Book of Mozilla

If you are in a Mozilla browser, click this link here. Happy Easter!

(Thanks to nixCraft)

Officially Awesome

The aforementioned PC-BSD v1.3 beta 2 has finally be officially released and I'm downloading it now. It really was an amazingly smooth installation and I'm looking forward to seeing if this final beta version is the same.

1.3 BETA2 Released!

Turkey Tech Toys

So I couldn't resist a quick trip to the store this morning to buy some new tech toys. For those international types, yesterday was the Thanksgiving holiday, whereby we eats lots of food and watch plenty of (American) football. And today, the day after turkey day, has become something of a shopping holiday, where the stores open at 5am (or earlier!), offering "incredible" deals. Generally, I don't bother with it, as I think the deals are vastly overrated.

But Friday is one of my hockey mornings, so I'm up early anyway, so I checked out the deals at some of the tech stores. And found some sweet ones at CompUSA and Staples, which just so happen to be next to each other in a little plaza on my way back from hockey, so it worked out nicely. I grabbed six things, and now I just have to worry about getting the rebates in before they timeout. Here's what I got:

• 200gb Maxtor EIDE drive (US$20) - yup, you read that right - 200 gigabytes for $19.99, after rebates. I didn't even need another hard drive, but I couldn't resist


• Saitek Gamers keyboard ($20) - My keyboard and mouse were getting a little long in the tooth (I use them about 10 hours a day usually), so I'd been thinking about upgrading. I just couldn't pull the trigger on the fancy Logitech gamer's keyboard, with the little LCD screen. It was $50 while the Saitek was only $20. Both are backlit, so that's pretty cool. But I'm a "Natural" keyboard guy, so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use this fulltime. But at least when gaming.


• Logitech G7 Laser mouse - with the money I saved on the keyboard, I splurged on the mouse. Very nice 2000dpi laser mouse, with on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment and two batteries. Very nice looking mouse (nope, this keyboard just won't work full time. My fingers feel cramped and my arms are already tired. Gonna have to splurge on a new Natural one).


• 5 outlet strip (free!) - can always use another one of these


• 60 pack DVD-R ($3) - don't really use DVD-R much, but for a nickel each, I can learn to do backups with them. I noticed my BootIT NG will make an image of a partition using one too.


• 2 1gb SD memory cards ($20) - My wife's Treo uses SD cards and this was a real deal. Will make a great stocking stuffer (can you tell she isn't interested in my blog?)

So it was a very productive morning. Like I said, I don't think this keyboard is going to work out as a full time one, but it should work for my gaming needs. I reboot into Windows to play games, so it won't be hard to just plug this USB keyboard in on the way.

Bullets Over Broadway

What language do you want?

A couple of interesting programming language links to pass along.

First up is a page which gives you the source code to print out the lyrics to the (in)famous road song, "99 Bottles of Beer", in over 600 programming languages, from the popular (Java) to the obscure (Piet - programming in color). Very cool list of virtually all computer programming languages:

99 Bottles of Beer

Here we have a page that attempts to rank programming languages based upon popularity, using a bunch of different sources. As someone who does most of his programming in C++ and C, I'm glad to see them maintaining their ranking!

TIOBE Software - The Coding Standards Company

She Sells Sea Shells

I've been thinking I should investigate shells. No, not seashells, silly, but rather command shells. I've always used bash, but more because I do so much of my work on Linux and it is the default shell then any real comparison between any of the myriad shells offered. Some people are voracious tcsh defenders, which is the "out of the box" shell found on FreeBSD (and, of course, PC-BSD). Other popular shells include ksh (kornshell), pdksh (a very close ksh relative), and zsh. And I won't get into the ancient ones, like sh (the original Bourne shell) and csh, as those are old and crufty, although 'sh' is the scripting language of choice, due to its power and widespread availability.

Anyway, I was reading FreeBSD 6 Unleashed on Safari (pretty good service, an article for another day), when I came across the chapters on command lines, and the part where they talk about the various shells. It was a very good overview of the various shells, ending with:

Which Shell to Choose?

Which shell, then, should you choose? For most of this chapter, it doesn't really matter. Most of the standard FreeBSD commands work the same way under all shells. It is only when you want to start performing advanced tasks, such as changing shell variables, setting aliases, and writing shell programs, that the differences between the shells really become apparent. In day-to-day use, you'll find that some of the features of more advanced shells (such as the ability to recall your previously issued commands using the arrow keys, and to complete command names with the Tab key) are crucial to your ease of use and peace of mind. This means using pdksh, bash, or the shell endorsed by FreeBSD, tcsh.

If you don't plan to do any shell programming, tcsh (which in FreeBSD is the same thing as csh) is a fine choice. If you are interested in learning shell programming, choose pdksh or bash because you won't have to unlearn anything when you start programming, and all the commands you learn for operating within the shell can be applied directly to programming within it.

So I suppose I should just tackle tcsh, a shell that I used to use in days gone by, but haven't done much with lately. But although they didn't mention zsh in this overview, their description was intriguing enough that I thought I would give it a try:

The zsh Shell

The Z Shell, or zsh, is a shell designed to cover all the bases. Its basic design is Korn-like, and it incorporates all the popular features of both bash and tcsh (and it attains a large size and memory footprint because of it); but its unique features such as advanced globbing (filename matching), command line editing, and key binding makes it a favorite for hard-core UNIX users, especially those accustomed to the binding-rich Emacs editor.

It was that bit about Emacs that attracted me, of course, being the Emacs aficionado that I am. So I've installed zsh and am playing with it a bit. The initial setup is quite daunting! There is a very long customization script that runs to get some things set up, and there is surely enough options to keep me dizzy for weeks. I'm going to be playing with it over the next few weeks to see how it works out and if I can notice any major differences in daily usage.

I also want to get much more into scripting. It's something I used to do quite frequently on Windows, ironically enough, where I've been using the incredibly powerful 4nt for ten years or more and find it very intuitive to write small batch files to do my work. But I've never felt comfortable enough with sh or bash to do the same on Unix / Linux. But now that PC-BSD is my everyday environment, I figure I must get better at it.

Addendum: Here is another excellent overview of the popular shells: UNIX shell differences

Build yer own

Okay, your hardware project for this weekend (and maybe I'll even extend the deadline through the upcoming US Thanksgiving holiday), is to build your own MP3 player:

Daisy_mp3