Another year, and another update to this website! I've been harangued by Java all day today, so I guess the next post to this blog is going to be how I managed to resolve that problem. whew.

This has to be one of the most amazing bands out there, ever. Essentially a group of turkish buskers in Istanbul, you need to watch this video to really figure out why they're so awesome.


Small Banner - 430x60

and

Foss.in

Lovely, we now have 2 brilliant FOSS events in different parts of the country, and I've had the opportunity of being involved in both over the past few years.

I QUITE like the logos and graphics for both, a far cry from what they were back when they started :)

:retab and :expandtab are godsends if you're doing python editing in vim, and want to make sure you don't ever have to deal with spaces!

Things to do to have a good font subsystem up:

1) Get Lucida Grande (Freeware)
http://www.osx-e.com/downloads/misc/macfonts.html

2) Get the msttcorefonts package, and gsfonts:

sudo apt-get install gsfonts-x11
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

3) In Gnome, goto System -> Preferences -> Fonts, and Set the following:
- Change fonts to something you actually like
- Font rendering : Best Shapes
- Click Details -> Resolution : 96dpi, Smoothing: Subpixel, Hinting: Slight

4) Next, edit your xorg.conf

Talking about Vista.

"It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout ... who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans."

Hehe. Very True. I recently installed Vista on parallels, and it was an interesting experience using it, but .. meh.

An interesting question - how do you see the last page of results, the least relevant ones, on google?

The answer is - you can't. Google only serves the first 1000 results, which you can go look at if you click all the way to the last search result. OR, you can do the smart thing and:

http://www.google.com/search?q=SearchTerm&num=100&hl=en&filter=0&start=900

Type the above URL replacing SearchTerm with your own word. A lot of other URLs are actually incorrect, since in order to do this well, you need to keep the "omitted search results" in, which the above link does.

This guide is meant to help you out with changing terminal settings to get default linux like functionality of page up/down and home/end keys on Mac OS X.

I would suggest getting your terminal to behave properly first, so swap some keys in the 'Terminal -> Window Settings -> Keyboard' menu - end and shift end; home and shift home; page down and shift page down; and finally, page up and shift page up.

Then edit the home key: delete all that is there and type the following keys:

ctrl + [, [, 1, ~
- it should now say: \033[1~
Do the same for the end key, it should say: \033[4~

Then setup those keys to have linux like (sane!) behaviour in bash and other readline aware programs.
As root, edit /etc/inputrc or as a normal user, edit the ~/.inputrc:


# Be 8 bit clean.
set input-meta on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off

# allow the use of the Home/End keys
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line

# allow the use of the Delete/Insert keys
"\e[3~": delete-char
"\e[2~": quoted-insert

# mappings for "page up" and "page down" to step to the beginning/end
# of the history
"\e[5~": beginning-of-history
"\e[6~": end-of-history

# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
# "\e[5~": history-search-backward
# "\e[6~": history-search-forward

You can setup all your Cocoa Mac OS X programs to have the same behaviour with end / home / page up / page down keys. To do so, create a file

Yes, I know I haven't been updating this site as frequently as I should be. But my anon blog is running well, and I might even post some articles from it here! Just a couple of days ago, a friend was talking about how increasingly important it has become to make sure that unwanted information about your views and opinions don't get abused by miscreants. And a fair word of warning that is too.

That said, I'm spending the week just impatiently waiting for my macbook pro to come in from Shanghai. Grr. They ship it all the way from China, and it takes almost a week to get to me even when its already in Indiana!