ssiva's posterous

internet explorer

I have always refrained from using IE (version 8), today was one of
those days I had to use it for some reason I don't remember now. While
on it, I have downloaded few files and I kept out for a while. Best
part comes now, I wanted those files, but I did not remember where
those files had gone in,nice and easy, there are easy ways to get to
it, I thought. I pressed CTRL+J (to see recent downloads) that works
just fine in both Chrome and Firefox, but it brought me favorites bar,
well, folks at Redmond did not think about giving the same experience
that users get on other browsers, perhaps they did it deliberately to
make IE distinct from others, and I had to go through the whole
history to find few files. There are more such annoyances in using IE
and those being reasons not to use IE. Of course,I don't have reasons
to prefer IE over Chrome or Firefox unless I need to visit something
that only works on IE. Someday, and that day may soon come, we'll say
RIP IE(edited version of a cue from The Godfather).

Most Romantic and Least Romantic in a single two-liner rhyme

Received this as a forward from a friend of mine... (Fwd Courtesy: Punch[Suresh])/

WASHINGTON POST COMPETITION ASKED FOR A TWO-LINE RHYME WITH THE MOST ROMANTIC FIRST LINE, BUT THE LEAST ROMANTIC SECOND LINE

And The Winners are ------:-

My darling, my lover, my beautiful wife,
Marrying you screwed up my life.

I see your face when I am dreaming.
That's why I always wake up screaming.

Kind, intelligent, loving and hot;
This describes everything you are not.

I thought that I could love no other --
that is until I met your brother.

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet,
and so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the
sugar bowl's empty and so is your head.

I want to feel your sweet embrace;
But don't take that paper bag off your face.

I love your smile, your face, and your eyes --
Damn, I'm good at telling lies!

My love, you take my breath away.
What have you stepped in to smell this way?

My feelings for you no words can tell,
Except for maybe “'Go to hell.”'

What inspired this amorous rhyme?
Two parts tequila, one part lime

.

pdf reader

Slowness of Adobe Reader had been a pain as we hate to wait for it to load, perhaps we, at least I, had dumped Adobe Reader ages ago, we have been searching for an alternate that just loads instantly. Though Foxit reader is a great one, guys out there started to bloat it, like what Adobe did to Reader. So I had to find an alternate, had to google, landed on lifehacker's page and there I found Sumatra. If you don't give a damn about features (useless ones), just get it, it's awesome.

 

 

Regards,
Siva

bash key bindings

The bash shell is got some nice key bindings that are of great use when you just get familiar with those. When you are an emacs user, you will find these bindings so emacs-intrinsic. These key bindings are configured through bind command that defines how readline is interpreted. In case if you are interested to know the current key bindings, type "bind -P or bind -p", which would give you the key bindings list. Here there are few easy to remember, yet sophisticated key bindings:

 

M stands for meta key (ALT)

 

C-a - Move to the beginning of the line

C-e - Move to the end of the line

C-f, C-b - Move one char forward and backward respectively

M-f, M-b - Move one word forward and backward respectively

C-l - Clear the screen

C-r, C-R - Search command history backward

M-backspace, C-u - Delete the whole thing you just types

C-k - Delete forward from cursor

C-t - Transpose chars

M-t - Transpose words

M-u - uppercase the chars from cursor

M-l - lowercase the chars from cursor

M-c - Capitalize the

C-/ - Undo

C-p, C-n - Recall previous/next commands from history

M-< - Beginning of history

M-< - End of history

 

More info available in man pages of readline, set and bind. Peteris Krumnis had compiled nice cheat sheets on bash+vi and bash+emacs.

gnu screen on cygwin

I have had a little problem with Cygwin environment settings on GNU screen sessions, the problem was all my settings are lost in screen sessions. To identify the issue, I tried to debug and found that my shell in the newly created screen session was different from my default shell (bash), hah, that explains why my rc files are not sourced in and my settings are lost. While I still am wondering why does screen use sh though SHELL is rightly set to bash, I just added "shell -$SHELL" line to my .screenrc file to explicitly select my current shell (which is bash) in new screen sessions. Same can be done achieved by specifying command line switch "-s $SHELL". (Thanks to the man page).

emacs + gnu screen

For quite some time, emacs has been my primary editor, and most of the time I use emacs while I am on gnu screen. I, have had, and still have, difficulty (refer StackOverflow) using C-a key in emacs while I am on gnu screen, so I thought why don't I change the escape command of 'screen' to ALT-[some-char]. However I could not find any nice way of adding ALT escape command, hence as a temporary fix, I have remapped the esc-command to 'C-\' by adding "escape ^\\" to my .screenrc file. If anyone has a better solution, please do let me know.