Probably the coolest VIm plugin since netrw, welcome CSApprox! Just put this in your .vim/plugin and away you go with completely transparent and automatic 256 color themes for your terminal vim that look amazingly not unlike the GUI versions of those themes. Just make sure your terminal properly reports 256 colors, and that your vim binary is compiled with gui support (debian flavors do this, but apparently not red hat flavors). If either of these are missing it will give you a little message and delay opening vim, if this is a problem you might want to suppress that output.
I also highly recommend enabling 256 colors via Xresources rather than setting
TERM=xterm-256color, this will save headache when sshing in from a less fine terminal or when logging in at the console. A quick google turns up plenty of info on how o set your Xresources with one caveat; if you use uxterm like any sane person would, you need
s/Xterm/UXterm/. I’ve also found cases where I need
xterm as well, so I simply put all three in there to be safe.
Xterm*termName: xterm-256color
UXterm*termName: xterm-256color
xterm*termName: xterm-256color
Some time ago, being the no good visual designer I am, I decided to put together a mutt color theme. This was no ordinary theme, I’m talking 256 colors! No, don’t worry, the theme doesn’t use all 256 colors.
Aaron’s post prompted me to put up my theme for consumption, enjoyment, and comment. If you want details on how to make the colors work, follow the link above, he did a good job of that already.
Now, the theme and screenshots.
Please, Von, please, next time you set up a samba mount, just use cifs and not smbfs. Save yourself a lot of headache.
Some people were poking around for the beast game on #utah today. So I dug up ye olde code and got it to compile without so much as installing some libs and adding a #include. That’s promising, I haven’t touched that code in 4+ years. Anyway it compiles but when you run it the screen is all garbage. #utah says it probably has to do with sfms. I don’t have a hint of time to do anything with it right now, but here I post it anyway in a darcs repo for the whole world to enjoy.
Some history on the project, you can stop reading now if you hate history. This was the first major thing I ever worked on. Before this it was writing a few graphics routines in BASIC for my friends game “Target”. It was then I drew the best ever 8×8 pixel rendition of an angry green blob. Wish I still had that… Prodding the time machine along… My brother Jacob and I set out to clone our good friend beast around 1997-8 in C++. He did all the work at first, with me watching intently and asking such questions as “what does that do?” and “why do it like that?”. Before the end I was writing as much code as he (or at least so I remember it). We had a good ol’ time playing it. When I returned from my mission in 2003 I did a rewrite to port it to linux using ncurses. At some point I also added some fancy self-preservation AI to the beasts. I’m really not sure if the AI stuff is in this version of the code I dug up; I hope it is.
As I just said, I attended fozzmoo’s presentation at the UTOSC. I spent some time trying to get Network Manager installed and working on my laptop before hand, and about half way through the talk. Both fozzmoo and others in the room were very helpful in getting it up and running. Now it is and I must say, it’s pretty slick.
That said, I will tell you that Network Manager isn’t the end-all be-all of your networking experience. It is for a very specific niche, which is for ‘on the go networking’. If you don’t try to shoehorn it outside of this, you’ll have a great time with it.
I mention this because in the presentation several people asked about static ip’s and such. NM doesn’t do these well, nor do I think it really should. I admit though it irked me at first. My next tidbit of helpful information is what actually brought me around to this understanding of what NM is.
At the presentation there was some discussion about ubuntu and network manager. By myself, as you can imagine, as well as others. I poked around on my laptop, and figured out that an interface would only be managed in network manager if it was not in /etc/network/interfaces as well as finding that the normal ubuntu network configuration tool made changes to this file. This concerned me and I made it known to others, saying if you want NM you should go in and disable the interface in ubuntu’s config. That seemed kludgy to me.
Well, when I got home I fiddled with it some more. There I found that you don’t actually have to disable the interface, ubuntu’s config tool actually has an option in the interface properties to put an interface in ‘roaming’ mode. “Cool,” I thought. But more than cool, this is what made me realize the true nature of NM. So I configured some profiles in the network config as such:
- Home: wireless in roaming, wired static on my home network (my laptop serves as gateway through the wireless)
- Caradhras: wireless configured to caradhras (my router) if I’m ever again lucky enough to have my router serve as gateway.
