A had one of those moments that makes me glad I have some basic competence with the various GNU tools.
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I’m giving Markdown a shot. I got sick of HTML. It’s cumbersome and not pleasant to read, and wyswig editors that operate with HTML under the hood have their own set of problems. Given the choice, I prefer a Wiki-like syntax. Markdown’s a lot like this; it’s human-readable but powerful in terms of the formatting it allows you.
Once I found a WordPress plugin and a Vim syntax file, I was all set.
What’s more, Ubuntu has a package called python-markdown. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll use Markdown for anything other than blog posting, but on the other hand, it’s awfully tempting to take advantage of this kind of intuitive, powerful formatting.
Yes, I’ve taken a step down a dark path: I’m writing blog posts in Vim, in Linux. Although I use it for coding as often as possible, I’ve thus far avoided it for anything like actual writing.
I like playing around with operating systems. I installed Windows 7 RC a few weeks ago, for instance. And then a couple of weeks ago, I installed Ubuntu 9.04. I’m sticking with Ubuntu for now, despite Flash not having any sound.
One thing guaranteed to bring on swearing is an OS that’s tanking. Some process sucks up CPU or disk and pulls down the whole OS with it. *nix flavored operating systems make this easier to deal with by exposing OS internals and providing you with tools to process that information.
What’s bothered me until now is that I had no idea how to audit things like who’s using up the most CPU cycles, who’s taking up all the network bandwidth and so on. My rough equivalent was ps -eo c,args | tail -n +2 | sort, wrapped up in a convenience function. I was looking at NetBSD stuff and stumbled across a few tools under the configuration, administering, and tuning section. These tools surely have Linux counterparts, if they aren’t mostly the same.
Of particular interest to me were:
sysstat appears to be a collection of tools in Linux.
I still haven’t found a good network auditing tool. I suppose wireshark is a viable choice, coming as it does with command line tools. I’ll have to play around— I don’t really want low-level packet dumps, and a list of open connections from netstat(8) isn’t quite what I want, either. I’ll have to play around. And of course if you have any suggestions, feel free to drop ‘em in the comments.
Tags: *nix
As much as I’d like to sever all ties from Windows, there are a variety of reasons that I can’t. On the bright side, Windows 7 is coming out this year, and purports to fix some of the problems with Vistas well as making some long overdue UI changes. One of ‘em is the new taskbar, which I’m actually interested in.
Of course, I’ll have to wait until October. Even then it’s rumored to be comparable in price to Vista, an expensive proposition if you have a machine that works fine already. If you’ve got Vista, you might be in luck! I do not, so I’m not sure what my plan is.
However! You don’t have to wait to get some of those features, as some enterprising fellow on the Internet is writing various apps that port newer features of Windows to older versions.
In particular, I’ve been using ViGlance. I’ve felt for a while that the taskbar is untenable with more than a few applications open, so this solves that problem nicely by grouping them under icons and, on hover, allowing you to choose from a list of windows that app.
It’s not complete yet: you can’t pin programs to the Dock Taskbar, and there are no previews on hover. Even without these features, though, I would recommend it.
Tags: windows
All right, so maybe I’ll finally use this space.
If you’ve tried to get IPython working on Mac OS X Leopard (that’d be 10.5, and 10.5.7 in particular) with an Intel based CPU, you’ve probably had some problems. I know I did! Let me cut to the chase, with a more technical explanation to follow. Oh, and some mild bitching, too.
I’m following the instructions I originally saw here, on IPython’s Launchpad site. Yes, my instructions are merely a reprint of someone else’s bug report. More on that after I explain.
Quick instructions
I’m going to assume you haven’t downloaded anything, although if, like me, you wrestled with this for a while, you can still do these steps and it’ll work. It worked for me, anyway. :/
- Download the
.eggfor readline, presumably the latest version. Get IPython if you haven’t already. As of this writing, you can get it here at the IPython download site. You can s/i386/fat/ if you like. - Copy it to a directory, such as
~/python. - You can try to install readline and IPython: sudo easy_install readline ipython. One or both will fail.
- Open /usr/local/bin/ipython in your favorite text editor, and replace the contents of the file as described at the IPython Launchpad bug linked above. The key is to hardcode readline into the Python system path immediately after sys, and then to launch IPython explicitly.
- Launch ipython.
You should be OK now, tabbing and all. If you haven’t checked this shit out, using IPython for your system shell, I highly recommend that you do. It’s none too shabby. There’s a book on this, too.
Technical stuff after the jump.