I was punting at work today and looked up a few neat tricks to do in irssi. While I really enjoy using irssi, I can’t say that it is easy to get the hang of, or even use on a regular basis. Perusing the internet for information on logging messages, I came across a great guide for using irssi and GNU screen. It’s reasonably useful for a user using screen and/or irssi for the first time, and a convenient refresher for those who have used either before. I particularly like the advanced windowlist script that can be found toward the end of the guide. (For those of you interested in the command to log only personal messages, it’s the following: /log open /path/to/logs/yourlog-%%m-%%d-%%Y MSGS. The MSGS flag at the end makes it record only personals. For more usage see /usr/share/irssi/help/log).

Things in lab have been going well so far. I came across an application that I really like called Zoho Notebook. It’s a lot like Google Docs. Although I have not really used Google Docs, I’ve heard better things about Zoho Notebook, so I figured I would give it a try. From what I’ve read, there has been an increase in applications mimicking Microsoft Office applications on the Internet. These applications are useful because you can publish documents and spreadsheets to your website, or share them with collaborators. I used Zoho Notebook today to store notes that I had taken about running reconstruction, and I created a spreadsheet to keep track of my progress with all the brains I’m analyzing.

To throw in even more links, I met with my adviser from the Media Lab on Wednesday, and he thinks it is probably a good idea for me to start learning Ruby. I took this 15 minute introduction to the language, and it looks pretty neat. It is somewhat similar to Python, although it is still very distinct. Ideally, I will be using Ruby for Ruby on Rails, which is a powerful but simple package for creating database-backed web applications. It looks pretty cool, and I’m excited to get into it more.

I have finally caught up in Berserk. The most recent issue was supposedly released on June 22, but the server for the group that scans the manga has “mysteriously” been down for the past few days. The manga is pretty crazy; I’m really looking forward to the next issue because the most recent one was a cliffhanger.

(This is the last of the updates, I promise) We will hopefully be finishing GITS later tonight, and getting started on the 8-bit adder project sometime in the near future, as I picked the parts up from desk a little while ago. That is all for now.