Abandon the GUI!

Alerting with Remind

Don Harper — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:57:08 +0000

Back in my article on Remind, I talked about the simple power of remind to power your scheduling needs. That is all fine and good, but how to you get it to tell you when you have an event?

In its simplest form, when you run remind from the command line, it will not only display the current day’s reminders, but it will run in the background and wake up to tell you about other reminders on the screen while you work.

This is fine, but what happens if you do not have that termial open in front of you? Well, I have two ways I approach that issue.

First, when I run under X (yeah, yeah, I know, but I use cli tools under X), I have this added to my .xinitrc:

remind -z -k’xmessage -buttons okay:0 -default okay %s&’ ~/.reminders &

Let’s look at the command line:

The -z tells remind to wake up every 5 minutes and reread the .reminders file.
The -k tells remind to run a command instead of simply printing the reminder to the screen
xmessage -buttons okay:0 -default okay %s& is the secret sauce of this. This is the command run when there is an alarm. This command line calls xmessage (which is on pretty much any box with X) to display the alert. You could use zenity or kmessage, or winpopup, or whatever. This is what puts the alert in your face when you are not looking at the screen. The & is needed to make this command non-blocking by putting it in the background.

That all good if you are setting at your computer. But, what do you do when *gasp* you leave to computer? This is a little tricker. For this, my solution needs two things: 1) a computer which is always on and 2) a way to send messages to your cell phone/pager (sms or email). I have a cron job which checks to make sure remind is running, and restarts it if it is not (I use a hosting provider which does not like long running processes). The command line is similar to the one for X, but with a difference:

TZ=CDT6CST ~/bin/remind -z -k”echo %s | Mail -s rem mypager@somephonecompany.com&” ~/.reminders &

This time, I echo the reminder and send it via email to my phone. As long as my phone carrier’s email to sms gateway is not bogged down (happens every so often), I get the alert within seconds of the X message when I am sitting at my computer, but I still get the messages. Pretty cool, uh?

[the examples above are on one line. They may be wrapped on your screen]

Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program

Don Harper — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:19:16 +0000

Want a pizza, and do not want to fire up that pesky GUI? We have the solution for you: Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program

Currently, only from Dominos, so if you do not have one near you who accepts on-line orders (*sigh*, mine does not), then you are out of luck.

So you need a calendar?

Don Harper — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:55:46 +0000

So, one of the things we have been using computers for is to keep track of our lives. And this means a scheduling or calendaring tool. Some tools out there do this fine, and some do it very well.

I have to keep track of a lot of appointments. From conference calls for work, to each member of the family’s schedules, to random, but highly important reminders. Most calendaring programs out there will let you set up a reoccurring event by day of the month, or the date. But, what if you need to do something two days before the end of the month, every month? Or, you need to do something every full moon, but not on the blue moon? Or, you have a standing meeting with your boss every other Monday morning, execpt when Monday is a holiday, then the meeting shifts to Tuesday? Oh, and you want something that you can run over an ssh session, while on your smart phone, or you friend’s smart phone?

The answer is simple: remind. remind can do this, and more. Need to set something up by the Hebrew Calendar? Check. Want your calendar to run a shell command for you on a holiday, specific day of the month, or phase of the moon? Check.

Most modern Linux distrobutions include remind nowdays, as it is so darn usefull. In addition, it runs just fine under Solaris, and the BSDs, including MacOS X. If fact, over at 43Folders, they have a whole section their wiki for remind. The wiki has many tips and tricks on how to use remind to its fullest.

In my next post, I will share some tips on how I get remind to remind me of events.

Command-Line blog posts

Don Harper — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:45:00 +0000

So, it only seems fitting that I should talk about a command-line interface to posting on this blog. No, I do not mean using links or the like, but a way to post from the command line.

So, this post is being typed up in vim on my Fedora 8 laptop. I will use this great little tool I found called wppost to post. wwpost is part of the perl module WordPress::Post.

