Sabtu, 16 November 2013

Food For Thought #1

Hi everyone! I have decided to share everything I learnt throughout my life. It is all based on my experience. From small things, into a bigger concept of life and every aspect of human being. I hope you do enjoy and learn something from this. Enough chit-chat and let's go to the first story.

Curiosity

No doubt, this is the first and golden rule of food for thought. Human mind has the instinct to feel hungry if their stomach is empty. Unfortunately, the instinct would not work the same for human mind itself. It works backwards. The bigger the human mind, the more their hunger for knowledge. Most people called this curiosity. If you want to be better at anything, the first step is to gain your curiosity. I allows you to keep searching and searching about new things. It let's you break the wall that prohibits you from getting better. I believe that every method I used in my life, there are better methods and I tried to find it. When I code, I believe that there are better method to code that I'm using right now and I tried to find and find it everyday to make my application better. This is the thing that keeps me moving forward. Do no satisfied with the current situation. 

Practice
"Judge each day by the seeds you plant, not the harvest you reap."
Simple, there are no secret way. There are no short path. Keep practicing and you will become better. While most people are in their comfort zone, you must get out from your comfort zone. I have seen enough people that only learn when the situation force them to do so. You need to become better. Not only because it makes you more competitive, it allows you to be ready for an improvement. This world is rapidly changing or maybe will you will the one that makes the change. If you are not ready, then you will out of the game soon enough.  Every single achievement do not makes you better. You can win a lot of contest, competition, and match, but the real improvement comes from practice.

Death
"The time that you stop contributing is the time of your death"
 Have you thought about your meaning of life? Are people who breath, eat, and sleep considered living? Yes it is literary alive, but do does it made impact? The only different thing with living people that only act when there are actions that given to them with a rock is that the living people breath. When there are actions, there are reactions. We, humans, are designed for something. There are plans for us and we need to give actions to make out life a real living one. Even a small contribution like saying "Hi" to people is a great action. Contributing is the only thing we can to to let other people feel that our life is alive.

Done! I think, three stories is enough. I hope you can learn new things from my perspective. This is only the beginning. In this first episode, I want to lay some basic foundation of life concept. In the next one, I will explain more specific things. Thank you. Have a good day. :D.

Senin, 11 November 2013

My Linux Terminal

Hi everyone! For several days, I've been tweaking my terminal so that it could made me more productive and stylish. It is true that it was not that easy to tweak a terminal if one do not used to play with terminal. I, myself, indeed face some difficulties while installing all of this. Nevertheless, the result is very rewarding. So, I would like to share the steps to made a good terminal. This is the example image of my terminal. It made the default Ubuntu style for terminal lame.




This tutorial is built to work on Ubuntu. It should work with other linux distro with proper package installer. In order to made this terminal, we need 3 main tools.

  1. ZSH, a powerful scripting language that designed for interactive use
  2. oh-my-zsh, a zsh framework to manage ZSH configuration
  3. Solarized, a cool color pallete for terminal
If you used to use bash as your default terminal, you will feel very convenient while using ZSH. The first step to customize your terminal is installing git. 

 sudo apt-get install git-core  

Git is essential because almost all the tools are hosted using git. Now, let us install ZSH. 


 sudo apt-get install zsh  

Then, proceed to install oh-my-zsh


 wget –no-check-certificate https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O – | sh  

Next, make ZSH as your default terminal.


 chsh -s /bin/zsh  

Easy. Now, restart your terminal and you'll have your terminal enhanced. ZSH have some features that would ease your development like auto completion of command, directory, and shortcuts. You can see it at here. The functional enhancement is done, now, let's tackle the style part. It is indeed stylish terminal makes me likes using terminal as it's color is very neat and compelling. :D. 

Fortunately, oh-my-zsh has abundant amount of built-in style. You can choose one from here. I use agnoster as my style. To pick your theme, edit the .zshrc file at your user home directory and sent the ZSH_THEME into the one you choose. :)

For the color pallet, there are a lot of color pallet on the web, but I choose Solarized. It is very neat and well designed. To use this, run this command. 


 git clone https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.git  

Remember that Ubuntu use gnome for it's desktop graphic. For, other linux distro, you need to use the other one like the KDE version. After that, put this line into .zshrc file.


 source <PATH_TO_gnome-terminal-colors-solarized>/set_dark.sh  

There are two types for solarized. It is light and dark. You can use set_light.sh for a bright style, but I prefer dark because it gives me more contrast color. The last step is to restart your terminal! Done! It should give you a cool new looking good terminal. :D. Let me know if you face some difficulties. I would be happy to help. :)