motivated.

I thought it might be a good idea to post my .z* files and other little tweaks that I have accumulated in my tech travels. I try to keep my shells simple so that behavior isn’t hugely different from system to system, especially since I typically work in environments where zsh may not be available and I don’t want to suffer from feature withdrawal when I’m forced to use ksh or bash instead.

Zsh in 100 Words

If you’re not familiar with zsh, you should check it out at zsh.org home page. In short, it’s a well-packaged feature-rich shell with features like

• phenomenal tab completion that supports tab-completing cmd-line options,
• intelligent file globbing that is suffix aware
• intuitive command history navigation that supports find+reexecute and find+ parameterized-rexecute
• a command history that spans multiple sessions

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I won’t bore you with a droll post about how awesome zsh is or what crazy things you can do with it. You can explore this on your own, and there are plenty of posts about this sort of thing floating around the net. This post is really for me to keep the basics of my zsh setup online and always accessible for the next time I find myself on a new host and I want to set this up.
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Unlike alot of people that ran right out and upgraded to Leopard on the first day it was available as a general release, I waited. I wanted to upgrade. And I was looking forward to it. But having experienced an upgrade that broke applications in sometimes unexpected ways before, I thought it wise to sit and wait this one out.

Why Upgrade Now
Now that the first major patch release is out (OS X 10.5.1) and after having read numerous reports about the new features, OS improvements to stability and the user experience, and the recent bug fixes, I upgraded. The upgrade went smoothly, but it wasn’t without quirks.

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I did something stupid last night. I tried to make a modification to the partition table of a drive while it was in use. For obvious reasons, this was not what I had intended and I corrupted the partition table and lost all my data on that drive — temporarily. Then, I fixed it with parted.

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With all the hype surrounding appleTV I’ve started to rethink the whole PVR vs. TV-media client tradeoff. I have a server at home, a bulky black box with 2×250GB hard disks that I use for storage and backups. I’ve recently considered turning it into a PVR or a TV-serving media server, but the lack of good HD options has stopped me from doing so. I have an HDTV, and I pay for HD cable. Naturally, I want an end-to-end HD solution. I could purchase and install a tuner in the server (which runs Ubuntu, by the way), such as the pcHDTV550 that’s guaranteed to run on linux — but it only takes analog inputs (coaxial and s-video) and only decodes ATSC, which is already exported via firewire by the cable tuner. When I thought about it, I noted that all I really want to do was capture the video stream.

After a little research, I found that any Firewire-equipped Mac can be made into an HD-PVR for unencrypted content at the expense of an appropriate firewire cable. Apple even provides the necessary capture software that you need, provided that you know where to look.

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Every good dev environment needs and uses source control. If you’re a programmer, and you don’t use source control of some sort, well, then you’re not really a programmer.
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Every flavor of *nix has some form of package management system. Gentoo has portage, Debian has the apt toolset which is also borrowed by Ubuntu, Red Hat, and now Suse, have RPM. Mac OS X, having *nix at its core, is no different.

Enter Fink. Fink is a powerful source-based package management system for OS X written in Perl and maintained by the Fink Project. While there are a number of binary packages available through the project, the available packages are primarily distributed as source and usually require the standard GNU dev toolchain to compile (gcc, make, etc). Either way, it’s easy to use, makes everything you’ll probably ever need to develop software in an OS X dev environment immediately available, and is terminal-based in the good-old unix tradition. There is a GUI that offers basic package management capabilities, but who cares– in my experience I spend so much time at a shell that switching back to the gui costs more time than it saves.

Here’s what you’ll need to install Fink:

• Mac OS X Developer Tools (XCode 2.4 with gcc 4.0, X11)
• The Fink installable binary

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