work. Some of my major beefs are excessive speed, tailgating, waste of gas, and poor lane usage.
The speed limit on most highways is 65 MPH, 75 when you get further away from towns. Lots of major streets in town are 45. These are quite a bit faster than what I'm used to in Illinois, where most streets are 30 or 35, and highways get up to 65. I always go at least the speed limit, but can't figure out why people are compelled to consistently drive 15+ MPH over the speed ...
Hello, World
The blog is working. Thanks, Sco++.
I'm finally getting around to publishing my updated website. I've got grand plans for content, and we'll just have to wait and see how much of it materializes. I'm also trying to get things updated for the pending Django 1.0 release.
