1. Weather
2. Words and Such
3. Wires & Widgets
I.
Bright and sunny — it’s so rarely bright but not sunny, though occasionally it achieves that silvery shimmer of high cloud cover — but chilly today. A high near 60s, though hovering closer to 50 much of the day.
And I should not complain: it’s downright balmy for me. But I guess I’ve been down in this part of the country long enough (since August, 2010, really?) that what is barely autumn elsewhere is feeling cool now. Ms. S. has a better and bitter response: be warm or be cold, but make a decision, and stop going up one day, down the next … and she has a point.
But now it’s still before 5pm and yet already dreary … and until late December it’s going to keep getting dark earlier and earlier. Yesterday morning around 4 we at least had constant rain (resulting in spongey grass in the afternoon), an appropriate autumn aesthetic. But I’ve also lived in darker locales.
Take the Central European timezone, for example. It’s too wide … in an attempt to keep much on continental Europe in the same hour, it broadens too extensively, so that in, say, Hungary in the winter you can leave for school or work before it is light, spend the entire day away from windows and sunlight, and leave for home after it’s gotten dark again. And it’s not even as if you’re in Scandinavia (or Alaska, or similar), where it’s always dark in the winter.
II.
Yesterday’s movies were, in a way, motivation.
‘Liz & Dick’ is a howler, a potential camp classic. The sad part is that LiLo evidently thought she was doing good work and making a career comeback … and the harsh reviews have ‘hurt’ in some way. The empathetic part of me and the part that wants to support all creative types, recoils at this and feels bad for her. At the same time I marvel at the self-delusion at play here. And I wonder, too, at her handlers and the others around her. Did they really believe something good was being made? (making them as delusional as her) or did they recognize the train wreck ahead of them and just decide to keep her in the dark? (so we either have lapses of judgment and/or of ethics at play). Alas, it’s also not so over-the-top as to really retain one’s interest, and it will probably be forgotten.
Quickly.
It’s no ‘Showgirls’.
It has better ‘pacing,’ to to speak, than something like ‘I Know Who Killed Me,’ which was nearly unwatchable, but it’s also less energetic or high-concept.
But as to words: Ms. S. somewhere has ‘Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century’ by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, which she recommends, and credits with getting her (more) interest in Taylor a couple of years ago. She thinks it’s probably in storage (either in our outside-closet or at her parents’ place). But there is also an ebook out there. The book is evidently based to a great extent on Burton’s letters to Taylor, which potentially gives it a more interesting textual / primary-text basis.
Anyway.
III.
For the longest time I’ve been a user of the bash shell … which seems a bit redundant, sort of like “ATM machine” or “PIN number,” as bash = “Bourne Again Shell,” one of those famous hacker recursive acronyms (see also: GNU = GNU’s Not Unix) as well as a pun, Bourne being the name of the guy who wrote the original Bourne Shell, aka ‘sh.’
Not Jason Bourne. No Matt Damon (or in Unix speak … Matt Daemon?).
In any case: I’ve used bash for years but recently had a desire to try out zsh (again). Both bash and zsh, as intereactive environments and command interpreters, are in a way supersets of sh. They are similar enough in syntax and the like that for most day-to-day tasks there’s probably little difference in usage or idiom.
zsh, however, is famous for its flexible and configurable auto-completion. bash also has auto-completion, though either by default or by potential it’s not as capable as zsh’s, so I am repeatedly told.
Which is not a good thing.
Not bash’s tab completion … but rather me taking the internet’s word on the matter. The proper thing to do is research it on my own, compare, contrast, try out, etc. Learn. Not just accept the word of a few blog posts and the like.
But they are starting points. And in the years since I last tried zsh (and ksh and others) the internet has become a different sort of place. On the one hand it’s seeminly less ruled by old-school-Unix folks, the ‘web’ is different (technology and culture), it’s seemingly more about SEO and social media, and the like; but also we have a new generation of coders discovering Unix tools (often on the Mac) for the first time and there’s a new wave of educational materials (blog posts, tutorials, YouTube videos, etc.) introducing these tools. And there are also new collections of shortcuts, utilities and the like, to augment them, such as ‘oh-my-zsh.’
Links:
– zsh vs. bash (a very short slideshow)
– moving from bash to zsh
– zsh is your friend (a bit cultish and anti-bash for my tastes)
– zsh, the last shell you’ll ever need
– your bash prompt needs this (a back-and-forth thread)
– oh my zsh! (lots of zsh options)
