Venerable tech discussion site Slashdot seems to have lost its way a bit in recent years, but occasionally it comes up with some useful stuff apart from tired memes ("In Soviet Russia Natalie Portman pours hot grits into your pants"), such as the following three threads which contain a mixed bag of readers' Unix, vi (vim) and Emacs tricks.

• (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?
• (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?
• (Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?

Of course, there are more than one or two tricks I'm personally familiar with, but also a whole boatload of stuff where you have to think "Why didn't I know this before (or think to find out if such a thing exists)?". Such as generic auto-completion in Emacs, "Meta-/".

 

One of the first tools I install on a fresh OS X installation is the excellent iTerm. However, "out of the box" the cursor keys (arrow keys) don't seem to work in many text-based applications such as vi/vim.

One solution (in 0.9.5) is as follows:

• Click on Bookmarks, then Manage Profiles
• Select Default from the Terminal Profiles section
• Change the Type option below Terminal Settings to linux (sic)

In all newly-opened iTerm sessions the cursor keys should then work as desired.

Deja-vu all over again...

74.86.249.98 - - [19/Dec/2007:10:17:22 +0100] "GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1" 200 10049 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Gigamega.bot/1.0; +http://www.gigamega.net/bot.html)"

When starting Alfresco after making changes to the .war file, it appears to start and it is possible to access the login page and log in, but all other actions result in a server error. The error logs then contain messages like this:

09:25:01,313 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/alfresco].[jsp]] Servlet.service() for servlet jsp threw exception java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

38.113.234.181 - - [27/Nov/2007:13:21:24 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 612 "-" "voyager-hc/1.0" 38.113.234.181 - - [27/Nov/2007:13:21:35 +0100] "GET /path/to/some/file.html HTTP/1.0" 301 363 "-" "voyager-hc/1.0"

38.113.234.181 resolves to crawl1.cosmixcorp.com, and cosmixcorp.com redirects to kosmix.com - a California, USA-based outfit which appears to be legit in a "we're a cool California start-up" kind of way. Not quite sure what they're doing (hey - it's Web 2.0), but it evidently involves crawling without an identifiable bot UA.

Our secret sauce (all Web 2.0 companies need one) is our categorization engine that crawls billions of Web pages in a unique manner to create algo-generated home pages…more on this later.

In the meantime kosmix.com has vanished from the internet - and good riddance.

The Problem

I don't like to anthropomorphisize technology, but sometimes I swear computers and the like know very well the most inconvenient times to fail. Such as on a Saturday evening, just as I arrive in Tokyo tired and exhausted after a trip halfway round the world. Going on line to check my mail before falling into a deep, jetlagged sleep, I discover the rental server I was running at the time was not responding. Not even to pings. It seemed to have vanished from the net completely.

The Problem

At a former company, whose directors were notorious for spending pounds to save pennies, there was a Server Room. It was basically a small room created by partitioning off one part of the developers' room. It had a door, a window, and was quite spacious - more than enough room for the three racks, PBX set up and miscellaneous collection of "Frankenstein" servers (converted desktops) which had been acquired over the years. There was air-conditioning, of course: supplied by a contraption made in Iran, of all places. (Apparently it was very cheap).

A string of entries from a bot calling itself LiteFinder/1.0: never heard of it, though the URL provided (http://www.litefinder.net/about.html) does work and claims it's a "a research project started by a group of Indian candidates from the cities of Bangalore, Patna and Jaipur.".

The Problem

In FreeBSD, when using vim in INSERT mode, using the arrow keys results in the characters A, B, C or D being inserted.

Alfresco is a Java-based enterprise content management system, and as such it should run on any reasonable platform which supports Java. So, my client wants it installed on a FreeBSD server - no problems, methinks. After all, the Alfresco specifications page lists "Unix" as a supported platform.

Useful options for dpkg and co, the package management system used by Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu:

• List all installed packages: dpkg -l
• List files contained in a particular package: dpkg -L package-name

The Problem

My remote mail program of choice (or more precisely: habit) is pine, mainly because I've been using it since 1994 or so and it works for me (at least for occasional use on the server). However, Ubuntu doesn't include Pine in any of the normal repositories (for licensing reasons, it appears). There is a .deb package available ( http://www.washington.edu/pine/getpine/linux.html), but only for 32-bit systems, and the server in question is 64 bit. I tried, but it didn't work. Obvious solution: install from source. Unexpected problem: pine has its own build system - there's a build script instead of the usual ./configure && make && make test && make install, which fails with a somewhat cryptic

+---------------------------------------------+
| Problems building c-client                  |
|                                             |
| Please check the output above for a         |
| possible explanation for this failure       |
+---------------------------------------------+

Of course, the output above (not shown here) is lacking a possible explanation.