Natural Order Development

The last terminal to exit wins the "who's history is saved" game. Unless you pull a cute Linux stunt or three.

Shell history is of major use as a memory jogger, short cut finder, and how did I do that answerer. However, the bash linux shell has one annoying feature and that is as each shell exits it overwrites the .bash_history file with its history buffer contents. Meaning only one shell's session command history is saved.

After a couple days of open VMware, click box, click start, click next box, click start, click next box, click start, ...., ahhhhh!!! Today I got fed up with my "get to code" process.

Table of Contents

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From Red Hat to Ubuntu

* Rosetta [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromLinux/RedHatEnterpriseLinuxAndFedora switching to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Centos]

Disable Blank Console Screens

I grew up using vi. Never got into emacs. Then along came vim. I ignored it of course. Then suddenly vi was gone and vim was quietly mapped to vi. Oh well, had to learn sometime.

.vimrc

au FileType * set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set noexpandtab
au FileType python set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set softtabstop=4|set expandtab
au FileType make setlocal noexpandtab|set softtabstop=4

" Make backspace a tad more friendly
set backspace=indent,eol,start

Working often requires opening terminal sessions or VPN connections. It can be very annoying when these connections fail after being left idle for a few minutes, or with VPNs in the middle of a work day in spite of traffic. In regard to SSH connections many people (even many experts) incorrectly assume that the SSH server (sshd) has some restrictive session auto-timeout setting. If you look carefully at the manual for sshd configuration (man sshd_config) you will see that there is not even a setting to enable a session timeout behavior.

At my office we have this thing called the "Dude Protocol." When I first started working here I thought it was a neat idea to make people a little more security conscience. The procedure is that if any workstation, laptop, or terminal is left logged in but without someone sitting there using it everyone is allowed (in fact directly ordered) to pull up the email client and send an email message to the "Fun" email list with the subject of "Dude" and then to LOCK the terminal.

Many times a day I sit and wonder about why something is (or is not). (Sounds pretty Zen I know, however, it is still true.) Technology is evolving so fast as to seem out of control. Yet, there are still fundamental elements we should be following. One of these is usability.

Is it from a game? Screen shot of an Inception concept story board or not?

Faux reality gallery of deceivingly realistic structures that are maze-like when observed too closely. Surprisingly, not a game nor CGI from Inception! Jean Francois Rauzier’s Hyperphotos are photographic reconstructions of real places often created from between 600-3,400 individual photos. A bit like Hockney, Jean photographs a single place for one to two hours. He uses a telephoto lens to collect close-up shots of his scene.

I love the presentation style for this video on Microsoft's coming technology:

What is Windows Azure?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poDRw_Xi3Aw

== Rollback A Change ==
While working on an issue, I found the following stored in the subversion repository:

$ ls
environmentPrep.sh
environmentPrep.sh.bk.08042010-0024

In subversion (or any version control system really), it is not necessary to make a backup file when committing changes, as the change can be rolled back easily. To roll back in subversion, simply execute a reverse merge:

svn merge -c -1234 environmentPrep.sh

1234 is replaced with the commit number that you would like to reverse.

Big company, large IT department, huge wiki server used by all. Do they have a recent backup? If you count 6 months old as recent then sure. Of course for a project started since the last back up that put 100% of the documentation into the corporate wiki when the server breaks and they have to go back to the back-ups this sucks.

Now of course being a tech-head I have ultra paranoid cleanup settings on my cache, browse history and other things. But, managers and office types often don't care nearly as much.

Every 6 months or so I have some little loop I wrote to run a process on a long list of servers sit and hang forever by waiting for the nohup background process to end before moving on to the next host. Naturally I come back after getting lunch expecting all the boxes to be busily humming away to find 3 have finished and the 4th is still running. This of course causes me to remember that ssh hangs on processes even if they are pushed off to the background with a nohup.

This is just a random list of keyboard shortcuts for use with any version of the Microsoft Windows Operating System. Each keyboard shortcut is designed to increase user productivity by eliminating the need to reach for the mouse. This is done by executing a combination of keys on the keyboard instead of clicking to perform the same function.

GUI task changing: ALT + TAB will bring up a Window with a list of icons representing programs which are currently running on your computer. While holding the ALT key, press and depress the TAB button to cycle between each icon task.

Secure string implementation is very hard. A secure string is a means to keep and use confidential data. Essentially the text cannot be stored as plain text and definitely cannot be stored in a Java String object since that is immutable and there is no definable point when it will be removed from the system.

Secure String Implementations should:

• text is encrypted for privacy when being used
• deleted from computer memory when no longer needed
• not be allowed to be paged to swap memory
• cannot be seen via memory inspection

I work on a beefy Linux box with multiple desktops & monitors. I also have a windows laptop to do office junk and some testing. If my computers are side by side things are pretty sweet and I use Synergyc / Synergy2 (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) to make all my monitors flow together.

But, I also have another beefy Linux development box in a shared team space where again I have multiple desktops & monitors. No problem I just use rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/)to make one of the monitors turn into my windows screen. All is fine in the world.