Lifehacker tips for Linux users: XMessage and History

On the one hand, interrupt-driven work processes are the bane of all programmers' existence. It means that you can't go head-down into the code and live with it for a couple of hours because, frankly, work is not going to let you. There are meetings. There are QA people who want answers now. There are inopportune revels in the hallways-- just kidding. But if you work in a cubicle, you know the drill.

Still, there are things that take time, such as builds and checkouts, and those are an excuse to go surf. For me, it's always been a pain to know when a job was done, to keep switching back and forth from, oh, Usenet to the console where I was doing real work, to see if the current task was complete.

Probably the most useful program I've found for doing "interrupts of interrupts" is xmessage, or its Gnome equivalent, gxmessage, which when tacked to the end of some long-running non-daemon process, will pop up a window on your X console when you're done. I use gxmessage, and have an alias called bgxmessage, which looks like this: gxmessage -font "sans 28" -fg white -bg "#446a7e". Gives me a popup with nice colors and big, unmistakeable letters.

Now you know when to go back to work. It's possible to put other things into bgxmessage like timestamps and so forth, if you know your console.

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The other tool I use a lot is 'history', which allows you to repeat commands easily. I do this a lot when doing a lot of searching and organizing, and I've aliased my history command down to "h". I recently added another tool: "hg", which looks like this: history | grep. As commands go, it's incomplete, but it has great utility. If you're like me and your history is deep, a thousand entries or more, this allows you to type things like hg Tools, which means "find me every recent command were I referenced something called Tools", which is usually a directory. Or hg rsync, which means "find me every command I've issued recently where I used rsync."

News I Missed

Phizer has agreed to stop marketing Viagra to teens. If there's anything sillier than that in the news today, I don't know what it is. I mean, don't teenaged males have boners all the time as it is?

A grandmother who was receiving medical benefits for her crippling arthritis, which doctors said prevented her from finding work, has now been convicted of fraud because she was working as a phone sex operator. On the one hand, it's hard to argue that she was working against the rules, but I worry that now every trapped-at-home person is going to be denied medical benefits because, hey, as long as they can talk, they can make a good living hot-chatting desparate necrophiles, bestialists, and scat fans.

Expect, any day now, that if the war in Iraq ends with an Islamic Republic, or even an Islamic Federation, and the repression of women continues unabated, and Iraq's financial and oil-deploying woes continue indefinitely, to hear the Conservatives claim that everything would have gone as expected if they weren't "stabbed in the back" by "the left" that wanted the war to go badly. Democrats are going to spend the next four election cycles explaining that they weren't traitors to the cause.

TMI!

It has been a day for precious bodily fluids. ( Medical TMI )

On the other hand, I will say that the UW Medical Clinic's new Surgery Pavilion, where the urology examination happened, is one hell of a lovely building. I don't normally like steel and glass as primary architectural themes-- take one look at the Seattle Library with it's cold ugliness and you'll see why-- but the spiral staircase was encased in white, frosted glass that felt calm and clean (good things for a hospital), and the exterior walls were floor-to-ceiling clear which brought in a healthy dose of sunlight and gave cheerful views of the green garden. The doors were made with pale pine and steel-framed glass, and everything was labeled in an obvious way. Kudos to the architect.

Then, this evening, after getting home from being poked and prodded, I tried to make coleslaw and hot dogs, and damn near cut my left index finger off when the knife slipped. I haven't done that in a decade. Fortunately, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been-- I lost a little skin, but some antibiotic ointment and a bandage later, and I'm fine.

When I was putting Kouryou-chan to bed this evening, I found a sheet from a coloring book on the floor, and on one side were cute and fuzzy bugs, and on the other was a crowd of girls all surrounding one with a certain fruit printed on her clothing. "Oh look," said I. "It's Strawberry ShortSlut and friends!" That just about cracked up Omaha.

And under cool things done with Linux, I can now play-- and finish!-- Unreal under Linux. Huzzah! I'm debating spending the $15 for Cedega, which might (might!) allow me to run things like Grand Theft Auto, Tron, and BloodRayne under Linux as well.