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.
tags/cscope for system headers
I love tags files for in coding, and enjoy using the tag feature in [vim]{tag/vim} as well as the derived tag-based completion. I do a lot of my development in the kernel, so all I usually have to do is put /usr/src/linux into my vim tags configuration. Sometimes I have to do some user space hacking too, and I often forget all the names of glib and pthread library functions. Having a system wide tags file is very very useful. Below is a Makefile that I carry around with me and place in /usr/include to keep my system tags in sync.
opteron 170, part 4
I am getting [sick]{20060805101941} [of]{20060803233234} [this]{20060802210126}. It froze again. So to date I have disabled swapped out the motherboard (but still have the same NForce4 chipset), enabled all sorts of debug features in the kernek, removed the Nforce4 network card (based on a hint on a web forum), and put in a PCI NIC. It’s still unstable. I had noticed that it never froze under console, just under X. The next attempt is to disable DRM. I did this through the xorg.conf… let’s see what happens next. I am no longer optimistic.
opteron 170, part 3
Over the last [few]{20060802210126} [days]{20060803233234}, I have been experiencing odd crashes. I have been able to narrow it down to network activity. Most of the time this has been triggered with NFS access; I assume that it has something to do with large UDP fragments; my MTU is 1500. The last couple of days I have had a serial console connected to the machine, and my laptop standing by waiting for another crash. It occurred, but something really bad happened because on the console I only got: