Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I’ve been using GNU screen for a long time. Probably something like 15 years. But I’ve pretty much always used it in a fairly naive way, no custom configuration, and when working remotely I’ll typically log in to the “gateway” machine, run screen there, and wind up with 20-30 sessions sitting in it and eventually go nuts trying to figure out what exactly any given session actually is.

Which has motivated me to learn a bit more about what’s going on, and, admittedly, to cargo-cult a bit too.

So here’s my .screenrc as it stands now:

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= BW}[%H] %{= BW}%-Lw%{= RW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= BW}%+Lw%< %{= BW}% -=%c%{-}'
defscrollback 1000
vbell off
term xterm

The nifty bit is that “hardstatus string” line. What it does is give me a line at the bottom of the terminal which looks a bit like this:

[prod01au] 0* bash 1 sqsh 2 log 15:39

Except generally with a lot more “screens”.

In addition to this I have a few aliases of the form:

alias sqsh=screen -t sqsh sqsh -Usa -S`hostname`

to make it easy to fire off what I need with the right labels. Of course that ’sqsh’ example is grossly simplified, and for sqsh itself I actually use a wrapper script because the database names are not always the same as the hostnames, but anyway…

So now I make a point of running screen directly on each system I touch, which means that:

• I can see at the bottom-left exactly which host it is, whatever crappy prompt settings might be in place;
• I can see which “screens” are running what;
• I’ve always got a couple of useful things there, ready for next time, like a “tail -f” of the Sybase error log;
• I’m much more efficient.

All this is usually running in a tabbed terminal emulator (Apple’s Terminal.app at the moment, but in theory any will do), one tab per host. And it’s dead easy to pick these sessions up from anywhere, of course, which was the reason I was using screen in the first place.

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A few small comments with respect to the 2008-09 (Australian) Federal budget:

• Means-testing the baby bonus feels a bit petty. I’ve never really been that keen on the baby bonus anyway, but perhaps it should’ve been left alone until the question of paid maternity leave is addressed?
• Laptops-for-the-kiddies is a nice idea but as has been pointed out in a number of places there are some infrastructure issues that are going to impede this. Laptops don’t keep running for eight hours without a charge and many state schools simply don’t have the electrical infrastructure to support them. Funding for that would’ve been a Good Idea…
• Means-testing the solar panel rebate seems completely stupid. People who will now be eligible for the rebate are exactly the ones who don’t have $20-30k to spare for solar panels!
• Half a billion for “clean coal” research? Yeesh.
• Salary-sacrifice of laptops has been clobbered. Probably the right thing to have done but from a personal perspective I wish they’d waited until next year. Oh well.
• The “alco-pop” tax increase. Not going to reduce binge drinking, which is (a) a niche problem; and (b) a cultural issue anyway. But there was an inconsistency with the alcohol taxes so it’s not unreasonable. Perhaps they should do the same with all drinks containing alcohol, just to even things out?
• If half a million people are expected to bail from private health insurance because they’re no longer penalised for failing to have it, then that says to me that the real problem with private health insurance is that the product simply isn’t very compelling. Instead of whinging, industry should be trying to figure out how attract customers. That may well require negotiation with Government as it’s a heavily-regulated area. One obvious option would be to offer a low-cost high-excess package, a sort of “catastrophic cover” arrangement. I’m sure there are other things they could do.

Nelson continues to look like a fool in his response. It’s too soon, really, to expect the Liberals to have regained their balance after losing last year, but they’re going to have to start shaping up soon and it doesn’t look like Dr Nelson is the man to do it.

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The question of “which Mac?” has been resolved. In the first instance we’re going to pick up a cheap Macbook, because the old Dell laptop is kinda crappy. My partner can use it for classes, we can use it when traveling, and should my employment circumstances change such that I’d be needing to work both out of the office and occasionally away from home, well, it’d suffice.

Later on I’ll take another look at a Mac Pro, though, as a kick-arse desktop+server-replacement combo.

Fixed the Toppy, which has been giving us trouble pretty much since the ABC renamed to ABC1/ABC2. Nice to finally have that sorted, really just required sitting down and stuffing about with it for a bit. The next step is to chuck on an autoexpiry addon that’ll do things like “delete 7:30 Report older than 48 hours”.