A brief summary of its commands are bellow:

       -c category, can be a list separated by commas, no spaces
       -t title
       -i description, main body of post, if it has a slash, it is interpreted as a file to slurp
          like a text or html file
       -D iso formatted date for post, can be left out
       -T if there are image attachments, place them as thumbnails only, with link, not just resized

Some usage examples taken from the man page:

    Most basic of usage, (provided you have a ~/.wppost file)

       wppost -t 'hi everyone' -i 'i just wanted to say hello'

    If you want to specify two different categories:

       wppost -t 'Another Apple' -i 'Apples are really great. I do love them so.' -c food,rant -D 20071231

    If the body of the post is in a file

       wppost -t 'title here' -i ./content.txt 

    If the content of the post is in a file and you want to use the file
    name as the title

       wppost -i ./Title_Here.txt

    If you want to have file attachments:

       wppost -t 'recent photos' -i 'these are recent pictures i took' ./*jpg

Pretty cool, huh?

Peace out!

dvtm - dynamic virtual terminal manager

Don Harper — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:35:00 +0000

He’s back! And with with something new/cool:dvtm || dynamic virtual terminal manager. I have looked at other character-cell based `window’ managers before, but they either a) did not work or b) took up too much screen room with needless decorations. The nice thing about dvtm is that it is small, simple, and works well under screen.

At work, I have a screen session running on my main dev server, and four dvtm’s running. This gives me the text-mode equivalent of four virtual desk-tops with different windows running at the same time so I can see what I am doing. This has been a big boon for my productivity.

The only downside is that you need to have a lot of room to make this work, so you need either big monitor ro small fonts or both. I have to settle for small (7 pt) fonts.

Pacman for Console

Don Harper — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:12:26 +0000

You are tired of hearing your GUI friends talking about their games? Tired of playing simple Adventure? Why not try Pacman for Console?

The game play is just like the old quarter game you played long ago, and the best part, you can develop your own maps! Check out the screen shot:

Screen - terminal multiplexer

Don Harper — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:03:12 +0000

GNU scren is a very handle little program. I first ran across it a long time ago, back when I was excited to have upgraded to a 2400 BAUD modem. screen is “terminal multiplexer”, ie, it will let you run many console applications under one tty. That is just one (very cool) feature. The other major cool feature is the ability to detach the screen session from the controlling tty, and re-attach it on another tty. So, you can log in from one location, start up your world, then detach, go to a different machine, and ssh back, and pick up where you were. Or, if you have a bad connection which keeps dropping the connection on you, you can re-connect, and pick back up where you left of.

I usually have one screen running at all time, and in that screen session, I ssh to various hosts that I am working, and have screen running on those hosts.

Additional Links

gnu screen - Google Search
GNU Screen - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
GNU Screen - Summary [Savannah]
GNU Screen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GNU Screen - Jonathan McPherson
Screen User’s Manual
start [GNU screen]
Deadman.org: SSH-Agent Forwarding and GNU Screen
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~jnweiger/screen-faq.html
Remote terminal session management using screen: How to use screen to detach from and share terminal sessions
z o r g . o r g - A Brief Introduction to Screen: www.zorg.org! Linux, Home Automation, VoIP, Radio Scanning, PMR446, CB Radio, Cryptography, Handspring Visor, Psion Series 3 and much more.
screen - The Terminal Multiplexer
Power Sessions with Screen | Linux Journal
Linux.com | SysAdmin to SysAdmin: The beauty of screen: SysAdmin to SysAdmin: The beauty of screen — article related to SysAdmin to SysAdmin, System Administration, and Docs.
Linux.com | Take console productivity to a new level with Screen: Take console productivity to a new level with Screen — article related to GNU/Free Software, Linux, and Tools & Utilities.

BINS Photo Album

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:15:48 +0000

The BINS Photo Album is a package to generate static web pages from the command line. Why would you want to do this? Well, most of the dynamic web photo albums require that the server do all the work when the client requests the images, thus either slowing it down, or requiring a very beefy server. Also, you introduce the chance for a script-kiddie from hacking your site. Not good.

