Cygwin’s rxvt without X

Maybe you saw this on my handy de.lirio.us feed over on the sidebar, but it seems that rxvt on Cygwin works without X — so I don’t have to suffer through X on my machine!

Yes, rxvt is better than Cygwin’s standard bash prompt — but “better” if you like Xwindows cut-and-paste and other things you can get used to there.

Welcome to the new blog

I have been thinking for many months that my blogging was taking a new direction. Not on purpose, but organically. And there were many other things that I wanted to blog about. There were also features that Blosxom was missing (Trackbacks anyone?). And there were other hiccups in my Blosxom system that were annoying and I couldn’t figure out how to fix.

So much research took place –with a provider, with a blogging system, and with what I wanted to do. And then the technical work took place — and here we are.

The biggest change is that this is now on a domain — the first domain I have ever owned! Hard to believe, isn’t it? I’ve been on the net for 10 years and this is my first domain. One of the things that I would like to see with the hostetlerhome.com is that it isn’t just about me — but about Gina and Leah too — they can have their own spaces.

And I’m using WordPress — it’s feature-filled, easy to setup, and has plugins galore, some of which are already important to this site.

The content from the old blog is still around since so much content is there — it needs to live. I’ll soon be moving the picture gallery, the lab, and everything over here — so this is still a work in progress, but I wanted to get the blog up. And now the secret is out.

So here we are. I hope you enjoy!

Writing byte arrays in Jython

I have some byte arrays given to me from a Java API and I want to write it to a file via Jython. I thought it would as easy as:

jpg = open("pic.jpg","wb")
for b in bytes:
   jpg.write(b)
jpg.close()

But, of course, it’s not that easy:

Traceback (innermost last):
  File "getbinarydata.py", line 28, in ?
TypeError: write(): 1st arg can't be coerced to String

I ended up having to reach into the Java API thusly:

out = FileOutputStream(fname)
out.write(bytes)
out.close()

Which works, but I think I should be able to do this with “native” Jython calls. But Google shows me no love.

When Emacs and The Browser converge [@lesscode.org]

When Emacs and The Browser converge has a great list of Greasemonkey scripts