First off, if you haven’t yet enabled the System Monitor, just right-click on your Panel and you should see it on the list. (Othewise: apt-get install gnome-system-monitor first)

By default the colors are all pretty similar. The first important tweak is to differentiate the Processor colors. Use whatever you want, but make sure they have enough contrast. (Not shown: I just fixed my green User color to contrast a little better.) Watching the Processor usage can show you a bit about the sites you spend time on (among several other things). If you’ve got a constant green bar (hmm, that sounds backwards to TDDers; maybe I should stay away from green), you might want to hunt down the tab hosting the unruly flash widget. Ideally, your system at rest should most often show a beautiful black box.

The second tweak I just made recently — and it’s growing on me — is to make outgoing network traffic red, and incoming yellow. Now I can see my backups to S3 in full swing when they kick in. And I might notice if anything is unexpectedly drifting outbound.

I also recently added the fourth Swap Space indicator just in case it ever kicks in, at which point I’ll know something is really awry. This one is probably not too important to have showing if you’re shy on Panel space.

Great! Now I can watch Firefox and a Mongrel take off with all my memory and know when to kill them. The monitor is also handy to see when something you’ve been running is (too often unexpectedly) finished. (I like using beep at the end of a long command for this too.)

I do still use top on occasion for its light weight. But sometimes it’s a bit more convenient to have a one-click GUI view of your system. Please share if you’ve got a more effective color scheme or if you use another light-weight tool for continuous monitoring.

More concretely, it’s really easy for entrepreneurs — particularly developers — to fall into the trap of focusing on what their product does.  This gets reflected in presentations and messages, and ultimately in the shape of the product.  For example, in my case I could be saying that uGraph is a technology stack that does round-the-clock data mining, processing, and analytics to produce novel, real-time visualizations about health.  But that tells nothing about why the product is compelling to customers.  I’ve made that mistake, almost so blatantly.  The why message should be more like: Our product enables medical detectives to understand sickness so that they can detect and avoid it.  (That’s a bit simplistic, but at least the right emphasis.)  Focusing on the why seems pretty obvious now, right?  Wonder why nearly all of the recent 30 elevator pitches I’ve heard have been what-focused.  Maybe it’s not so obvious.

That brings up the next point: who.  As we started working through elevator pitches, we had some confusion about who our customers are.  For many at this stage it’s hard to exclude any potential markets.  But there needs to be a focus on a near-single customer; not the world at large.  Of course our technologies can be tailored or generalized for various markets.  It’s hard to throw out so many opportunities, but the bottom line is that we need to narrow in on a specific customer, or at least differentiate for disparate groups.  We still have a few potential markets since we’re still testing the waters, but now I’m simply lumping them all into a “medical detective” class, which I now define as Epidemiologists.  It turns out that a lot of types of end-users (news companies and sickos) would like to wear Amateur Epidemiologist hats, and we’ll target them too (though most may not even know what epidemiology is).  We are now building Epidemiological visualizations — that’s pretty specific.  This narrowing really helps to simplify my elevator pitch (which we’ll work more on next week), and really the grand vision (which may be different next week .

With that in mind, I’ll expand our who and why to: We provide tools the CDC uses to immediately see an illness spread and take necessary action, or what the news companies use to captivate their audience so they stick around through the next commercial, or what end-users use to avoid getting sick and understand why they’ve been sick.  The why is now addressing the real needs/pain points of our actual who: customers.

UPDATE: I now do almost all my reading on an Android, using Aldiko or Kindle apps. Amazing what two years have done for books! I haven’t printed a book according to this post in a while. I’m finally publishing this post (sans the pictures that would have been helpful) in case it’s still useful to anyone to be able to print sub-120-page e-books on their own printers. And I’m posting the script as a gist in case anyone wants to use it.

So I did my usual routine of over-thinking a problem (held probably only by myself), and decided I should be able to print TBB just like a publisher.  It should have linear flow, be bound in the middle (with a couple staples); basically equivalent to a real book.  Hmm, now how to lay out those pages?  Just a SMOP, right?  Almost.

After messing around with various printer utilities (cups, lp, lpr, lpoptions, foomatic, and more) and being teased that I was close, I ultimately was not able to invoke the printer the way I needed from a script.  But even if I could, it would be a pretty system-specific solution.  Probably better would just be to print out a list of page numbers that could be pasted into any print-wizard’s “page range” prompt.  I don’t need to automate this completely (yet).

