Hacklets

Nano tech notes to myself

[hacklets]

Remote editing in Vim

A useful Vim plugin (now part of the Vim base distribution in Vim 7+) that supports remote editing files over multiple protocols: netrw.

Since the plugin seems to create local copies of the remote files for editing, this enables transparent resumption of editing at different locations (work, home) as long as the remote system is reachable using the specified protocol.

[hacklets]

The ChrootDirectory feature in OpenSSH (4.9 and up) provides an easy way to set up a restricted SFTP service without needing to go through the more complicated work of chroot(2) configuration and maintenance:

Unfortunately, setting up a chroot(2) environment is complicated, fragile and annoying to maintain. The most frequent reason our users have given when asking for chroot support in sshd is so they can set up file servers that limit semi-trusted users to be able to access certain files only. Because of this, we have made this particular case very easy to configure.

In a previous commit, markus@ implemented an "in-process" sftp server in sshd, basically linking sftp-server(8) into sshd(8). When the in-process sftp server is used, sshd does not need any special chroot configuration (no /dev nodes, no libraries, no statically-linked sftp-server) so the chroot setup and maintenance burden is eliminated.

Follow the link for more information.

[hacklets]

Surviving on Windows

Life on Windows used to be so miserable, and still can be at times.  I remember getting excited about cygwin for a while, and then hating it as a step in the wrong direction.  Thankfully, many tools are now available as native Windows applications, so how far can one get with them?

As an experiment, I tried doing development work on Windows, as I would on UNIX.  To my surprise, I quickly found out that I could do more than get by, and have now been living entirely on Windows for months.  I don't think Microsoft made this possible, it really is the availability of these tools that allowed this:

Python & IPython

GNU Emacs

TortoiseSVN & Subversion

PostgreSQL & pgAdmin

grepWin

PuTTY

What do I miss most?  zsh

What do I develop?  A mix of things:

Tools that I use on Windows and/or UNIX

a Google App Engine site

Has the OS finally become irrelevant?

[hacklets]

Some of us, the paranoid types, like to use different email addresses (aliases) for different uses/services, and [Thunderbird](http://mozilla.org/thunderbird) has built-in sorcery called _Virtual Identities_ for such aliases. If you use plain old Apple Mail, you might already know that **adding a list of addresses separated by commas** in you mail configuration will give you some of this capability. But what about the iPhone? Turns out the comma trick works on the iPhone mail configuration as well... except there is no "," key available in the address configuration field. As the link in this post demonstrates, that's a problem easily overcome with a little cut and paste.

[hacklets]

If you are the Redhat type and remember with great fondness `chkconfig` and `service` after your move to the sexier Ubuntu, there is a rough equivalent called `update-rc.d`. See link (or your man page) for more info.

[hacklets]

Annoying 'ls' colours

In *nix (including GNU/Linux), if you find the subtle racism ;-) of `ls` with colours offensive (it assumes that you are using a white background), or you just plain don't want colours, you can usually `unalias ls` to get rid of this. Typically `ls` is aliased to `ls --colors`, which in turn uses the LS_COLORS environment variable, which is configured via `dircolors(1)`. Head spinning yet? The default dircolors file is `/etc/DIR_COLORS`. If you want to over-ride this, you can create your own `~/.dir_colors` file. The syntax for this file is beyond the scope of this hacklet.

[hacklets]

False colours in CPAN

Turned on colours (colors) in CPAN and regret it? Run 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' and use 'o conf init /color/' to redo it.

[hacklets]

Tumblweed for Tumblr

Tumblweed is an AIR based (and therefore multi-platform) feature rich client for Tumblr.