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New job, new desk, therefore new hardware. When my day job took place at FormScape my desk was somewhat cluttered; a case of more is more.

Since then I’ve moved on and my working hours are now occupied by a division of Yahoo! and we’re definitely in the less is more category where desks are concerned..

I’d never found any issues with speed or overall responsiveness when using my trusty G4 iBook but compared to the MacBook Pro my iBook definately feels sluggish. With 1 GB of SDRAM and a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo this machine is as fast and responsive as it’s visually gorgeous. So far I’ve had none of the fan or heat issues that other MacBook Pro owners have been afflicted with. According to Coconut Identity Card, the machine is a very recent build so let’s hope that the MacBook Pro’s teething issues are as an end.

Various quotes, mostly UNIX related, which I’ve accrued over the years from various sources.

Well my terminal’s locked up and I ain’t got any Mail
And I can’t recall the last time that my program didn’t fail
I’ve got stacks in my structs, I’ve got arrays in my queues
I’ve got those: Segmentation violation — Core dumped blues.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

– Grace Murray Hopper

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the corner of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong”.

– Anonymous

The problem with sendmail is that the sendmail configuration file is a rule based expert system, but the world of email is not logical and sendmail configuration editors are not experts.

– David Waitzman, BBN

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While I was playing with AppleScript earlier this week I wanted to run a shell script I’d written from within Finder rather than from a shell prompt in Terminal.app.

On Windows I tend to write scripts to run under Cygwin and then write a wrapper batch file to run the script under the control of Cygwin’s bash executable.

Turns out the AppleScript solution is identical in principal and is as simple as

do shell script "/full/path/to/shell/script"

You may need to adjust the path to the script dependent upon whether the directory where your script resides is in your $PATH or not.

Emacs is almost infinately customisable; a fact I didn’t really get to grips with this fact untill I found myself on a Fedora Core box a while back with a net connection but without my favourite set of keyboard short cuts. This really brought home how just a few simple customisations can come to be relied upon.

Determined never to be caught short in such a manner again I decided to make my .emacs permanently available, providing I have a net connection that is.

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RTFM. Really.

Although this is free advertising, before you use SSH for anything other than a drop in replacement for telnet buy a copy of O’Reilly’s SSH: The Definitive Guide, and then read it. It’s a rare O’Reilly book which doesn’t make you realise just how little you actually know about a subject and this one is no exception. To be honest, it was only after reading this book that I realised just why I shouldn’t use SSH as a drop in replacement for telnet, which in turn proved how little I knew about SSH. Which kind of proves my point I guess.

Neat Hacks

To populate a remote accounts’s authorized_keys with a public key from your local machine, in a single command try:

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh \
user@remote.host 'cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

One gotcha is that you do need to have password authentication enabled (PasswordAuthentication yes) in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config for this to work.

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