IT-Box

Here’ s a list of some useful lightweight terminal applications which i use mostly on my linux distro.

htop

Htop is young and beautiful sister of top on gnu/linux. It views your processes on your system with resources they use in a more visual way that top does. Htop provides fully customizable pretty colored widgets like gauges that display total system resource usage.

Mutt

A superior e-mail, newsgroup client that works on terminal with a simple configuration and setup. If you love to work on terminal and want to access your incoming mails rapidly on terminal then you can easily adopt to Mutt

Finch

Finch is a terminal clone of famous IM client Pidgin and is developed again by Pidgin developers. It has almost the same visual apperance as Pidgin on X but this time on terminal. It uses ncurses libraries and worths to give it a try.

SnowNews

SnowNews is a simple feed reader that supports all versions of RSS and OPML. It uses libxml2 and ncurses libraries and has many smart features like cookie handling, auto http redirection, caching and colored customization.

Mpd - Ncmpc

Mpd is a music player daemon which publishes your music directory to a local port or to a shoutcast server. You can use it as a remote access point for your own music box on public or private network. It uses a special protocol implemeted by mpd developers. The client which i should suggest is ncmpc which plays your music box in your terminal enviroment with a simple nice looking interface. It has a sweet looking digital clock too.

Midnight Commander

Famous file manager for terminal environment which gets easy your file system operations, also you can login to ssh or ftp server to manage your remote files.

ccze

if you get blind in long logs, try them to colourize with ccze. It simply represents your logs in fancy colours to you. If you monitor your syslogs, apache logs or etc… so much, try this and don’t get lost in log hell.

BitchX

The most stable, commonly used, robust irc client in the world that sits on terminal. Also i want to share a quote from bitchX website :),

BitchX is the most popular IRC client among Unix systems. You can also use it on Windows, but if you had a Picasso painting, would you put it in the bathroom?

LoL…

screen

Probably you already have screen in your os if you use unix or unix like system and again probably you already know what screen is but i want to add it to this list for whom who doesn’t meet it if any. Screen is terminal multiplexer which means that you could have more than one interactive shell session in the same terminal screen. ıt’s very useful espacially when you open a remote shell session (ssh connection).

XMonad

It’s a fantastic X window manager for unix like systems which organizes windows in useful tiling algorithms. Windows will not float until you want and you’ll never miss a gnome - KDE like enviroment when you adopt this. I strongly suggest if you work in terminal emulator too much.

Finally,

So, i will add any application to this list if i remember or meet a new one. Feel free to share any if you think it must be in the list.

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as a result of an accident all comments of it-box has lost, sorry for inconvenience

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Since i’m coding with Microsoft software development stack for years, recent days i’m very confused with my observations about Microsoft’s new technologies and returning reactions by it’s communities.

The big picture what i see is; there is a world of wonders which has a god (Microsoft), and prophets (Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Rob Connery : The last Prophet etc.) and we all the creatures. We are all crying out to our god:

God:

- Hoo Hoo hooo, give me your soul poor man, i will bless you. With your $acrifices, i would be appreciated.

Prayers:

- oh my god, please please give me food, i gave you my soul already, please give me some more.

Among all these my posts below in the blog, it’s interesting that why i’m talking about like that for now? Nowadays, everyone is aware of the ASP.NET MVC framework you know and all the Microsoft folks waiting for it in a lather (sadly me too!). Every other’s blog which i get in, get me out with the comments like

# re: .NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)
Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:39 PM by Wallstreet

Give me silverlight 2.0 or give me death!

comment on Scott Guthrie’s “.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)” post

Kevin Isom
October 19th, 2007

But in saying all of that I can’t wait to get my hands on the MVC stuff as well.

comment on Rob Connery’s “Have We ASP.NET Geeks Lost Something?” post

These comments describe what i exactly trying to mention. I called this “followship”. We all ms guys playing around with the toys that Microsoft gave us. Everyone in the community looks for Scott Guthrie’s mouth for any lips movement. We are greedily waiting for MVC ctp deadline, when we eat it, our god will feed us with an another toy. What’s new here? MVC patterns exists for years and when Microsoft implements it it becomes one of holy grails. The followship buzzword sits on the right meaning for Microsoft community IMHO.

