Martin Geisler Online

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.

I went to see Pearl Harbor the other day. It was a good film, but it was more about love than about war. There’s nothing wrong with than — I had just been expecting a little more about the war. Instead of being a movie primarily about the attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, it was a film about a romance that happened to take place at that time, December 1941.

The scenes with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are great. There’s some nice flying action in the film. It’s just a shame that they’ve made so many mistakes in the film. Take a look at this page to see a list of the embarrassing mistakes.

But despite the errors in the film, it’s still a good film. It was long — about three hours, and it covers a lot of ground, starting with the Battle of Britain, moving on to the Japanese attack, and ending with the Doolittle Raid. If you don’t like these American movies about their heroic soldiers, then don’t bother seeing this movie. And, by the way, all the girls in the theater was weeping at the end of the movie — I’ve never seen that before…

Another film I’ve seen recently is Thirteen Days. I bought in on DVD yesterday. The film describes the Cuban Missile Crises in 1962 where the world was on the brink of a nuclear war. This film is about the crisis, and is not a love-story. The film shows how the Kennedy brothers were under a great press from the military to issue the orders for an airstrike against the missiles in Cuba. In the film we follow Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner) who was one of JFK’s most trusted advisors. That gives us an in-side view of the conflict.

As we’re only allowed to see what the Kennedy brothers saw, the crisis is gradually built up until we reach the climax where the Americans decide to trust the back-channel contact that have approached them.

I likes the film a lot, perhaps because we’ve been studying the crisis in our History class. By seeing it on film it suddenly comes alive in a new way. And it’s also a much more correct film than Pearl Harbor, just take a look here to see for yourself. As I’ve bought it on DVD I had a chance to hear the producers talk about the film. They said that many of the cars, the photographs, etc used in the film is in fact the original objects. That’s pretty impressive.