Merry Christmas and happy New Year 2023

Finger

I cut my finger really badly while working in the kitchen garden. I was cutting a lettuce for diner and the knife slipped and hit my thumb. I only wish I had chosen to eat herrings for diner instead of a salad ;-)

The cut was really deep, but it is slowly healing. This happened two months ago. I can move my finger after weeks but it is a bit insensitive yet.

I hope it gets better by Christmas. I need it to open my presents ;-)

A web server written in bash

I had wanted to try a web server written in bash for years, well the wish just came true with bashttpd available at  https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd     

It is pretty easy to use, you only need to download the script, make  it executable and launch it. There are several launch options, one single connection or accepting multiple connections. At launch time a default config file is created, bashttpd.conf, you can configure several things, especially the files you want to serve.     

In order to connect to the server, ie, to see the file it is serving use the address of the machine using port number 8080. For example if  the server has the following ip: 10.100.120.2 open a web browser and type http://10.100.120.2:8080 and that's it.     

Two important considerations here:

 - Never use it on the web, it is highly dangerous and insecure. Use it at home or in a private network (Its main use is for testing stuff)   

- "If anyone installs that anywhere, they might meet a gruesome end  with a rusty fork" --- BasHTTPd creator, maintainer    

 Enjoy it

Peace

I was curious to know how the word "peace" was in Chinese. I searched the web and I found this: 

I think it is beautiful. So I decided to post it here.

Disclaimer: the image is not mine. And besides I don't even know if it really means "peace". I hope so. It's what we always need.

I am so terribly sad

One of my uncles planted two white mulberry trees 90 or 100 years ago. They were so huge that everybody admired them. 

Several years ago one of them was so damaged by a storm that I had to cut it down. 

The one that was left was really awesome. But again several storms torn it to pieces so I had to grasp the chainsaw and well... 

I hope I can plant some new trees to replace them.

I am thinking about a magnolia and a mulberry tree.

Again. I hated having to cut them down, but I had no other choice. It was dangerous to be around in a wind storm.

Tronada in Agropienso

With the author and Jose Antonio Adell. 

(Saturday October 8th)

The wait was worth it

The crop this year was very bad, as you know, due to the weather. 

However, watermelons made it in the end. I am grateful for that.

(It weighs 7-8 kg)

Sopa de Cabra

What a great concert last night. Pure Rock and Roll

Tronada

I finished reading "Tronada" ("Storm" in English) written by a friend of mine. J.R. Viu Llubell. It is his first published novel.

It is a fantastic detective adventure book in which the characters and the story are carefully crafted. 

The end is absolutelly well-knit and completelly surprising.

You can find it on stores and at Amazon (only available in Spanish so far)

Third generation plants

The first generation died due to extreme cold. The second one due to extreme heat. Hopefully the third time is the charm. 

Protecting plants from the sun

Plants get burnt due to the extreme temperatures of this heat wave. They die of exposure. So I had to improvise a shade to protect them. 

Some of them couldn't make it, it was too late for them.

Unbearable 40C in the shade

First Tres cantos tomato of the season

The first one is the best one (not necessarily)

This is the first tomato of the tres cantos variety I picked up this season. It is an excellent variety. The colour is not red but orange. It is a beautiful piece. And may I add, delicious.

Screenshot of the week 16

 The Spanish performance at the Eurovision festival 2022 was simply extraordinary...

Four-leaf clover

My cousin has a special gift. She can find four-leaf clovers among millions of plants. It is more than good eyeshight. It is a real gift. She's always had it as far as I remember. She found one for everyone of us in less than five minutes. Ain't that really extraordinary?

Spring going back to normal

Low temperatures seem to have gone away and the weather now is close to normal (It's raining now, but that is how it is supposed to be in April)

The frost killed my tomato plants but I planted some new ones yesterday and they look good.

Besides, since I cannot do anything in the garden I've spent some time in the garage tuning my lawnmower. 

Cold Spring

Spring just began but the weather seems to be a bit stubborn. We reached -3C last night and the plants and the trees froze. Too bad.

Hydroponic

This is my first attempt. Next month plan: hydroponic tomato plants.

Ramoncin

We had such a great time at the concert last Saturday February 26th I can only say Thank you.

Evolution of greenhouse

Man, it's freaking full!

