Martin Geisler Online

I’ll start at Aarhus University tomorrow. The first week is set aside to help the new students get a good start. We’ll be helped by tutors — older students who’re supposed to know the answers to all our questions, or at least to know the right person to ask. The tutors will show us the University, tell us about our study and help us find our way around things.

But we’ll also be having some real lectures — the first will be held this Wednesday and the subject is Math. It’s going to be exciting to see how it goes.

So, the day has finally come. In a couple of hours my bed will be dismantled and my computer will be shut down. I’m about to start at DAIMI at Aarhus University so I have to move from Aalborg.

I’ll be staying with my Grandma until I can find a place for myself. This means that I’ve had to buy a 56K modem which is about 17 times slower than the nice broadband Internet access I’ve enjoyed through StofaNet. And let me tell you — it’s terrible slow :-( So if I don’t answer your emails right away, it’s probably because I haven’t got it yet. I guess I’ll only fetch my mail once or twice a day from now on.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

I’ve recently switched to Zsh from BASH. I switched after Cookie had demonstrated it for me — I immediately saw one great feature: Zsh can handle a prompt on the right-hand side of the screen. The prompt is managed intelligently by Zsh, so that it temporarily removed if it gets in the way. I use my right prompt to show the current working-directory. When I’m working in a deeply-nested directory, this string can get quite long and take up much of the line-width. Before using Zsh, I also had my working-directory on the right of the line. But this was done by an ugly hack, as BASH doesn’t support such a prompt. The result was that my display would become garbled if I overwrote some of the right prompt. It was a mess!

The switch was done without any problems. I had to move the contents of my ~/.bash* files into the corresponding ~/.zsh* files — no problem. But I’ve also gone a step further and I’m now using the powerful completion-features of Zsh. I’ve added these two lines to my ~/.zshrc:

autoload -U compinit compinit

This initializes the completion-code which makes Zsh much more intelligent. Instead of always suggesting all files in the current directory, I’ll now only see directories after cd, manual-pages after man, compressed files after gunzip, and so on. It also knows about the valid options for a lot of programs like cvs, dvips, etc. All this only slows things down a little bit, thanks to Zshs ability to load the code automatically when needed. So it’s only when I try to complete an option to cvs that Zsh actually loads the necessary code.

So — Zsh is a great shell. Compared to other shells (well, compared to BASH) I think it’s much more advanced. I always thought that man bash was big, but that’s only until you try man zsh. That tells you that the manual has been split out into 11 different sections because of the many features :-) And each of these sections is rather big by itself…

Yesterday we had dinner out, to celebrate that it’s now 20 years ago my Mom and Dad got married! Well, it’s actually 20 years and one week ago, but we were in Hungary last week… We went to a place called A Hereford Beefstouw. They have the best steaks I’ve ever tasted — they’re large (you can choose between 140 g, 200 g, and 300 g) and comes with baked potatoes. It’s also a bit expensive, but it’s worth it.

I’ve persuaded my father into creating a key-pair for use with GnuPG. And because I’m such a trustworthy guy, he has signed my key :-)

It isn’t that easy to find somebody who uses GnuPG or PHP. In fact there’s only a little over 11,000 Danish keys on the public keyserver www.pgp.dk.

Anyway — I’ve started using the latest development version of my mail and newsreader Gnus. The development version is called Oort Gnus. The reason I switched from Gnus 5.8.8 was, that Oort Gnus has much better support for what is known as S/MIME. This is the format MUAs like mutt uses.

When using S/MIME, the first part in the mail has a Content-Type of application/pgp-encrypted. Then follows the encrypted text in a MIME part with a content-type of application/octet-stream. It’s the first part that tells Oort Gnus that it should be prepared to decrypt the message. Gnus 5.8.8 didn’t understand this, and was further confused by the application/octet-stream part which it (of course) didn’t think was text. But it works now: I can encrypt and decode mails, and verify signatures from others. If I’m missing a public key, then it will be fetched automatically.