If you’ve given any thought to what such a page arrangement would look like you’ll realize it’s slightly complex.  But I got a little script working that does the job well.  I’ll spare the details unless you ask for them.  Download it here.  Basically, the order for an 8-page book is: 8,1,6,3,2,7,4,5.  You can print out your pages in that sequence, cut them vertically in half (hopefully you’ve got a honking-blade paper cutter, but scissors will do), put the pages on top of each other, and squeeze off two staples in the middle for the binding.  Wrapping in 100-lb cover is optional.

There’s one remaining hurdle.  Say you want to print a 7 page book.  Now the order is *blank*,1,6,3,2,7,4,5.  Does your printer allow that?  How about 9 pages?  b,1,b,3,2,b,4,b,b,5,b,7,6,b,8,9?  (I think that came out right; time to try it out.)

If you run the script you’ll simply get a one-line listing of page numbers. These can be pasted right into your browser’s “print” menu (if you’re lucky enough to be using GNOME).

And I should mention the other minor issue: a standard USA stapler has about a 4 inch (actually 9 cm) arm reach.  But you need 4¼ inches (obviously for 8½-inch wide paper).  So get creative or get an extended-arm stapler.

My vision is that the burgeoning class of new authors writing 100-page e-books can print-publish their own books basically for free.  Maybe it costs them a quarter to print each book, and two stamps to send it in the mail.  But for about $1 USD a new author can hit quite an audience without a publisher or bank account.  Yes, much of the world will just read e-books and manuals online, but there is still a broad group who doesn’t want to read more than a blog post-length article at their screen.  They can still benefit from printed copy.  I’m planning on devoting a whole shelf just for my own crude-bound “books”.  Next step is to find a clean way to have a quarter-inch flat binding that will take a label-maker sticker.

BTW, printer ink is a scam:http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0109/p14s01-stct.html

O’Reilly’s Short Cuts are a great for printing.  And O’Reilly is also supporting ePub by releasing 400 commercial books for the format.

ALSO NEW: You can use FBReader or Calibre for desktop reading: apt-get install fbreader calibre

ALSO NEW: I also just bought a handful of Pragmatic Programmers books in e-format, as .epub, .mobi, and .pdf. Those are looking great on both my Android and desktop. Some PDFs are still worth printing.

I do most of my development work (bash, ipython, vim) in a terminal. Some of it involves working remotely on other machines, and demonstrating things for others (e.g., pair programming). I need different setups for each of these. I spend most of my time hacking away in a local shell, so for that I want optimized font, color, size, etc. Then when I share I need to make the font way bigger. And when I’m on a different machine I like to have a different color window (in addition to a custom prompt color) so I don’t forget where I am. So those are the three basic tweaks that are critical for most people. You can probably make those tweaks with most xterm-clones.

I’ll assume you’re using GNOME already. You can get a feel for the gnome-terminal feature set by simply firing up an instance: Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. But I suggest you right-click it instead, and “Add this launcher to Panel“. In fact, do that a few times; we’ll customize each differently.

Now from an open instance, you can explore the options by invoking:

$ gnome-terminal –help

Profiles

There are profiles. Create a few. This is pretty important. If you’ve only got a “Default” profile, every time you change it, you’ll affect every other open window.

Font

I’m very picky about having the tiniest font that will work. I can actually look at 380 lines of code at a time on a humble (1920×1200) 15″ laptop screen. To achieve this I have to go with a non-antialiased (bitmap?) font. The generically named “Monospace-7″ is not beautiful, but works well for optimizing screen real estate. It’s also the only bitmap font I’ve seen that renders italic/oblique well.

Monospace is also the only font I’ve seen able to scale down to 6-point and render readably. Try it — pretty amazing! I can now look at 570 lines of code (if I cheat and narrow the last window a bit) in 15″! I’ve got great near vision, but I have to be really close to the screen to read it at 6, so I’ll go back to 7. You could also easily install other more appealing bitmap fonts like Terminus (apt-get install xfonts-terminus). In fact, terminus at 8-point fits the same number of characters as Monospace at 7-point. Too bad Terminus doesn’t do 6!

Remember to stop all running gnome-terminal instances to get a new font to show up in the list.

CLI Options

Customize the CLI options with right-click, Properties. Look at the Command field and start adding options there. The first I like to add is –geometry=80×50 to set the window size; the default of 80×25 is always too small. I like to start out with a meager 80 columns to make it obvious when I’m exceeding the good old rule.  Of course I often widen manually if I’m not in code.