I’ve gotten fairly bored with Warcrack. Don’t have time for the end-game content, so it’s all just more of the same. We’ve renewed our City of Heroes subscriptions to play around with that for a bit, shall have to see how it goes. We’ve spent some time playing today (both sides) and have been enjoying it.

Am considering the merits of cancelling my WoW account until the next expansion comes out. Will give it a few weeks and see how I feel about it.

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When I log a case and explicitly write in the notes “I am not in the office today, please contact me by email” what exactly leaves you in any doubt that phoning me at the office is useless?.

As a general principle I want you to send me email rather than call me anyway. If you call me, you have to try to comprehend my accent, I have to try to comprehend yours, and chances are we both end up feeling frustrated. Sending me an email, as I asked you to, saves us both a lot of time and irritation.

Dude, I am the damned customer! We pay your company way too much money to be spending months chasing you around to let us generate a damned license key.

Sybase ASE: an expensive but primitive toy, legacy software at best. And lest you think it’s worth paying for it to get decent support, forget that too. If you really want to give someone money for your database, give it to Sun/MySQL or Oracle. Their software support probably isn’t much better, but at least the software has seen significant improvement in the past decade.

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Tags: Rant, Sybase // 2 Comments »

Think I’ll probably be buying myself a new Mac in the next few months. The question, of course, is “which one?”. It was fairly simple — Macbook Pro because it’s not as insanely expensive as the Mac Pro but it has a real GPU — but the recent iMac refresh made that more complicated by giving the iMac a real GPU option at the top end.

A bit of poking at the Apple Store, though, shows that one can spec a Mac Pro for similar money to the top-end iMac. That’d be a quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, and an 8800GT for graphics compared to a dual-core 3.0GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, and an 8800GS. The iMac provides the big shiny screen, the Mac Pro provides double the CPU cores and plenty of room for more disks.

Right now the Mac Pro is appealing a lot. Four cores and a few hundred extra dollars on RAM would let me run an XP VM in the background that would be pretty much unnoticable. It’d also be able to take over “house server” type duties, effectively condensing three machines into one. There’s a 300GB SATA disk in my current game machine which could go in a Mac Pro for Time Machine purposes, and there’s a 300GB ATAPI disk in the server that could go into the gametoy, which could then be donated to a not-for-profit.

As much as a laptop appeals in other ways, my vision is such that I’d rarely use it as one, and it’s not really suitable to take over the “house server” type tasks. And my eye doesn’t really agree so much with the current iMac displays either so if I bought one of those it’d probably wind up hooked to the current display anyway.

Ah well. This time last year I was sure I was about to buy an MBP…

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The latest addiction here is AudioSurf. Great fun, but I am a little cautious about making an unqualified recommendation because it seems to be a bit buggy.

The general drift, if you haven’t already heard of it, is that it creates a track from a music file, and then you drive along it doing a colour-match puzzle. Tracks and tiles (”cars”) are calculated from the music. So if you put on something like Joni Mitchell’s River you’re in for a smooth ride, but the Beasts of Bourbon’s Ten Wheels for Jesus is rather trickier.

Bugwise, we’ve so far come across one where minimizing crashes the game, and rather more frequently anything that needs QuickTime to decode doesn’t work from a network share.

Yesterday’s little experiment involved renting I Am Legend from iTunes. This works fine with store credit but you do have to tie the AppleTV to your US account — merely being authorised to play via your iTunes installation doesn’t suffice.

The movie itself was surprisingly good. I am always dubious about remakes, but this was (a) quite different to The Omega Man — Neville is believable as a scientist, for a start — and (b) better than it too unless you’re after a 70’s Charlton Heston strutfest.

Will use the rental service again. The experience was pretty straightforward. If more content were captioned — and captions on AppleTV weren’t tiny — we’d probably buy/rent a lot, but as-is it’ll do for cases where my partner is out of town and I want something to watch.