- Other: like it sounds, anywhere I don’t have a specific configuration. This one puts both interfaces in roaming mode.
It’s pretty sweet how they work together once you figure out the respective roles.
I never could get myself excited about the iPhone, and I began to wonder if I was becoming less of a techie. I would look at the sites, and sure enough it was darn cool. I would read about the interface, the multitouch, the accelerometers. It was all very cool, but did I want one? The answer was consistently no. Sure, if you dropped one in my lap with paid-for service, heck, I’ll take that, and be quite glad. I’ve come to realize that the reasons for my dissent were generally Apple (I guess my anti-apple blood runs thicker than I thought) and more specifically openness, or lack thereof.
I came to this realization after stumbling, nay, tripping over this, and on Yahoo! of all places. The Neo 1973 got me excited like the iPhone couldn’t dream of. I actually want to go out and spend $300 on a phone now (as I’m sure many Apple fans actually want to go out and spend whatever it is for an iPhone), even though it’s a little behind (no multitouch). Still, it has GPS, accelerometers, standard usb hookup (don’t think the iPhone has this), and the whole thing is made to be hackable. It runs on a Linux kernel with X! Oh the joy.
I predict this and other such products will dominate the mobile market the same way intel and it’s many clones did the not-so-mobile market. It will be interesting to see how prices will plummet, cool apps will be in abundance, and there will be a whole slew of Free phones. That reminds me, I love the slogan, “Free your phone.”
So if you want to get me a present (Christmas and my birthday are both coming up) now you know what I want.
IMMS was complaining to me that sox couldn’t read mp3 files to alalyze them. I wasn’t about to let this go on too long, I want IMMS to work to it’s full potential. I tried installing liblame0 and liblame-dev, I even tried libmad but all to no avail. Finally I did apt-cache policy sox. The installed version was some studio version from DeMuDi. I thought if any of the available packages would support mp3 it would be the one from demudi, alas this was not the case. I installed the version from ftp.easynet.fr (PLF) and now I have (readonly) support for mp3. Good enough for me.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if I could see an inline text version of .doc attachments?” I thought. That wish quickly became reality in this well-ended story.
Finding a sufficiently constrained search term proved difficult, so I resorted to #utah. I soon received an answer from spr (thanks man!) citing wv. I installed it with apt-get install wv. Then I constructed this line for ~/.mailcap:
application/msword; /usr/bin/wvText '%s' /dev/stdout; copiousoutput; desciption=DOC Text; nametemplate=%s.doc
Now fire up mutt and read that darned email-with-a-doc-attachment with nary a care.
I noticed yesterday that firefox now uses the newest pango and it displays cambodian properly. This makes me happy. I would type a few things in cambodian except my laptop is gone and I don’t have the keyboard layout set up on this computer. There is another post
however that has cambodian in it. And if you need a font, get it here.
I’ve been using quodlibet for a couple weeks now. I actually was introduced to it by my brother Hans some time ago, but it lacked an imms interface so I clung to xmms. Subsequently, xmms managed, in it’s awesome ability to annoy, to drive me away once and for all.
Using quodlibet I now have a couple fun projects ahead of me. First is writing an imms plugin for it. Next is fixing some quirky behaviour involving the play queue. Queue is probably the most awesome media player feature since random/shuffle. It allows you to add specific songs to come next without muddling around with the playlist itself—the playlist can happily remain in random mode or any other mode you can fathom.
Now I describe those queue quirks. If someone wants to tackle them before I get to it, go ahead. Just let me know so I don’t duplicate a work in progress. ;) Both issues seem to arise from the fact that a song in queue is a seperate instance that != the same song in list. This causes problem 1) the playlist doesn’t show the current song as playing or jump to it. Problem 2) likewise, when quiting quodlibet, the queue state, the playlist state, and the current playing song are all saved. However, upon resuming the current song, if derived from queue, fails to register as anything and doesn’t play. I assume this is because song_from_queue != anything_in_list.