Automatic Remote Login

My favorite trick is to automate logging in to remote machines. It’s as simple as adding another option: –execute ssh YOU@SOMEHOST

Linux distros these days tend to be pretty minimal in their default install mode. Many of us used to be in the habit of checking the “Install Everything” box in the earlier Red Hat days. But then the box disappeared, and it became a pain to get everything you needed, and most people moved on to use apt or yum, or some equivalent, to get their systems to a usable state. The modern idea is that you start out with the bare minimum to simply enable yourself to boot, fumble around, and install more stuff. Then you just use apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, or whatever, to install to your particular needs. On a fresh new Ubuntu 8.04 installation I see only ~300 packages.

After some time on a machine you probably find that you’ve manually installed hundreds (or thousands!) of packages to satisfy all your development needs. Here’s a great way to get that critical, comprehensive package list and make sure your other oft-used machines have everything you need. (You might even want this in the crontab of your primary machine; it can be helpful for recovery purposes. I’ll discuss cron optimizations in a future post. And another future post will discuss why apt-get is Ubuntu’s killer feature.)

mocushla$ dpkg –get-selections | grep -v ^lib [>/some/backed/up/place/packages.log]

The list on my primary machine shows nearly 2,000 packages now. That’s a lot! Note that I’m excluding the libraries since they tend to just be dependencies. Including them can actually make an upgrade/rebuild/recovery more difficult.

A Minimal Package Set

You may also find yourself needing to get onto freshly installed machines with some frequency. Maybe it’s a new web host, or some lab machine you need to do some work on. For time and space reasons, it’s probably not practical to start off by immediately installing your full 2,000-package set, so you’ll want to come up with a minimal set which at least makes you dangerous.

As someone who regularly sits down at other people’s machines, or at fresh new machines, I’ve found the need to have a small set of essential packages that I install, just to be productive. Here’s my list (the green).

newbox$ sudo apt-get install build-essential screen zsh corkscrew mercurial subversion python ipython pychecker pylint ctags vim vim-scripts xfonts-terminux sqlite3 tree ntp mailx postfix mutt autofs nfs-common

This will install some other dependencies, of course, but it’s a pretty quick operation, requiring less than 100 MiB. There are various other essential packages not listed there, but they tend to be part of the basic install. Now you can just use something like “hg clone ssh://your-mocushla.com/yourhome” to pull in your well-organized, minimal $HOME setup — but I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Related tip of the day: Did you know you have tab-completion for apt-get? Try this:

newbox$ sudo apt-get install python-[tab][tab]y

How many of those have you had to discover by searching?

The Meme

What’s on your Minimal APT List? Or do you have a Yum List? Does it look different?

If you found this post interesting, you may be interested in some related book s: Linux Patch Management, and Ubuntu Hacks.

Unfortunately, books are not generally free. Publishers are finally seeing some light and letting some of their books be free online. Some of the best books I’ve read are free downloads. I still often buy those anyway, for the benefits mentioned above. But having them searchable and copy-paste-able is a huge boon for quick use. I hope the trend continues.

Amazon has proven to be a great way to find and explore any book. Through their review system I usually have a pretty good idea whether any given book is worth purchasing. The conundrum is that I find a lot of books are worth it! I spend way too much money there. I haven’t very well kept track of what my family gives to Amazon in a year, but I’m sure I don’t want to know. My wish-list is out of control. So what can I do?

I’ve been in the habit of avoiding my local library, since my wife’s late fees have become a sensitive matter. But she spends so much time browsing around for books there that I was compelled to check out the system. Although the site is some ASPX crap, it actually works okay once you’ve figured out how to work around some oddities. All you really need is to be able to search and request. So I went through the exercise of wading through my Amazon wish-list to see what the library actually had. Surprisingly, there were a lot. My searches included: blog, blogging, python (already got this one covered; just for fun), django, lisp, javascript, seth godin, and a few other recommended titles. The most popular Amazon blogging books were in, and the Django book was on its way — a couple copies! There was even a lisp book, but it didn’t look much good. Guess I’ll still have to drop the $44 on Practical Common Lisp. But in general, the library will likely become my first stop before clicking Amazon’s dreaded “Place your order” button.

The library system is set up to share books among some 10 locations. All you have to do is reserve a book, and they ship it to your local station. Their calling system is pretty cool. We get phone calls almost nightly in the robotic festival voice: You have… 3… items being held for you. Can’t wait to get those Seth Godin books.

Be sure to check out your local library system and see what they’ve got. You should even think about donating some of your books so you can be a part of feeding this useful public system.