…but the bartender had no idea what i was talking about.

(This, a thank you post, to whomever anonymously sent me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I kind of enjoyed being made fun of for not having read it, it was really good to finally do it.)

A person on screen-devel, who shall respectfully remain nameless since he didn’t post to the list proper, sent me this in response to my proposed patch:

I would never use this feature because I would rather that window #n
always remain window #n, but I can see the usefulness of the feature
if you used to have more than 10 windows and now have fewer than 10
but some windows still bear numbers greater than 9, so you can go
back to using Ctrl-A to switch to them quickly.

My recommendation is that you call it compacting, not renumbering.
“renumber” doesn’t make it clear enough HOW they get new numbers.

To which I replied:

Thanks for the mail. Your comments are fair enough and definitely anticipated. I often can peak way above 10 windows, begrudgingly, and often want to migrate down to as few as possible so that the next window allocated is the highest available number. And, I’m an active user of the hardstatus line, including labeling windows. I implemented this because I know several people who use screen like I do, though knowing many people do not.

I do like your suggestion that the patch feature be called “compacting.” I was in fact struggling with how do best describe the action, and that does, in a single word. I will create a new patch sometime in the next week reflecting this, even just for my purposes.

I’m curious, though, for my own usage: how do you remember which window is which? What is your typical screen workflow?

Thanks,
Eric

After running a single session of screen for a long time, I often find that I have several gaps in the numerical ordering of windows. Using :number is definitely feasible, but it takes a bit more effort than I’d care to contribute every time I want to make my windows contiguously numbered.

I’ve created a patch against CVS HEAD to fill in the holes of the window numbering. It simply moves windows to lower positions until there are no holes left. Any [constructive] comments are welcome.

The patch can be found here. It was also sent to the screen-devel mailing list.

From O’Reilly:

named is pronounced “name-dee” and stands for “name server daemon.” BIND is pronounced to rhyme with “kind.” Some creative people have noticed the similarities in the names and choose to mispronounce them “bin-dee” and “named” (like “tamed”).

right. so I got this today when trying to untar all of my academic work from an archive:

ericgar@babbage extusb$ tar -xjf columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2
You can use the `bzip2recover' program to attempt to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

ericgar@babbage extusb$ bzip2recover columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2
bzip2recover 1.0.4: extracts blocks from damaged .bz2 files.
bzip2recover: searching for block boundaries ...
bzip2recover: I/O error reading `columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2', possible reason follows.
bzip2recover: Input/output error
bzip2recover: warning: output file(s) may be incomplete.

I was thinking, “Well, data loss sucks.”

But it turns out the underlying filesystem was mounted read-write on a read-only mount point. D’oh. I feel like tar and bzip2recover could have told me that off the bat.

Those of you who know me know that I don’t use Gmail for a variety of reasons. But, I know you do. Here’s looking at you, kid.

When you go to http://gmail.com to login, your browser greets you with a happy “this webpage is secure” notification.

And you sign in. Your username and password is sent using an encryption technology called SSL/TLS so that people who see your information go by can’t actually read it.

*

Google then sends you, over the same encrypted connection, a delicious cookie to identify you so that you don’t have to sign in every time you request something from them.

This is all standard practice. But then Google does something sneaky. It redirects you to the non-encrypted version of Gmail.

All subsequent information you retrieve is sent over the internet unencrypted, available for any eavesdropper to see.

*

This is particularly important when you’re browsing over an untrusted network, like the wireless network at Starbucks, the connection you happen to use on a park bench, or even my wireless network when you come to my apartment (where I may or may not log packets).

Now, we all know that you don’t want your correspondence with the new half-orc you met at the Friday Dungeons and Dragons session to be known to the world.

Worse than anyone being able to see everything you send back and forth to Google, the eavesdropper could intercept the delicious cookie, install it in their browser, and impersonate you. They would have complete access to all of your information at Google.

There is a simple fix to avoid this potential embarrassment, however cute the half-orc may in fact be. Instead of going to http://gmail.com, use https://gmail.google.com which will encrypt everything you send and receive to and from Google.

Remember, your love life is counting on it.

* “Alice” is the name used for the unassuming victim of computer security. “Eve” is the typical name for the “eavesdropper.”

Picture of happy baby by cnbyates.
Picture of cookie baby by Jason Trom.
Picture of Eva Longoria by steature.
Picture of Orc Donny by cristajoy42
All are licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic.

Tagging has been a great way for slashdot readers to interact with the moderated stories. My two favorites:

Yes and No

I’m really glad those questions were answered for me.

I love being an engineer. My iPod shuffle was broken. The left audio channel became intermittent, but worked with a bit of constant pressure. What does any good engineer do? break it open, put some solder on the connection and seal it back up!

As good as new.

I love being an engineer.

“Open Letter To Hobbyists” by Bill Gates, 1976:

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

From Coding Horror, today:

I accept that software registration keys are a necessary evil for commercial software, and I resign myself to manually keeping track of them, and keying them in… Furthermore, registration keys are often the user’s first experience with our software– and first impressions matter.

Welcome to the age that thinks software is not the end, but just a means to an end; an end that is something useful to humans: communication, collaboration, creation, perhaps; something more than making someone else pay for something we made for the sole purpose of accomplishing our own goal that costs us zero dollars to give to other people.

Welcome to the age that has advanced itself.

This is disruptive technology. Deal with it.

(P.S. I’m around more often now and starting to contact people.)

Mostly because of things like this:

Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol.

From the paper:

The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and
would have taken a long time to carry out. We will advance a hypothesis
as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with
very similar features.