Month: November 2016

VimGolf – fun way to learn Vim

VimGolfVimGolf – a quick and fun way to learn Vim text editor.  There is a whole lot of different challenges for all levels – from novice to expert – that will test your knowledge of Vim trickery.

You can also review the solutions provided by other people, from shortest to the most readable.

ASCII vs. ANSI

Browserling does it again:

ascii-ansi

For those of you not old enough, here are the ASCII and ANSI Wikipedia pages.  Back in a day we used these for cool art, fancy user interfaces, email signatures, games and more.  Have a look at some cool examples of ASCII art.  Now imagine those “images” colored with the breathtaking variety of 8 colors and you’ve got yourself a true 90’s rainbow explosion.

ansi-color-table

You’d probably be surprised to learn that a lot of these have survived to modern day, and are still used in command line user interfaces.

P.S.: And if you think that this stuff is ancient, have a look at typewriter art example.

Install Ansible 2.0+ on Amazon AMI

Today, while upgrading some of my Ansible roles I’ve hit the problem.  Some of the newer roles require Ansible 2.0.  My Amazon AMI machine that runs the playbooks was still on version 1.9.  EPEL repository doesn’t seem to have the newer Ansible version yet.  Gladly, Google brough in this StackOverflow thread, which suggested installing Ansible with pip, not with yum.  This helped a lot:

rpm -e ansible
pip install ansible

It actually brought in Ansible v2.2 (see also Ansible v2.1), which is even better.