The offical website of Jason Charney and his services
FINALLY! SOME UPDATES! This website is being reconstructed. Some content will go away soon. If you want to see my new stuff, visit my github: https://github.com/jrcharney/.
Yeah, it looks like I didn't do a whole lot with the site last month. I was thinking of writing a post on how to use the old floppy disk drives, but it has been postponed until this month it seems.
So what is on deck for November?
Establishing the LaTeX math library for displaying math equations.
The Floppy Disk Drive tutorial I talked about.
Probably a few articles about math.
Work out the kinks on my menu widget. (Feedback welcome.)
Reorganize and add features the articles widget.
That seems to be the big highlights for this month. No big thrills since this is the holiday season. But that can change depending on the situation, even more so as get back in the saddle of some projects. I'll admit, I slacked off last month since there wasn't a whole lot of stuff to be excited about.
So what advice can I offer today? Well, there is an Election coming up on Tuesday. Hopefully you've registered back in September or October if you haven't registered. You don't really need to re-register unless your home address has changed or you're stuck somewhere where you can't get to your local precinct to register. If it's the latter, it's not too late to vote via absentee ballot. Just make sure that you fill out the form before Tuesday, November 6th.
Given the awful storm that occurred this week that hit the Northeast United States, there's a good chance that absentee ballots will be quite popular, especially if some residents are displaced or the local voting place is closed due to damage.
So don't let the fact that the polling booth got washed out to sea stop you from casting your vote this weekend. To everyone in that area, my heart goes out to you and help is on the way.
For everyone else not affected by Hurricane Sandy, or the Nor'easter that merged with it, in between now and Tuesday, go down to your local Red Cross, donate a pint of blood. Just be sure to know the rules about donation. So far, at least one of the presidential candidates doesn't know that the Red Cross does not operated on donated canned food and toiletries. (Because I can't be partisan on this website, names will be refrained. But what I can say is that a snow ball has a better chance of surviving hell than he does getting elected. Ditto for a lot of the people in his party who--shall I say--are the legitimate biproduct of skipping biology and health classes on account of their beliefs and possible home schooling. I'm pretty sure I can get away with saying these things since I haven't named names or parties, so everything is good. I've shared my opinion without making it sound political. Take that, critics of my website!)
The easiest way to donate to the Red Cross is texting REDCROSS to 90909 and chip in $10. It will make you feel good no matter who gets elected!
If you've ever wonder, can I open tmux inside of tmux, the answer is YES!. You can also run an extra layer of shell (be it bash or ssh) between the two tmuxes. Commands for the outer shell would be manipulated by CTRL+B as the prefix, naturally. Commands for the inner shell would be manipulated by using CTRL+B CTRL+B (That's CTRL+B twice).
This is great for running the local shell and a remote shell in the same terminal window and even better if you have like a 14 inch monitor or larger.
After over a week of tinkering, the new menubar is ready for this site. While I developed it to be more extensive for more than two levels of items, for the moment, the content I put into the array just shows the list of my active projects. It's not fully complete. There are still a few things I'd like to fix like whenever you mouseover a submenu and you don't want the entire thing to disappear, that's sort of been my dilemma.
On the plus side I've developed this menu with such flexablity that the only thing that needs to be input into is a PHP array. jQuery handles most of the style changes, though I would really like to find a way to use .on() for any mouseout events, not to mention fiddle with some of jQuery's animation features.
I'm hoping that with this project nearly wrapped up and thermos.sh in an adequate state, I can get back to working on jill.js and also implementing SQL.
Beneath is ugly color scheme is a lot of beautiful code. Today, we've made it all the more beautiful and functional.
I am happy to report that thermos.sh is now ready for tmux. However, tmux refuses to honor the color codes that were put into thermos.sh, not even after rewriting it with an option to not use colors and replacing much of the gawk code with bash so that options could be added.
It also turns out I hadn't had a ~./tmux.conf file set up. There wasn't one in /etc/ either. At any rate, the local file hidden in the home directory still allows for greater freedom as things can be applied to my own environment.
# File: ~/.tmux.conf
# Info: This file manipulate the appearance of tmux. See man tmux for options.
set-option -g status-bg colour0 # black # TODO: I wan't this to be TRANSPARENT not black
set-option -g status-fg white
set-option -g status-interval 15
set-option -g status-right "#(~/thermos.sh --nocolor)"
set-option -g pane-active-border-fg blue
This is what I have so far in my ~/.tmux.conf
Take note, that anything that is not applied in the above file thus far is set to the default settings, which I wish tmux had come with a /etc/tmux.config file so that I could take a peek at what the default settings were.
I want you to take note of a couple of settings status-interval and status-right. The first line says that every 15 seconds, the status bar should update, the second line runs thermos.sh in the lower right corner thanks to a little ncurses.h magic. There is a status-left btw, but the status-right is particularly worth noting as that is your widget area. I have some ideas for using this space better, but it will require more frequent status updates. As great as the image icons have a purpose for the general computer user, people who know computer enthusiasts love the command line. Things like tmux, urxvt (which I'm still trying to get set up), and ncurses.h still allow the programmer to exercise their minds and imagination. Of course, this is to an extent. I mean, if you want to write a program in OpenGL or HTML5 Canvas, GUIs are the way to go. But the real impressive stuff is still the low-high-tech way to do things. It's not enough for you to wait for someone else to create something awesome. That's where you must fill in that need and make something yourself.
Over the past couple of weeks, my computer has had some trouble staying cool. With no fan, it is now easier for critical temperature alarms to be triggered even when the computer isn't doing anything and you have the lid closed.
To compsenate for this, I've developed a new program today to integrate this information into the tmux interface in the very near future.
thermos.sh is a program that takes the data from sensors and consolidates the information into a single line of output fit for tmux. Most of the code in this project was written in gawk. It was a real learning experience as I figured out why my previous ventures in using gawk to do all my awk programming had some trouble getting of the ground as nobody had really brought it to the attention of the general public (or atleast me) that I would need to use the --posix option to get gawk to do anything if I needed to change the FS field separator. Perhaps the best way to help everybody else is to bring some emphais to that.
You will need to use --posix if you change FS in gawk
That should be emphasis enough.
I bet if the folks to created the gawk derivative of awk had placed emphasis on this information, O'Rielly Media would be selling book titled sed & gawk Cookbook or sed & gawk Pocket Reference instead of sed & awk Cookbook and sed & awk Pocket Reference. The latter of which I have and is a must have along with bash Pocket Reference. Both books by Arnold Robbins.
So the next step would be to integrate thermos.sh into the status bar of tmux.