Software I discovered in 2021

 Last year I discovered two pieces of software that surprised me: The zsh and byobu

I already wrote a post talking about my experience with zsh here but I haven't really even mentioned byobu anywhere that I remember, except maybe on irc.

byobu is a wrapper for gnu screen or tmux, it really is something you have to try if you like to test new software. It can do many many things, and learning them all is a bit challenging at first because it is mainly managed using your keyboard's F keys and you need to learn them by heart. However you only need to know two basic keystrokes:

F2 opens a new window (similar to ctrl + a + c in screen/tmux)

F6 dettaches your session (similar to ctrl + a + d in screen/tmux)

Heed that these two keys are only the two basic commands. F3 and F4 move form one window to the other up and down. Want to learn more? I am sure you do...

Enjoy

Ready for the spring to arrive

This year I bought a tiny greenhouse for my seeds. Inside there are only onions and egg plants so far.

And today I sowed four different types of tomatoes and green peppers.

The truth about the zsh

 I heard wonderful things about the zsh and the wannabe geek in me couldn't help installing it in some of my computers (including the raspi) and it might be yet too soon since I have only been able to play with it for a week or so, but I think I am ready to tell you the truth about the zsh (heed that I mean "my truth"). And bear in mind that we, wannabe-geeks, are so enthusiast that we say "play" instead of some other more appropriate, descriptive word. In the end it is all the same: Learning and having some fun.

 

Well, when you fire up zsh for the first time it offers you a menu. You can choose among several options, it offers to create a blank .zshrc or a default basic .zshrc according to the configuration chosen by your admin (read your distro) or configure a brand new .zshrc following some other items on the menu. Man, ain't that super cool?

 

I tried all the options, and my conclusion is, if you only have a basic configuration you can only do basic things, you need to add your own aliases, your own functions and this way it (apart from some enhancements on its own) behaves very similar to other shells, say bash or ksh.

When I say "basic" I mean I even had to add things like:

alias ls='ls --color'

alias grep='grep --color'

and so on and  so forth. I even had to add alias la='ls -alh' Man, that sucks. I thought zsh  was so clever and so cool...

But what happens when you add something like oh-my-zsh ? Man, that's a completely different world!!! That is where the true power of the shell comes to the fore. oh-my-zsh and probably other similar frameworks add dozens of super elegant themes and plugins (for git, for managing history...) many of he plugins add hundreds of aliases to your configuration. 

And apart from the fact that the default theme sucks big time (which really makes you want to dive in the pool of themes looking for a better one) now I can say that zsh is really and truly awesome. Much in the same way other shells can do great things if you add them great stuff.

Themes are basically customized prompts, some of them add nice info like the timestamp of commads or simply a local clock. I like the traditional user@host (+ directory) ~$ model:

For example: chals@jean:~/bin »

Here is where one of the plugins, git, is rad. When you enter a git repo it adds the branch you are in in the prompt. 

For example:     

chals@jean:~/git » cd soma/

chals@jean:~/git/soma(master○) »

Conclusion: I am enjoying zsh a lot and I really like it. I will continue playing with it to see how many good things I learn in the long run. In my raspi it is now the default shell and by the way, I need to customize the web-search plugin for my raspi.

pharc v.7.0 released

 I am proud to announce that today I released pharc v.7.0. It only includes some minor changes as you can read in the changelog:

* pharc v.7.0

* Updating permissions for gophernicus.

The thing is, when we had bucktooth as gopher server, it was ok to have permissions 750 for directories and 640 for files. This is not the case anymore with gophernicus. It needs 755 and 644 permissions.

 This is not a great deal, it was pretty easy to run these lines I found on sdf's gopher tutorial:

 

$ find ~/gopher/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
$ find ~/gopher/ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

But it had to be done manually and after that you had to chmod +x your 

moles again to work. 

Like I said, this was not a huge problem but I had to do something about it. 

So now the problem seems to be fixed for good.

One more important change is that since I had to update the wiki for version 7. 

I added the wiki to the gopherhole. So from now on you can find both resources 

(the source code and the wiki) on the web and on gopherspace.

On the web:

https://gitlab.com/pharc

https://gitlab.com/pharc/pharc/-/wikis/home

On gopherspace:

 gopher://sdfeu.org:70/1/users/chals/downloads/software

gopher://sdfeu.org:70/0/users/chals/wiki 

Self explanatory