blog.foosion.org

Colored Manpages

Posted by micele - 05/06/08 at 10:06:16 pm

Manpages are a very appropriate instrument for documentation on linux und unix based systems. Unfortunately manpages have been invented in times of monochrome displays. Todays colored displays offer much more clearness and readability. Unfortunately manpages don’t - at least not by default…
I really tried hard to give my linux manpages more readability and finally - it worked. There are a lot of different (and also difficult) approaches. In my eyes the most easiest way is to simply add some less capabilities (less is used as the default man page browser) to enforce coloring. This can be done by using your favorite shell .rc for setting those capabilities. In my case i just added

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

to my .zshrc. The result is quite satisfying and looks like this:

I really fell in love with man pages again. Ok, I confess: I sometimes really care about appearance

Update: While gentoo has some problems with the mentioned method it even works fine for mac.

OpenSSH Escape Characters

Posted by bene - 10/05/08 at 11:05:24 am

Yesterday I discovered a terrific feature of OpenSSH while reading ssh(1): Escape Characters.
It’s a wonder that I didn’t accidentally noticed from it before, but that’s just a proof of how well it actually works.

Here’s how you go:

Just type ~? and make sure that the last you typed in was nothing or a newline. SSH will then show you the list of currently supported escape sequences:

~. - terminate connection
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~C - open a command line
~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice

For me are ~C and ~# the most important commands.
One can open or close port forwardings in the command mode – which I could have used so many times

And because escapes are only recognized immediately after newline, you can still cd into your homedir using cd ~

Pimp my ext3

Posted by micele - 03/04/08 at 03:04:09 pm

Auf heise open findet man seit zwei Wochen einen Artikel über Ext3, dem Standard Dateisystem unter Linux.
Auf insgesamt 10 Seiten setzt sich Autor Dr. Oliver Diedrich ausführlich mit den Interna des Dateisystem auseinander und erläutert an welchen Stellen Potential zum Tunen gegeben ist.
Ein lesenswerter Artikel.

TrueCrypt 5.1

Posted by micele - 11/03/08 at 11:03:15 am

.. is out now! Just 27 days after the 5.0a Release.

Thank god, they brought back the command line interface for Linux and Mac OS X. With the 5.0 release the GUI (so far only known by Windows user) was established on all platforms. This was quite a good improvement but in return the removed the possibility to create and manage volumes on the command line…
It seems they realized this mistake and fixed it
In addition TrueCrypt now supports hibernation on Windows platforms with encrypted system partitions and the bootloader is now compressed so that it takes only 27 KB. This is an advantage especially for systems where the BIOS needs a lot of memory.

For the hole list of improvements and bug-fixes view the changelog.

Get it!

Mr. Macintosh, say hello to Mr. Beolingus

Posted by Nils - 11/03/08 at 08:03:22 am

Many many thanks to Wolfgang Reszel!

He’s the one who packaged the whole Beolingus-Database in one Dictionary for Mac OS. Now one can spotlight search trough the thesaurus, wikipedia and beolingus at the same time, to find the word or phrase you’re looking for.

And: trough this ~100 mb download, you get whole thing on your mac and can search offline, whenever you like!

And and: these’s also a package for Daniel Naber’s openthesaurus.de - an open german thesaurus.

UPDATE: Pretty funny - mainly the same article popped up exactly at the same time at apfelquak.de

ViDock gfx is …

Posted by Nils - 09/03/08 at 07:03:58 pm

… a dockable Graphiccard extension for your Expresscard enabled Notebook.

For everyone out there with a Powerbook or a MacBook Pro: your chances for over 5 megapixels just got a whole lot better!

ViDock gfx

Meet the GIMP

Posted by bene - 09/03/08 at 02:03:53 pm

Rolf Steinort published a very nice series of video podcasts about GIMP – 35 episodes so far!

If you ever wanted to edit pictures on Linux but got stuck at the unusual user interface, you should definitely watch the tutorials.

Episode 001: Preparing an image for the web

Keywurl

Posted by Nils - 06/03/08 at 12:03:42 pm

I’ve always been a fan of Safari, because of the speed and more im important the uncluttered, clean interface. The only thing i always missed, was the ability to punch a search string directly into the addressbar.

Well the waiting is over - thanks to keywurl.

Easily configurable in safari’s prefenrences, it’ll soon become your closest friend when it comes to fast, excessive searching in multiple services.

And yes, I’m aware of the fact that this feature is de-facto standard in all the other browsers - but this one doenst look like §$%&

- Nils

Webkit Nightshift

Posted by Nils - 25/02/08 at 09:02:30 am

Apple’s Webkit a.k.a. KHTML render engine is open-source since 2005 and is packed in a nightly build every day, giving you the ability to see and test the cutting edge developments done in the past days.

Pretty cool is the new HTML and Javascript Inspector “Drosera” which lets you do similar things as, for instance “Firebug”, just with os x glamour and shinyness

anyhow, as heading over to webkit.org every day, downloading the newest nightly and unpacking that thing into your Applications-Folder would be annoying, you can write a nice script or use this one, called Nightshift, which also gives you some nice features, like reverting to an earlier nightly build, if for some reason the recent one is cr*p

- Nils

FOSDEM ‘08 live streaming

Posted by bene - 21/02/08 at 07:02:48 pm

[…] for those who don’t know it yet: we are streaming the main track of FOSDEM ‘08 this weekend live from Brussels. Participation is completely free and all talks are in English. […]

get the schedule and more information