Vinh Pham

Whenever I use terminal to ssh into my ubuntu linux setup on slicehost, my delete key turns into a “foward delete” key. This was too much for my brain for handle because deleting the character to the right instead of the left seemed so unnatural. After about 30 minutes of googling around, I finally found a hidden thread on fixing the terminal delete / backbase problem.

The solution is simple. Go into the “preferences” –> “settings” –> choose a theme –> “advanced” –> change “declare terminal as:” to “vt102″. Reboot terminal.

Fun, fun, fun.

A long time ago I wrote about the perfect work place. Today I went to a web developer meetup at Bricka Bracka, and it is as close to the perfect work place as I have ever seen.

1. The office is a huge art studio with plenty of room, high ceilings, and plenty of couches.
2. The owner, Brian, is a cool guy who is more interested in creativity than a rigid schedule.
3. They are open to the public to come in and use their free internet, play games on the LCD, or just hang out.
4. They have classes to teach people how to do development. It’s refreshing to see people willing to share their skills.
5. They are good at what they do: Flash and Flex development.

Just as I start to enjoy my freelance / contractor life, the reality of this shitty economy creeps up on me.

Every day I wake up and the Dow has slipped past yet another threshold, jobless claims grow, and more companies announce massive layoffs. For the first time, in a long time, I am really worried about my ability to continue getting work.

I wish I could blame someone for this, but I don’t think any single person deserves all the credit for this travesty. Besides, the culture of blame in America is the reason why we are here in the first place. Instead of taking responsibility for being where we are, a lot of people start pointing fingers. Its the auto industry, its the shady housing lenders, its the stupid Bush administration, its OPEC lousy oil production.

Well no shit.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, lets do something productive. Lets start building better cars, lets put in regulation to protect the consumer from misleading lending practices, lets prosecute the Bush administration for their crimes, and lets start changing our life style so that we are less dependent on foreign oil.

It’s like getting a bad beat at the poker table. When some people get a bad beat, they bitch and wine about it for hours. They blame the dealer, they blame he unholy cards, and they even blame their unlucky seat. I say, fuck that, shit happens, learn to play better. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and cry when someone steps on it.

Our economy is a donkey poker player. We obviously have no bank-roll management skills, we wagered way more than we can afford to lose, and we chose to go on all-in with a weak hand when all the odds are stacked are against us.

We got beat, now lets move on. Don’t go on tilt, don’t pass go, don’t collect 200.

Last night I watched Idiocracy for the first time. The movie itself wasn’t all that funny, and it was pretty boring at some points. However, the movie touch on one subject that resembles our current state of the economy.

In the movie, the main character is tasked with figuring out why the crops are not growing. He finds out that crops are not growing because people have been watering their crops with Gatorade. He convinced them to stop using Gatorade and use water instead. But in an ironic twist of events, their switch from Gatorade to water causes the Gatorade company to go out of business, making thousands of people lose their jobs. The people got upset and rioted against the main character.

In Detroit, they are building inferior vehicles that are not selling, and the people who buys these vehicles can’t afford to drive them because of the high oil prices. The obvious solution is to stop investing in these outdated technologies and start looking into vehicles that uses alternative energy. But of course, this move could mean thousands of people will be out of a job. What do you think they will do?

Funny.

I was writing some Ruby on Rails code the other day, and one of my column, which I had named “type”, was not saving.

After some googling, apparently you can’t name your database column “type”. The word “type” is part of the magic field names, so it is reserved.

I thought this is kind of strange, and I also thought that scaffold should know this and drop some sort of error if you ever try to use these. This would really help newbies like myself, because this kind of error can take all night to diagnose.

I am not a very smart guy. So it freaks me out when I hear smart people tell me that there isn’t enough transparency in our government.

Specifically, there have been a lot of complaints about the lack of transparencies in how the bailout money will be spent.

It’s like taking your car to a mechanic. You have no idea what’s wrong with it, or how to fix it, all you know is that it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg. So you pray to dear God that the mechanic doesn’t lie to your face and steal all your money.

Our government is a shady car mechanic. You pay the son of a b1tch to do his job, and all you get is him telling you there are more problems that will require more money to fix….

The other night I was messing around with the mail command on my setup because I wanted to send e-mails. Some how I made it so that every time I opened Terminal, it says “You have mail.” It was very annoying, but I did not know how to get rid of it. After about an hour of browsing google, all the links I found were too “techie” for me to understand. Finally I stumbled on this link:

http://lowfatlinux.com/linux-mail-commands.html

It has a very simple explanation on how to deal with the mail command.

Here are the very basic, Hope it helps!

$ mail email@address.com
Subject: Enter subject then press enter
Type in message into this blank space.
Type in as much as you want.
To end this and get out of it, press CTRL+D
EOT
$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/test": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 MAILER-DAEMON@test.lo  Mon Nov 10 20:38  46/1840  "Undelivered Mail Retu"
? 1
? delete 1
? q
$

Enter “mail” to get into the mail prompt.
When you are at the mail prompt, enter the number to read the mail.
“Delete X” - any number to delete the message.
“q” to quit.

The results of this study is very surprising, considering how many times I have seen men walk out of the bathroom without detouring to the sink. With all the grunting that some men do while at the urinal, you’d think at the very least they’d want to dry their hands before heading outside…

Study: Women lead men in bacteria, hands down (AP)

Me, I suck at aiming, so I always have to soap and wash.

Today, I bought myself a new coffee mug because I want to cut back on using disposable cups. After watching a documentary on the big gyro of plastic waste floating around in our oceans ( aka “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” ), it really freaks me out to think about how many disposable coffee cups I have added to that gyro.

My requirements for a good coffee cup are:

1. Spill proof - getting burned by hot coffee, or have it spill all over your car and clothes is very annoying
2. Easy to clean - you don’t want the funk to linger on your mug
3. Fit in cup holder - why do they even make cups that don’t fit in cup holders?
4. Easy to drink from - the sipping hole can not be too big, that’s how you end up burning yourself

This may seem like a trivial excercise, but in my opinion, if we all can cut down disposable coffee cups and plastic lids, we can save the environment — one coffee cup at a time…