Enter BINS. Some of its features include [from the web page]:

generated album is static : it’s just plain HTML/CSS/Javascript files (Javascript is not mandatory to view the album), no need of any dynamic language (php, asp, etc.) nor database on server side. Album can be burned on CD or DVD.
album can contains other albums (sub albums): the album can have a tree structure ;
generation of a thumbnail and of scaled images for each picture ;
generated album appearance is fully customizable by using HTML templates (5 different templates sets are currently provided) and configuration parameters: colors, number and size of thumbnails per page, number and size of scaled pictures (in pixels or percentage of the original image for the size), fields to display, etc. Those parameters can be set globally (system wide or per user), per album or sub album or per picture (for example, you can change the colors of one sub album or one just one picture page in an album by editing its description file) ;
several description fields (date, location, etc…) can be associated with the pictures (in text or HTML format). You can easily add or customize these fields ;
description fields can be set or modified via a command line interface or a GTK+/GNOME-based GUI ;
A search engine is included in the album : you can find some pictures by searching keywords in their description fields.
Album can be generated from pictures managed by Zoph.
speed up album browsing by performing a clean up of HTML code to reduce its size and by pre-loading thumbnails in browser cache using JavaScript code ;
Exif information and Digital camera support :
- use the EXIF data structure found on some image files (usually, those produced by digital cameras) to fill automatically some fields (date and time for example).
- BINS use the Orientation EXIF tag (which is normally set when you rotate a image on you DigiCam) to rotate the picture to correct orientation.
- For each image, a page provides all information available on the picture and the DigiCam settings when the photo was taken.
- Additional information are provided for Canon DigiCams.
- Tooltips provide information about the meaning of some of the fields.
- All EXIF information is saved in the XML description file, preventing they disappear when the image is modified ;
internationalization (generation of album in different languages) using gettext. Current languages supported are Catalan, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Traditional Chinese ;
customizable charset encoding for HTML generation, including UTF-8 (Unicode) support by default. Generation of the Apache .htaccess file for correct encoding charset in HTTP headers ;
use of XML files to save user description of pictures and albums/subalbums and Exif data from image file ;
handle correctly file and directory names with spaces or other odd characters (excepted ‘/’), and create valid escaped URLs ;
generate valid HTML/XHTML code. The level of HTML depends of the style used. Some of the styles are valid, table free XHTML.

The web site has some great example. Go check them out.

iKog - the simple todo list

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:19:03 +0000

iKog - the simple todo list

So I am looking for a good to-to list manager, and I stumbled across ikog. ikog stands for “It Keeps On Growing”, and it is a pretty nice todo manager which has been influenced by the GTD school of thought. Currently, I am using it for my daily todo manager, and using the python gtd tool for my long term list management. Give it a whirl, you might like it!

New look and new home

Don Harper — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:42:07 +0000

Well, the look has been updated, and we are at a new home. Main advantage of this home verses the last one? Command line access, of course.

The new look is because I updated the CMS. My work-flow has changed, and I needed to retool some things in response. Look for me to get some new content up here sooner than later!

Strayed from the path

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:35:57 +0000

In two ways…first, I have not updated the site in a while, and I
need to get back to updating it.

Second, because I have not been true to my cli roots. I have moved
from my default MUA of the last, oh, 8 years, and flirted with a GUI
MUA, thunderbird. It was pretty.
It was sexy. It let me see everything then and now. It tried to
seduce me into using a GUI for more…

But, then I got behind in my email, and it was taking longer and
longer to catch up. *sigh* Two days ago, I switched back, and now, I
am fully caught up on my inbox, and making headway on my actionable
items.

CLI Magic: Linux troubleshooting tools 101

admin — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:56:23 +0000

When something goes wrong with your Linux-based system, you can try to
diagnose it yourself with the many troubleshooting tools bundled with
the operating system. Knowing about these tools, and how to
effectively use them, can help you overcome many…

href=http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/linux/KhmQ/~3/92841427/article.pl>Read
More…

cli bug/issue/task tracking system?

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:08:52 +0000

Fresh from freshmeat:

http://www.ditrack.org/

What is DITrack?

DITrack is a free, open source, lightweight, distributed issue (bug,
defect, ticket) tracking system using a Subversion repository instead
of a backend database. It is written in Python and runs in UNIX
environment (*BSD, Linux, MacOS X).

The project is inspired by the idea of Subissue issue tracking system.

