There are multiple ways to customise Bash prompt. There’s no need to look for long to find plethora of examples with fancy, colourful PS1s. What have been a bit problematic is having text on the right of the input line. In this article I’ll try to address that shortcoming.

Getting text on the right

The typical approach is using PROMPT_COMMAND to output desired content. The variable specifies a shell code Bash executes prior to rendering the primary prompt (i.e. PS1).

The idea is to align text to the right and then using carrier return move the cursor back to the beginning of the line where Bash will start rendering its prompt. Let’s look at an example of showing time in various locations:

__command_rprompt() {
	local times= n=$COLUMNS tz
	for tz in ZRH:Europe/Zurich PIT:US/Eastern \
	          MTV:US/Pacific TOK:Asia/Tokyo; do
		[ $n -gt 40 ] || break
		times="$times ${tz%%:*}\e[30;1m:\e[0;36;1m"
		times="$times$(TZ=${tz#*:} date +%H:%M)\e[0m"
		n=$(( $n - 10 ))
	done
	[ -z "$times" ] || printf "%${n}s$times\\r" ''
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=__command_rprompt

Clearing the line on execution

It has one annoying issue. The right text reminds on screen even after executing a command. Typically this is a matter of aesthetic but it also makes copying and pasting session history more convoluted.

A manual solution is to use redraw-current-line readline function (e.g. often bound to C-l). It clears the line and prints the prompt and whatever input has been entered thus far. PROMPT_COMMAND is not executed so the right text does not reappear.

Lack of automation can be addressed with a tiny bit of readline magic and a ~/.inputrc file which deserves much more fame than what it usually gets.

Tricky part is bindind C-m and C-j to two readline functions, redraw-current-line followed by accept-line, which is normally not possible. This limitation can be overcome by binding the key sequences to a different sequence which will be interpreted recursively.

To test that idea it’s enough to execute:

bind '\C-l:redraw-current-line'
bind '\M-\C-j:accept-line'
bind '\C-j:"\C-l\M-\C-j"' '\C-m:"\C-j"'

Making this permanent is as easy as adding the following lines to ~/.inputrc:

$if Bash
    "\C-l": redraw-current-line
    "\e\C-j": accept-line
    "\C-j": "\C-l\e\C-j"
    "\C-m": "\C-l\e\C-j"
$endif

With that, the right prompt will disappear as soon as the shell command is executed. (Note the use of \M- in bind command vs \e in ~/.inputrc file).

A few days ago I received an email from Google Wembaster Tools saying no more no less but: ‘Your webpage sucks on mobile devices!’ Or something. Now that I think of it, I could have been worded slightly differently. The gist was the same though.

I never paid that much attention to how my site looks on phones and tables. I’ve made sure it loaded and looked, but apart from that never spent much time on the issue. I always thought optimising for a small screen would be a lengthy and painful process. How mistaken I was!

In my defence, when I last looked at the problem, state of mobile browsers was different; now there are two things to do. First, add a viewport meta tag, e.g.:

<meta name=viewport
      content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

and then use min-width or max-width CSS media queries. Admittedly the second part may take some time, but if your layout uses simple markup rather than being TABLE-based, reading the excellent article on A List Apart might turn out to be the most time consuming step.

If you haven’t already, do take a look at whether your website looks reasonably well on small screens. Apparently mobile is the future, or some such.

The ‘bad’ news is that I’ve dropped endless scroll feature. This is because in narrow layout the sidebar moves to the bottom and endless scrolling would make it unreachable since it would run away all the time.

Outside of functional programming context, map-reduce refers to a technique for processing data. Thanks to properties of map and reduce operations, computations which can be expressed using them can be highly parallelised, which allows for faster processing of high volumes of data.

If you’ve ever wondered how tools such as Apache Hadoop work, you’re at the right page. In this article I’ll explain what map and reduce are and later also introduce a shuffle phase.

Same as my previous article written in Polish, this text will describe some steps I take after installing Slackware Linux. I try to strike a balance between performance, security and usability, but not everything written here may work for everyone. You have been warned.

Cleaning Tiny Applications Collection, I’ve dropped both artificial intelligence scripts. Not wanting to let them disappear completely, I’m posting them here for posterity. The first one is an eight line of code version that might be what Sid wrote as his first ever program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wWtT
while (<>) {
	if (/[aeiouyAEIOUY][^a-zA-Z]*$/) {
		print "Yes.\n";
	} elsif (!/^\s*$/) {
		print "No.\n";
	}
}

HTML has gone quite a long way since its inception. This means a lot of new features but also some small incompatibilities which may pose issues in certain situations. For instance, when posting a code snippet for others to include on their websites, it’s best if it works correctly on as many sites as possible which implies being compatible with as many versions of HTML as possible. But how to create a snippet that works both in HTML and XHTML? Here are a few tips:

CSS sprites aren’t anything new. They have been around for years, and are one of the methods to optimise website’s load time. The idea is to incorporate multiple images into one and in this way decrease number of round trips between the server and the browser.

In its traditional use, CSS sprites work as a replacement for images and cannot be used as a background. Alas that is exactly what I wanted to do with a quote and flag icons like the following:

Update: This website has evolved slightly since 2013. The flags are no longer used (replaced by content negotiation) and quote sprite icon has been replaced by an SVG. While I no longer use this technique, it is of course still valid.

After some playing around I’ve finally figured out how to get this working. Even though there are some caveats, sprites can be used as a top-left no-repeat background image as well.

Surprisingly I couldn’t find any HTTPS-aware examples how to drop the www. prefix from web hosts in Apache, so I had to come up with one myself. Firstly, the following lines need to find their way to the end of Apache configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or something):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1$1 [L,R=301]

Secondly, analogous lines need to be added inside of the <VirtualHost _default_:443> directive of mod_ssl configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf or similar), like so:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>
	# … various directives …

	# Here’s what needs to be added:
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1$1 [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

Now, after a restart, Apache will drop the www. prefix for both secure and insecure connections.

Będę miał dzisiaj przyjemność prezentować Contiguous Memory Allocator na seminarium dyplomowym (CMA jest bowiem tematem mojej pracy). Dostępny jest również referat opisujący z większą zawartość slajdów. Aktualizacja: Z racji, że jestem już po obronie, dodaję również link do pracy inżynierskiej.

• Praca inżynierska, źródła.
• Prezentacja, źródła.
• Referat, źródła.

Prezentacja nie opisuje sposobu użycia CMA zatem po więcej szczegółów odsyłam do materiałów z LCE 2012. No i oczywiście jest również strona mina86.com/cma/, z której linkuję do przeróżnych materiałów dotyczących CMA.

LinuxCon / Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012 is nearly over, and I had a pleasure of talking about the Contiguous Memory Allocator. Slides from the talk are available for download and their source code can be accessed at GitHub.

Unfortunately, in contrast to other LCE/ELCE conferences, talks were not recorded, so the video of the presentation is not available.

For more links regarding CMA, I have set up a resource page at mina86.com/cma/. Beside the link to the final CMA patchset and to the LCE/ELCE presentation, it links to various articles and patches relating to CMA directly or indirectly.