Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Cygwin tips

All tips assume you installed Cygwin at C:\cygwin

Use rxvt instead of dos command prompt

Change your cygwin.bat to
@echo off

C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin

rxvt -e bash --login -i

Customize rxvt

Create a file in your home directory named .Xdefaults
rxvt*foreground:white
rxvt*background:black
rxvt*font: Lucida Console-14
rxvt*scrollBar_right: true
Other rxvt options can be found here.

Fix Home, End, Delete, and Insert keys

Put this into ~/.inputrc
# Home Key
"\e[7~":beginning-of-line

# End Key
"\e[8~":end-of-line

# Delete Key
"\e[3~":delete-char

# Insert Key
"\e[2~":paste-from-clipboard

Then add this to ~/.bashrc
export INPUTRC=$HOME/.inputrc

Friday, March 16, 2007

Web - Firefox Search Engines

You can add your own search engines to the Firefox search bar. Here are some I found:

Tips

Thursday, March 8, 2007

VIM - Doxygen Syntax Highlighting

To have vim highlight Doxygen comments, add this to your vimrc:
let g:load_doxygen_syntax=1

For more help, try
:help doxygen

Thursday, March 1, 2007

UNIX/Linux - Command Line Tips

CommandDescription
du -hs dirDisplays disk usage of dir. -h gives human readable format (e.g. 12M) and -s suppresses every recursive directory's output
echo $?Displays the return code of the previously exited program
pgrep -lf process_nameDisplays pid of all running processes named process_name. -l lists the process name and -f matches in the full command line

Web - RSS

You've noticed websites with orange icons that say "RSS" on them, but you don't know what that means or what to do with those icons.

What is RSS?

Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication.

For real, what is RSS?

A website containing an RSS feed has the capability to send you a summary of updates whenever it has updates. In other words, you're able to subscribe to that website's updates.

Why should you care?

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, it sends notifications when updates are available on the site. Some feeds even give a brief description of the update. This way, you don't have to open the whole website to know that it's been updated; thus, saving you time.

What can you subscribe to?

Any site with orange icons labelled RSS or XML. This includes sites such as blogs, news sites, forums, and download lists.

Some browsers, such as Firefox, display buttons when you browse to a site with RSS feeds.

Ok, cool. So how do you use RSS?

Let's walk through an example:
  • At the bottom of CNN, you'll see a link for RSS.
  • Click on that RSS link. It should bring you to CNN's page of RSS feeds, which contains various RSS links to potential topics to subscribe to, such as CNN's Top Stories.
  • Click on any one of those RSS links. A page or dialog box should prompt you for which RSS aggregator (such as GreatNews) to use to subscribe to that feed.
  • Now you open your RSS aggregator, update your feed, and look at the page updates. Simple as that!

Subscribe to my blogs using RSS