Toluu : Push cx

Push cx

A tea-drinking web geek's coffee-flavored blog

It’s not commonly used, but most Linux terminals can support 256 colors. It’s also a bit of a pain in the ass to set up if it doesn’t Just Work out of the box. Having spent a while today tinkering and searching and cursing and testing and trading mail/IM with folks who understand the eldritch depths of terminals better than I, I thought I’d write up my findings for anyone else who’d like spiffy colors.

Ncurses and other terminal programming libraries need to know what capabilities your terminal supports, like highlighting, underlining, blinking, and colors. This used to be done with termcap but now everyone uses terminfo, which hold the specifications in a set of files. The first thing to do is make sure you have a 256-color terminfo file for your terminal:

$ find /lib/terminfo /usr/share/terminfo -name "*256*"

What you need is to see a filed named terminal-256color. For example, mine is xterm-256color. My first hassle was that Ubuntu doesn’t install this by default. I can’t guess what it will be named in your distribution (look for packages with ‘ncurses’ or ‘term’ in their names), but in Ubuntu it’s just a quick:

$ sudo aptitude install ncurses-term

Xterm needs a little more configuration, edit ~/.Xdefaults to add:

*customization: -color XTerm*termName: xterm-256color

To make this apply to new terminals (so you don’t have to log out and back in), run:

$ xrdb -merge

14 Years to UnicodeAugust 28

Last August I was chatting with some friends (every coder has an IRC channel with around six nerds they shoot the breeze with, right?) and said:

In other news, I will be really happy in like fifteen years when everyone has broken down and admitted that Unicode is the only sane way to go and all the tools use it by default. At the moment it’s built into most everything, but it 1. is generally broken and 2. is not the default.

Google just posted a great graph of the uptake of Unicode on the web:

Graph showing strongly rising unicode adoption

This is really encouraging, it’s great to see Unicode taking a plurality (if not yet a majority or totality) share. I think I had my two concerns reversed, Unicode needs to be set as the default for everything before all the varying implementations work out their myriad bugs.

But that’s progressing along well. Python 3000 and Ruby 1.9 will use Unicode as a default, and more content-producing tools are picking it up. There’s still lots of random standards that don’t support it (think of metadata stuffed into mp3s and images) or only half-support it in the “well, it’s 8-bit clean…” wa

SEO Hates ScienceAugust 8

Over at Hacker News somone posted a (fairly misogynist) fairy tale in which the owners of a small website destroy the traffic bestowed on them through the work of their honest and upright SEO consultant by pushing him too far. Throughout, the noble consultant says things like “In some weeks, go check your traffic. You’ll find you’ll have a couple of thousand people come by each day.” (and, implausibly, suceeds), so I snarked:

This is obviously a fairy tale, no SEO consultant would ever give a quantified, testable prediction of the effects of their work.

A self-admitted SEO consultant called bullshit on me, saying that not all SEOs are snake oil salesmen. Well, no, that wasn’t the bit of truth that made my joke funny. It’s that SEOs make vague, unverifiable claims rather than specific and measured ones.

I realize I’m painting with a broad brush here, but SEO is so Wild West that consultants make few or no claims and will take credit for any improvement rather than demonstrate that it was something they deliberately accomplished. Yes, some SEO is valid and yes, some do more than “uh, give your pages titles”, and yes, a lucky few have managed to manipuate Google (for now) into giving them scads of traffic.

SEO is alchemy, not chemistry. It doesn’t measure what it mean

Moving is RewritingAugust 3

As I’m pulling my life back out of a hundred cardboard boxes and settling into a new place, I recognize a kinship between moving and rewriting code. You spend a lot of time and effort, you Do Things Right This Time, you expend resources, and you feel productive for how much you’ve done. And in the end, you’ve probably just got a few new features and you’ll find a few new problems after a couple weeks.

So Jess and I have moved to Arlington, VA. Our new big features are a shorter commute for me, no gaping holes in the walls, and a building pool. If you’re nearby, drop an email and come by to have dinner and see the place. Or write if you just need the new address.

WWW Will Never DieJune 27

ICANN is moving steadily to enact a fast-track process for gTLD creation (where “fast” here means “months instead of years”), so there could be a few more competitors for .com, .net, .pro, and the rest of the gang in a year or two. Some of the early candidates are .bank, .nyc, and .paris.

What this means, of course, is that www will never die. When a website could be advertised at “strand.nyc” or even just “google”, there needs to be something to indicate to the viewer they should go type this into their computer. It’s not going to be “Hey, now that you finally get that .com isn’t some kind of stutter, type this into your computer:” and it’s sure not going to be “http://”. It’s going to be www, and it’s going to just barely be the lesser of several evils for a long while.