Blacklander at Dilbert.blog

Scott Adam's blog is good reading at any time. But this post wasn't even by him. Scott recently caused a new wave of commenting in response to his recent post and follow-up where he considers the effort required to fear all the things that we are required to these days.

Some serious discussion came out of this, along with the usual Bush-banging and Bush-loving nonsense. But out of it all came a comment that Scott thought so well of that he promoted to a post.

Blacklander offers incisive thoughts about the reality of the "us" and "them" rhetoric we hear every day, from the perspective of "them".

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games

Dark Ages

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can't help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right - and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn't seem to fit the whole picture... then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation - the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn't been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn't enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying "yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn't work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn't give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?"

Making the command line more commanding

Nircmd is a great little utility for making the Windows command line just that little bit more useful.

nircmd will let you manipulate many aspects of what is going on in your windows session, such as closing, minimising and restoring windows (even by class), stop/starting services, turning off the monitor, shutting down, even making windows varying levels of transparent.

This greatly enhances what you can accomplish with batch files without having to resort to vb or other scripting languages.

Screen is the Answer

The question is "How can I make my command line life easier in linux (and other unix style os')?"

Screen is the answer, but it is the answer even if you aren't asking the question. Screen is so fundamentally useful that should be a fundamental part of the kernel if you ask me.

So what is it? So there you are, connected to your linux box, and you kick of a compile. Before you know it, there a zillion dependencies to consider and it is going to be there a while. So now your session is tied up, so if you want to get on with something else, you need to make a new connection to the box. But what if you need to restart the machine you are connecting from while a day long compile is taking place? Killing your connection to the linux server will kill any processes associated with that session.

Or what if you want to try something in one session and see the output in another session? SecureCRT is a great ssh client, and version 5 supports tabs, which is cool. But of course each time you need make a new session, you need to authenticate.

Anyway, "screen" is the answer, as you already know because I told you at the start.

What screen does is decouple the console session from the console itself. When you create an ssh session, you are providing an input/output tty. So that you can tell the box what to do, and it can talk back to you.

What screen does is provide a proxy for that session. So screen is where your input and output go to, and you can either be connected to screen or not. When you are running screen it is transparent, it is just like you are carrying out a normal session.

But if you close your ssh session, and then reconnect from another terminal, typing screen -r will let you carry on where you left off. And it doesn't matter whether that is another ssh session, or a telnet session, or if you walk up to the physical console.

So thats useful right? But this isn't all of by a long stretch. screen isn't limited to one console session. You can have a number of them. You could have 10 different sessions going to your linux box simultaneously and then disconnect them all and resume them all somewhere else.

screen is controlled with the ctrl-a meta by default, and here are a bunch of useful commands:

ctrl-a c Create and enter a new screen
ctrl-a n Switch to next screen
ctrl-a p Previous Screen
ctrl-a " List screens
ctrl-a M Monitor screen for activity (will bell other screens if something happens)
ctrl-a S Split screens
ctrl-a Tab Switch between split screens

So there is a handful, and note that you can cut and paste between screens, which makes it massively useful when on the console.

This concludes this screen article and it will now sit amongst the millions of others on the net. There is a reason why they are all there: screen is the answer.