letting screen apps use the ssh-agent
I have been wondering for a while how to do this… How to pass the ssh-agent variables to screen clients. After doing a google search on it I found a couple of solutions: grabssh/fixssh - two scripts that save the ssh agent environment variables and restore them; screen_agent - this just executes an ssh-agent that is used by the screen session; fixx - ok, this actually fixes X forwarding not ssh-agent and is a variation on the first; Then I came across Alexander Neumann’s blog entry which is the perfect solution. He simply redefines the SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable and makes it point to a symlink that he creates when he logs in. This means that this method works when you’re sshing into a machine running screen. I will just have to overwrite this symlink when screen is being launched.
mpdscribble stream support
I am using gnump3d to get my tracks to my laptop, which is using mpd to play tracks. I noticed that none of the streamed tracks were getting to last.fm. I investigated and discovered that mpdscribble was not getting told of the track length by mpd – understandably so – and was not reporting it to last.fm. I patched the mpdscribble utility and posted about it. Updated…
glGo on ubuntu/dapper amd64
I started playing go. I tried cgoban and gtkgo. Both crashed a lot. Then I tried glGo… it’s much better.
lbdb and mutt
I recently added an outgoing mail filter to capture the email addresses of people I write email to. This saves me time on adding them to my address book manually. I ran into Mark’s Mutt Fan and Tip page and was pleased by the description of lbdb. I then found a way to write an outgoing filter to capture email addresses as I send mail… I wasn’t really interested in lbdb holding the forged SPAM addresses.
vim tutorial
I just joined the #vim irc channel on freenode. In the topic is suggested visiting Vi-Improved.org. This site in turn had a pretty good tutorial, here are a couple related links: Vim-Tutorial Vim Regular Expressions VIM Editor posts by Amir Salihefendic Vim 7 - the graphical introduction Workspace efficiency - Vim tip 1 of 3 Search don’t scroll - Vim tip 2 of 3 Taming your Vim config - Vim tip 3 of 3
fixing your terminal
I sometimes get into an odd state in screen. I am not sure what causes it, but it usually happens after I ctrl-C out of a console tool that wanted to do something odd with termcap. In this odd state the terminal no longer responds to the default control characters, like ctrl-H for erase. Usually running reset does the trick and restores the terminal configuration. Well in screen, I found, this does not always work. I googled a bit and found a pretty neat article titled Unix Tip: Using stty to Your Advantage, which shows how to save the current state of the terminal and restore it later.
apt-get pdiffs
Debian/unstable apt-get has this feature called pdiff files (or pdiffs). It downloads only the diffs between the previous day’s Packages and Sources indexes, which claims to improve downloads for regular use. When you don’t update often you will find that your updates could take 30 minutes, plus. You can disable use of pdiff files by running: apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs=false
256 colour xterms
Welcome to the 90’s! 256 colours are here! It’s pretty sad. I got really excited today when I read the Tip #1312: 256 colors in vim. I quickly installed the few colour schemes listed in the tip and was really impressed with the inkpot scheme… it’s pretty.
dynamic IPcomp
I just had a thought while reading over the KLIPS code and creating beautiful inkscape diagrams from it ([see previous post]{20060824145428})… Wouldn’t it be great if we had IPcomp that worked for all connections? Your cpu is always faster then the internet connection – or at least it has been my case for the last decade and a bit. So my idea was… why not have IPcomp on all the time. Assume the other host you want to talk to has IPcomp enabled for TCP and UDP. On the first packet we send, if they don’t understand it, they will hopefully send back an ICMP error and then we retransmit the packet uncompressed. For TCP that would be pretty trival, because TCP already retransmits. For UDP we would have to remember the IPs that we tried and have a way to hold the packets before the verdict is known.
inkscape++
I’ve never had to do any illustration work, so I never tried inkscape, even though it’s been around for quite some time. Today, I decided that I should make my flowchart in svg. It’s pretty easy to view and supposed to be supported by most browsers. Inkscape seemed the logical choice for doing svg images… even though I’ve never really used it, or any alternatives. My first impression was: wow someone actually thought about the users. Everything in inkscape is accessible via keyboard shortcuts… well, everything I tried to use so far.