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Tags: Games, appletv // 2 Comments »

Been probably two weeks or so since I switched to using the old G5 iMac as a primary home machine, and my only complaint is that it’s a bit on the pokey side. Opera and Firefox each sometimes go bonkers and try to eat the CPU, and Opera in particular is prone to stuttering. Now that I’m using Airfoil to transmit iTunes (and in theory other things) to the Windows box that has the real speakers attached things are pretty nice. Except for the bit where Airfoil itself chews ~15% of the CPU.

Which brings us back to “pokey”.

The new top-end iMac is looking pretty tempting. I’m still dubious about the merits of a 24″ display, and I didn’t really like the aluminium iMac they got me at work last year, but then again this is a dimmer environment with rather less natural light so the reflection issues may be moot. When the time comes — whenever that may be — I think I’ll have to go and look at one in a store and see how the display goes with my eyesight.

For anyone who has been living under a rock, the big deal with the new iMac refresh is that the top-end model (selling for about AU$3000) has a real GPU. A 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800GS. Much much better than the fairly dreadful low-end ATi parts they’ve been using previously.

They also top out at a 3.0GHz Core2 Duo CPU, and you can now specifiy a 1TB SATA disk. With the biggest disk and 4GB of RAM that’s almost AU$3700…

Which is an awful lot of money.

Australian tax law being what it is, it’s still cheaper to buy a Macbook Pro. Those don’t have anywhere near as spiffy a GPU — though they do have a “real” one — nor as fast a CPU, but they’re rather more portable. And start, effectively, at under AU$2k thanks to the ATO.

Perhaps waiting to see if the next Big Apple Event includes Yet Another MBP Refresh, as I am beginning to see some merit to a portable machine.

In other “news”, I finally got around to hitting our AppleTV with a patchstick today. After installing Perian and copying some font files over, it now plays DivX/XviD natively, with extra bonus big-arse subtitles. Which is exactly what we want.

The motivator was fairly simple: sometimes converting DivX/XviD->H.264 results in loss of A/V sync. Which is rather irritating and seems to happen regardless of the tools I use. Not having to do the conversion at all is a nice bonus but not really the point.

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Tags: Mac, appletv // 2 Comments »

Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.

Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.

We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.

Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.

The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.

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Tags: Mac, Music, Random // 3 Comments »

Transmission is very nifty. And I thought uTorrent on Windows was good!

Also, good e-commerce experience of the day: Book-a-Bin. Nice simple straightforward “specify what sort of bin you want, when, and where” system, handles the payment, the bin simply arrives when you asked for it and goes away as booked. Have used it before, and have booked another bin to cart more of our accumulated rubbish this weekend.

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Gave up on Synergy2, leaving aside the issues with daemonizing, having the server running on OS X was resulting in wacky Warcrack mouse behaviour. Have dug out an old Belkin USB KVM. It too has its issues — in particular it takes a few seconds for Windows to notice devices when I switch to that machine, and in the past it used to do annoying things like automatically flip inputs if the monitor was put to sleep. Which is a bit of an issue when you’re dealing with system reboots/etc.

Otherwise, so far so good. Except for iTunes+AppleTV. Streaming is fine, syncing video is fine, but trying to sync the 10k+ music files causes the system to eat itself after about 500-600 tracks. Suspect it may simply be that 1GB of RAM and a G5 is not exactly what you’d call “current” and iTunes is gnawing its eyes out trying to cope, but it’s tricky to track down when the system runs so slowly that you pretty much have to reset to get control back…

I had hoped to move the video encoding work over to the Mac. It’s a slower machine, but OS X is pretty good about running this sort of thing in the background with limited impact on interactive stuff. But the mplayer/mencoder bug which screws up subtitle support appears to be extant only on OS X and in every build I can find that’ll support H.264 as a target codec. Having tried a few randomly-selected SVN trees I’ve been unable to make it build at all, each time for different exciting reasons. Same deal with the ffmpeg kit. So for now that task is back on Windows too.

Will see how this goes. My experience has been that most computing environments irritate me within a few weeks at best, and while I’m quite happy with Leopard at the office this dual-system scheme is probably going to get on my nerves after a while. Longer term I may simply wind up buying a more modern Mac and putting everything on that, worst case with the video stuff would be a GUI-less Linux VM, and everything else I care about (WoW, Spore, Puzzle Quest) seems to have a Mac port. But that’s probably end-of-the-year stuff, so We Shall See.

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