However, while Subissue aims in merely replacing the traditional
database storage with Subversion repository, DITrack is a major
rethought of the issue tracking system paradigm. The main difference
is that instead of sticking to the centralized model (one database,
one web interface, one mail integration machinery), DITrack treats
underlying Subversion storage as a versioned distributed file system
which enables benefits of truly distributed operation mode.

Window Manager for tty?

admin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:43:37 +0000

The package screen is
something that has been around for a long time.

With screen, you can have many session running on on tty, and you can
switch to another session with out touching a mouse. With the proper
configuration, you can get notified if there is some change (like if
you have a IM client up) or if there is no output (say, if you are
watching a compile session).

You are in the zone working, and then you notice the time, and you
have to log out and go home. Is this a problem? No, with a simple
d, you can disconnect the screen session, log out, go home,
log back into that machine, and resume your session just where you
left off.

One of the other really feature is cut and paste between sessions.
The is very handy when adapting code (or articles) into a new file.

Screen References

Disconnected IMAP

admin — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:56:49 +0000

So, in an effort to get to the office earlier, I decided to try to
figure out how to do disconnected IMAP. Well, the route I took was to
use a tool called href=http://mailsync.sourceforge.net/>mailsync which is a cool
tool to allow you to sync IAMP mailboxes. So, my tack is to sync it
down to my laptop, and read the email on the bus. I sync email down
in the morning, and then in the evening, sync again. So far, so good.

More updates later…

Screen Saver? Yes!

admin — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:03:16 +0000

So, a while back I found a screensaver which is meant for the command
line. It is called tss. The
latest version is 0.8.1, and it is looking pretty cool.

Under screen 4.0 or higher, there is a command called idle which is
set in seconds. By default, it uses screen’s built in lockscreen
function, but if you define the environment variable LOCKPGR, then you
can call something else. I have it call a the following script:

#!/bin/bash

tss -r
exec vlock -a

This will lock my screen after a set time, and give me a nice thing to
look at.

RSS Reader: Raggle

admin — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 03:15:14 +0000

Well, after getting some time over the US holiday to try to get raggle
built, I gave up. I am guessing that Fedora Core 5/6 are not very
ruby friendly yet, as I could not find everything I needed very
easily. I was able to get it almost all the way there, but I could
not get the ruby-Ncurses rpm to build, and I am very strict about
using the native package management system (ie RPM on a RPM based
system, portage on Gentoo, apt on a Debian deviant), so I will not be
trying this until I can get the RPMS.

In other news, I have found some more PIM type things to play with.
Does anyone know of a good CLI Palm Pilot sync package? href=http://www.coldsync.org/>Cold Sync seems to be dead, and I am
not sure if it will talk to modern Pilots.

Another RSS reader?

admin — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 03:13:27 +0000

Well, it seems that someone is reading this after all.

So, tonight I have been given a pointer to raggle ( href=http://www.raggle.org>http://www.raggle.org). I guess I need
to install ruby to try it out…

Thanks to Philip McClure for the pointer.

Updates after I try it out some…

Window Managers?

admin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:12:28 +0000

Why would a web site dedicated to the CLI have a section on Window
Managers? Well, simple.

Some times, you just have to have X running. Some web sites I have to
do research at use Flash, or photo editing/managing, or my iPod (none
of the CLI tools let me manage play lists very easily).

Plus, I cannot get the same resolution on the console as I can under
X.

So, what is a CLI user to do? Why, get a Window Manager (wm) that is
meant for us!

The features I look for include small footprint and full keyboard
integration. The current one I use is wmi-10, but it is no longer
under active development. The group working on it has moved to on to
wmii, but I do not like the changes,
so I am off looking for a new one to use.

From time to time, I will post how my search is going so you can see
what is out there.

What do I Use?

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Software

So,
What major apps do I use daily? Well, this is the list of apps that
I currently use daily:

bash - my shell of choice
screen - a schell multiplexer and more
mitt-ng - a mua on steriods
centericq - IM. How do you stay in touch?
snownews - an RSS feed reader
calcurse - a calendar/todo manger
bashblogger - the CMS for this site

There are a few more, but I need to find URLs for them.