Then what is “fellowship” ? I won’t describe the the meaning what i load to, But i’ll gave you some steps to open your wings to gain full freedom and to open doors to no headed community.

• Get you pc Ubuntu/Linux installed (or any other popular linux distro)
• Open your distro’s packet manager.
• Get your distro Apache Http Server installed
• Get your distro Eclipse installed
• Get your Eclipse PyDev and CDT plug-ins installed
• Welcome to the fellowship of the free software

All you need to develop really real world software is on your hands for FREE even in enterprise solutions. Take it so:

1. Do you need speed? No doubt : take C programming language, learn it, experience it, tool it for you box, in Eclipse IDE with CDT plug-in.
2. Do you need efficiency? No doubt : take JAVA programming language, it won’t hurt you if you already code with C# also it has extensive Enterprise Frameworks like Spring, Struts and Eclipse IDE is the hometown for JAVA.
3. Do you need productivity? No doubt : take Python programming language, learn what it can save for your life time, again in famous Eclipse IDE with PyDev plug-in.

The all stack comes with real cross-platform comformance, they are not built for a specific platform like IIS or Windows api. They can extend on free Apache http server which works on all platforms, they can extend on Gtk+ GUI toolkit which works on all platforms etc. etc. etc. Give them a chance and with your individual skills you should be number one coder and developer with community support, GPL support and freedom support Believe in that here no one expects nothing from someone except some help without get paid.

Anyone may vary easily in his/her thoughts, so do i. Give a try for steps i pointed above, you’ll be exactly excited for only in 7 hours… From now i’ll hold this stack with my right hand and swap my Microsoft related (really experienced) knowledge to my left hand.

And it’s time for you to face with your own realities…

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Here is my simple, some spare time project, one that smartphone game based on a southpark theme. It’s a simply working game that coded for dummies. You can download the source code below the post but unfortunately the code had not been commented, but it promises to be really simple. In fact it’s not really a tutorial, i only exposed the code for dummies, only enjoy it if you wish.

Although it’s a simple tutorial like game, it’s surely entertaining and enjoying. As you know Cartman is very angry as always and tyring to avoid things that he hates.

The game uses GDI with custom double buffering model, so it DOES NOT use windows controls such picture boxes. It’s based on bit blitting technique. Honestly the code wasn’t written perfectly, as i said before it’s a spare time project, but it can give the general basic game programming concepts to newbies altough i’m not a game programmer.

Download the source project here

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i’ve got two tasks for you. The first one is; you will connect to your working database, make a query to fetch all your contacts, and display’ em in a grid like control on a windows form. You bet it’s very simple, especially if you’re using Visual Studio. Now with Visual Studio 2008 by drag&drop operations i can do this without writing any code snippet and even have ability to display relational data.

Oh my, visual studio is really great IDE software, it makes all the things for me and now i could really dive into thinking the real problems of my software needs. But where is analytical thinking? Trying to solve the big picture puzzle of software is really an analytical thinking? I think the nature of computer programming is writing code that computers undertands and trying to solve problems by using innovational or existing algorithms. So the one who solves computional problems by algorithms is a computer programmer in a nutshell i think.

If you doubt, one main question have to be asked:

What is analytical thinking?

Here comes my second task for you that you have an array of digits those random positioned like this one:

int[] digits = new int[]{4, 5, 2, 7, 9, 3, 1, 8, 6};

So please give a try to sort this array ascending like this one {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 } without using Array.Sort() or any library method. This sounds very simple, is it? i can hear your laugh, saying how an easy thing this is. If you give a chance yourself to solve this problem i guess and suppose that you will find how much an analytical thinker you are.

*

Here i do not advocate that not to use visual studio or framework libraries, certainly they make our life more easier, but all programmers who says that i’m a programmer and have ability to solve any kind of problems by using my favorite programming language, must do training and exercise in basic algorithms, learn historical solutions to generic problematic issues and have a look at some framework base classes how things done.

I’m neither a perfect programmer nor a expert analytical thinker, but i’m trying to do and always give myself some time to understand some basic and base concepts. I guess and believe these will make me soon a good big picture puzzler, a senior developer or solution developer.

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