At the request of some of my buddies, I’m making a short blog post here to share my emacs configuration file as well as my bashrc file.  I don’t think there is a whole lot going on in either of these, but there are some nice tricks I’ve picked up over the years.  The links to download will get updated over time.  To start off with, we’ll go over my bashrc since it is the simpler of the two.

Bash RC

Grab my .bashrc file and I’ll go over some of the special features.  It starts off by dot sourcing in any other system wide bash configuration files (including the excellent bash_completion config).  It then creates a PATH variable that most notably includes the current directory so you can just execute blah.py instead of ./blah.py.  I then define my editor as emacs, increase my history file and require it to only store unique entries (instead of like 4000 cd ~/ commands for example). It then defines all the basic terminal colors to help make building and changing my prompt easier (stuff like production = PURPLE, development = RED, etc).  After that I set my terminal title bar (thanks to Nick), enable grep color if possible, add some alias commands for ssh and common switches, and export my uber prompt.  My prompt is really kind of nice due to it dropping input down a line and starting with a hash symbol.  This results in very nice scriptable copy and paste commands like:

Where the blue line down is just a paste of the previous commands.  The # and newline make the prompt a bash comment and what you enter a command.

After that cool prompt I just have a neat function I grabbed somewhere (and add to from time to time), that will extract pretty much any archive file I have without me having to remember the switches to pull out a gzipped tarball vs. a bz2.  It is always just: extract file_name

Emacs

My emacs config is slightly more complex since it includes some handy libraries.  To install it, you will need to copy the file emacs to your ~/.emacs and create a ~/.emacs.d folder.  Copy the vendor folder into ~/.emacs.d/.  That should be all you need (of course back up your existing config if you don’t want it overwritten.  In general this nice config moves all your blah.blh~ files to ~/.emacs.d/backups (which makes for a nice central backup of previous versions), as well as your #filename# files to ~/.emacs.d/saves.  It changes the default tab width to 4, gets rid of the welcome screen, gets rid of silly bells, and fixes tramp and other shells to handle the cool shell prompt defined above.

On top of that it adds a vbscript and powershell mode to the editor (for you Windows shell scripters), loads the lovely color-theme library and chooses a default theme, adds goto line (M-g), and adds a few handy commands like line wrapping and indenting entire buffers.

Hit me up with comments or send me an e-mail if you run into any snags or have suggestions for other neat bash and emacs configuration tricks.

Over the 4th of July weekend I finally broke down and decided to migrate off of my own mail server and over to Google Apps.  Between the space, SPAM filtering, Android syncing, reliability, and cost, I couldn’t justify running my own mail services anymore.  It has been a great run for the last 10 years or so, but I doubt I’ll miss it.  That being said, here is a bit of a sysadmin journal of the migration, in case this ends up helping anyone, or more importantly myself, in the future.

So I have an IPv6 class tomorrow so I decided to study by dinking around with setting up IPv6 on my home network. I was disappointed to find out that Ubuntu (even the current revision), still doesn't ship with ISC's DHCPD v4 server, so I couldn't with DHCPv6, but other than that it was a blast.

Well this is likely one of the longest lapses in blogging I’ve had, 6 months is quite some time and there has been a lot going on since I appeared to stop writing.  So for this post, we’re going to go on a little flyby of the last 6 months.  And because I’m generally too wordy when I write, it will mostly be pictures with a video or two thrown in.  The main thrust is that Deena and I have still been doing our day trip a month, and there has also been a major change in my life as of March 22^nd that I’d rather not get into.

December

On Saturday I went on a treasure hunt for a UPnP / DLNA server that would work with Deena’s iPhone, the XBox 360, and my Nokia N900.  I wanted to be able to get our large music collection to every device in the house without any fuss, and I figured out how to do that with FUPPES.  Here is a copy and paste style install guide for getting everything setup and running using Ubuntu Linux as the media server (FUPPES supports other operating systems as well).

I just finished one of the largest undertakings I’ve ever been involved with when it comes to Web design by launching a newly designed KU School of Engineering site.  The project started in the summer of 2009 and involved migrating or at least assisting in migrating every School of Engineering academic—and some research—sites to a new template design given by the University.  This totaled about ten sites that needed to be migrated.

I’m back to the grind after an amazing Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  It was probably the best holiday I’ve had.  There were mad amounts of good food, driving, exploration, and the best kind of company.  It all started with a non-traditional cooking extravaganza on Thanksgiving day and ended with a trip to St. Louis.

Welcome to the new site.  I hope you like it.  It is now a bit more robust in talking about my work life and I have basically turned it into a long form of my résumé.  I had a very difficult time writing the new content, but the design was an absolute blast.  Hopefully, it will entertain you enough that you won't have noticed my lack of recent blog updates on the old site.

The reason for the redesign was a desire to get off of my old CMS (Drupal), and move onto a Django based site.  It was also a fun opportunity to push some of my front end design and development capabilities like using animation and AJAX based deep linking to create a smoother and faster Web viewing experience.

That is it.  I am done.  30 days of wallpapers is finally over.  There were some good parts, and I think I've gotten a little better at my current project.  Hopefully those of you have visited these have at least somewhat enjoyed this month's daily shots.  Posting these here has certainly helped to keep me honest about doing one each day.  Here is the last walllpaper, Turning Off:

I have always been a fan of rubber ducks.  I have especially liked devil duckies since my sister Sunni introduced them to me by wrapping my Christmas presents in paper with them on it from the greatest store ever, Archie McPhees.  Here is a little ninja devil duckie I drew, Ninja Duck: