Setting Proxy Environment in UNIX

The easiest and best way to set proxy information on your Linux/Unix machine is with the http_proxy environment variable in your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or whatever your favorite shell’s configuration file is. Set it like this:

http://user:password@proxy-server:portnum

In my brief bit of experimentation, the follow important (to me, at least) command-line tools use http_proxy:

1. wget
2. Python easy_install
3. curl

I’ve been a Unix user for 14 years — why did I take me so long to figure this out?

The Manly Reading List

This thing started the way a lot of things start in the blogosphere — Mr. Wallace has re-envisioned his blog and made a post to a blog called The Art of Manliness. That blog has a list of 100 Must-Read Books for every man. I’ve always been a voracious reader and I’ve been thinking (again) to break out of my scifi/fantasy rut I’ve been in for a while (some of the books I remember the best are the ones that aren’t fantasy or scifi).  Some of the books on the list aren’t ones that I would be interested in but the ones on the list that I had read (some in high school for class assignments, some as recently as last year) were all really good. So I decided that was a good start . . .

I took some time and make a list off the Art of Manliness of the books that I have always wanted to read or books that seemed interesting (because some of the book are ones I never heard of — and that’s okay!) and put them in a list.  Over the past several days I’ve thought of other books I would like to read that weren’t on the list so I added them.  As of right now, the list is at 37.  There is no time limit on this but I do want to at least attempt them all. And the list is organic — I will add to it as I see fit and mark off the books as I read them.

And, one last thing — the list is on the remarkable webapp RememberTheMilk (RTM).  And I’ve make it shareable to you can see it to! The books are in alphabetical order, but I put the next book I will read at Priority 1 and my choices for the next books as Priority 2, and the next lot as Priority 3.  Cool, huh?

If you want to join me, or have advice for books to add, or advise me on what book is next, please let me know.

A new look

I’ve neglected the style of this blog for waaay too long.  I was using the “default” blue theme, but since like WP 2.3.  Since then they have introduced Widgets, which are very useful things and I have used them in other people’s blog, but never took advantage of it myself.  And I have been looking at other themes and recommending them to people, but not using them myself.  So I said “Enough!” and decided to take care it all this myself.

The Google Search field, the Adsense and my cool little Amazon Thingy are powered with Widgets.  The theme is called Frugal and this is the free version of it.  Some of you may think that it’s a little boring, but I think it’s beautiful in it’s simplicity.  The content is what is the focal point in this theme and that’s what I want my blog to be about — content.

Anyway, I will be updating other things here from time to time. Some things like the About Me and the Links are horribly dated.

Magic Space in ZSH

Since writing this post about bash, I’ve switched to zsh.  A lot of the functionality is there, plus quite a bit more.  But zsh doesn’t use GNU Readline, so you can’t add anything to inputrc.  But you can put something in your ~./zshrc:

bindkey ' ' magic-space # also do history expansion on space

Planning out your next job

I don’t listen to a lot of podcast but I did listen to Andy Lester’s[1] recent appeared on the Pragmatic Programmers. Andy’s book “Land the Tech Job You Love“   is in beta now and will be released Soon.   If the book is as good as the podcast was, it will be a must-have for a lot of techies.

One thing that struck me from the podcast was Andy saying “If you can’t put two new things on your resume every year, you aren’t doing enough to keep up with this industry” (or something to that effect). Lately, my self-learning has taken a back seat to simply trying to keep my neck above water on my projects — not learning anything new, just puttying out fires.  And sometimes that okay, but I  actually like learning something new — which is what I enjoy about this industry in the first place.

Another thing Andy said is that the right job for you changes over time.   For example, what you want to do when you are 25 will probably be different than when you are 35.  Very true for me — when I was 25, I was flying all over the country and world.  Now, at 35, I’m married with three kids.  My desires now are very different.

Andy also suggested being honest with questions like “Where do you see yourself in five years?”  If you may want to stay technical but they may want someone to move into management.  So, that’s not a good fit for you and you will soon be frustrated. Be honest and know the answer to questions such as that.

These things aren’t just for finding your next employer, but also for your next promotion.   Want to go up to a team lead role?  How can you prove that you are ready for that?  What can you do now to take that step?  Those are the questions that I am asking myself, and other techies should be, too.

[1] Andy is also the author of ack, which is one of my newest tools in my toolbox.  And, yes, it is better than grep!