Now that school is out for the summer, I have a bit of time to work on some of the themes I’ve created for my ZSH prompt, Irssi and GNU Screen. The first focus of mine was to get all themes working well with both white text on black backgrounds, and black text on white [...]
I was writing some scripts this morning to help me keep the Unix and Linux server I administer at work up to date with their NTP time synchronization. As I was going along, I thought to myself, “I’d like to see some color in the output.” Thankfully, I already had the code in my ZSH [...]
Ever since discovering ZSH 3 years ago, I’ve been addicted, but it wasn’t until a good 2 years into using the prompt on a daily basis that I decided to do some radical work with my prompt. I’ve blogged about this before a couple times, making improvements along the way: post 0, post 1, post [...]
I’ve been getting a flurry of emails at work, reminding me that my passwords are about to expire on several Unix and Linux machines in our production datacenter. They have a policy in place, where the password much be changed every 90 days, and I have to keep my current password for at least 7 [...]
I’ve decided to go back to vi mode with my shell. Of course, by default, BASH, ZSH and others use emacs mode for the keyboard bindings. This is fine for the generic case, but if I’m using Vim for my default editor, it makes sense to use the Vi keyboard bindings in my shell as [...]
A couple recent posts have started on the Utah Open Source Planet regarding popd and pushd not being available on a default Ubuntu install. As discovered, popd and pushd are shell built-ins for the BASH shell, and not provided by the Debian Almquist Shell (DASH). Why has Ubuntu made the change from BASH to DASH [...]
I’ve been meaning to get to this for some time, but haven’t gotten around to it until today. In a previous post, I shared with the world my zsh PS1 variable. Well, I extended it a bit this morning making it more informative. First, I need to setup a scenario: I’m running screen locally on [...]
Spending the evening working on my shell scripting, I thought I would jump into “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts” by Dave Taylor. In his script validalnum.sh, he has a test case to check if a user entered in valid alphabetic or numeric characters. His result is elegant and clean. I’ve changed up the script a bit [...]
I guess when you have GNU developing both the bash shell and the text editor emacs, you’re going to have one set of keyboard shortcuts work in the other. Case in point: the emacs keyboard shortcuts are also bound in the bash shell. Well, being a vim enthusiast, that just isn’t going to work. So, [...]
Apparently, people are having issues with the Bash script in my previous post. There is a syntax error, and they can’t get it working. The error is something along these lines: aaron@poseidon:~$ bash irssi_notify.sh irssi_notify.sh: 3: Syntax error: “done” unexpected (expecting “do”) The problem is a missing semi-colon after the word “message” just before the [...]
I am currently connected to two Irssi instances coupled with screen. One instance at home, for all my personal IRC needs, and the other at a corporate LAN for secure inter-office IRC messaging. It works great, except when someone tries to get a hold of you (a highlight). I haven’t found any good way for [...]
My coworker asked me this question, and began asking a few others in a couple IRC channels. So, I thought I’d extend it to my blog, and the planets that I syndicate. I added as many choices as I could hoping to see a wide array of votes. I added a few newer languages for [...]
For those of you running WordPress on your own server, or a server that you maintain, I wrote a little script that may make upgrading your WordPress a bit easier. For me, I am running 4 installations of WordPress, so, when the upgrades are released, it’s a bit of a pain to get them all [...]
Ok. I had a little project at work, at which point, I turned to Perl to accomplish the task. The project was simple enough: take a comma-separated file, and look at a few fields to see what data is contained. Based on that data, create a “weight”, and assign the weight to the record at [...]
I’ve had this before on one of my previous blogs under the toponcefamily.com domain. I no longer own that domain (I let it expire, and now some “search engine” is selling it), but it was pretty cool. You could see what I was doing at anytime during the day. Well, I set it up again [...]
