Linux Command Prompt in Color

In this modern world, basically every terminal is compatible with VT-52 terminal sequences. These includes Windows Terminal (free from Microsoft on the Microsoft Store), Terminal.app (on macOS) and most terminals available under Linux. Further, most of these support emoji and 256 colors. Yet, most of the advice out there on how to deal with this suggests hard-coding these escape sequences directly into your prompt. This is great, and probably will work just fine, but I find it to be painful....

19 Nov 2021 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Stopping Regular Book Blog

For over a year, I have published a book review every other week, on Wednesday, at noon.  Every week in the middle of both summers. Reading for review My wife is a librarian, and when I started this blog, it was partly a way for me to share something about the numerous pre-release books that she and I would get when we went to book events.  Also, when I started, doing this was fun, and I figured that if I were any good at it, maybe I would reach other readers....

6 Oct 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Fixing the Broken

I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true.  It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though.  The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....

30 Mar 2019 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Movie] Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)

Movie poster This is a documentary film about Fred McFeely Rogers, who was on a popular children's program called Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1968 through 2001.  The movie starts his career with a children's show that he produced before Neighborhood, the Children's Corner, though skips his earliest work for NBC. Won't you be my neighbor is a very well paced, carefully timed, and beautifully edited documentary....

9 Mar 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink