Monthly Archives: October 2014

Tab colors in iTerm2

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I’m old school and still do much work in a terminal. My preferred terminal is iTerm2. I use multiple windows and multiple tabs/window. I tend to have lots of suspended work or session, which I keep in tabs. It is convenient to use separate tabs for each task for many reasons. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find the correct tab when there is time to return to the task.

I have started using colored tabs as a way to (more) quickly identify tabs. The problem is that tab colors are a menu item (I prefer command line) and most of the default tab colors are ugly.

My solution is Ken Snyder’s tab colors. Thanks, Ken.

Enrollment

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Wow! Both courses I’m teaching filled up almost immediately. This is good and bad. Good: I must be teaching the right subjects. Bad: I have to turn away many students.

If you wanted to get into a course and couldn’t that is regretful and I empathize with you. Unfortunately, each course has a limit. Registration is controlled by the registrar and policy set by the dept, college, and university. I do not have any control of this process. If you have any questions or requests, please direct them to the dept grad office, csc-gradoffice@ncsu.edu.

Your only option is to get on the wait list and hope that enough students drop the course. I do not know whether that will happen, but in the past about 10% of those that initially enroll drop the course. If you are not on the wait list, I believe you can set up an alert in MyPack to let you know if space opens up on the wait list.

Python is not a scripting language

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Many refer to Python as a scripting language. I heard it again last week. It came from an accomplished computer science professor and colleague. This comment was borne of ignorance: He has little experience with Python.

While there is no universal definition of a scripting language, calling Python a scripting language is ignorant. Python is the underlying language for a web framework (Django) that powers monster sites like Instagram and Pinterest. Python has major libraries like numpy and NLTK. The features of Python are too numerous to list but certainly they greatly exceed those of a language typically called a scripting language.