SHDH X Day 1 - Like work, only better

So I had a revelation this morning. After spending four work hours on TurboGears filing bugs on SqlObject, working around poor documentation, and chatting with the only other responsive person in the chatroom, I have thrown in the TurboGears towel. I had a sort-of working todolist example, plus bugs. If I'm going to get anywhere with the 16 work hours or so I have left, I'm going to need a more "rapid" development environment, like CGI, maybe. I'll revisit TurboGears when they are a bit further along.

This morning I woke up wondering how I was going to get things done. Not that there is any real pressure to do so. The whole thing has a sense of humor about it, and no one has anything invested, so if anything does get done, bonus.

Anyway, I picked up the mail this morning and David Heinemeier Hansson was looking back at me from my Linux Journal magazine, as if to say..."Give in yet?". Yeah. I give. I'm installing rails on my laptop as we speak. It's about 1PM, and having already gone through a rails tutorial, I know this is going to get me there.

So SHDH X is being held at France Telecom in S.San Francisco. I'm in a beautiful corner office with a developer from another team. Everyone is running Ubuntu. Anyway, a bit of a late start but better late than never. I have the simple goals today of:

* finishing the design of the basic app
* fixing my eterm colors and learning a few more screen commands
* getting a rails app with the correct data model installed on my laptop.
* getting a basic rails app installed on the competition server.
* go to a barbecue for dinner.
* meet a few more people.

...

So far, so good. Notes:

Eterm

Eterm is very old. The last checkin was years ago. There is probably something better. If you install Ubuntu eterm, the config file you want to modify is in:

~/.Eterm/themes/Eterm/user.cfg

To figure it out, you will need to open the man page for eterm, www.eterm.org, and an advanced search page on the sourceforge "enlightenment" project mailing lists. Anyway, I've successfully changed a few minor things like foreground and background color, and consider myself lucky. Anyone who has a good Eterm user.cfg with a lot of font configs let me know.

Screen

Someday soon I'm going to write the best damn article on screen, ever. But for now, I have picked up a couple new screen commands. "Control key [" puts you in copy mode, which gives you access to the scrollback buffer. This is important. In my .screenrc, I have added these emacs key bindings:

# ------------------------------------------------------------
# EMACS KEY BINDINGS
# ------------------------------------------------------------

# emacs keybindings for navigation in copy mode
markkeys h=^B:l=^F:0=^A:$=^E
markkeys " =^ "

# special hack for C-e, since it should go *past* # the last char. -m means this is for copy mode only. bindkey
-m ^e stuff "$^f"

# C-g and other keys just quit copy mode. Esc does nothing. markkeys 033=015=^G=^D=h=j=k=l=H=M=L=G=g=y=c=v=a=x=
b=e=B=E=w markkeys @=033

# control arrows move by words. (set B, e, and w to F keys so that i can use # them to move by words, but they
themselves still quit copy mode.) markkeys B=[:E=]:b={:e=}:w=> bindkey -m ^[Od stuff { #"[[}" bindkey -m ^[Oc s
tuff ] #"}]^f"

So it's only 3:34PM and I have met a few new people, and made screen and eterm more tolerable. That's a little under an hour each for those enjoyable tasks. Oh, one more thing about screen, remapping the crontrol key is a must - the default is Ctrl-A, which of course interferes with readline bindings.