Archives
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Using X forwarding with screen by proxying $DISPLAY
If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t have to explain why I love GNU screen. I can keep a long-running session going on a server somewhere, and log in and resume my session without losing any state. I also love X-forwarding. I love being able to log into a remote server and work in [...]
May 30th, 2010 | Filed under linux -
Getting carried away with hack value
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of BarnOwl into perl code, instead of C (BarnOwl is written in an unholy mix of C and perl code that call each other back and forth obsessively). Moving code into perl has many advantages, but one problem is speed [...]
May 23rd, 2010 | Filed under Software Engineering -
The Window Manager I Want
Since I first discovered ratpoison in 2005 or so, I’ve basically exclusively used tiling window managers, going through, over the years, StumpWM, Ion 3, and finally XMonad. They’ve all had various strengths and weaknesses, but I’ve never been totally happy with any of them. This blog entry is a writeup of what I want to [...]
May 9th, 2010 | Filed under linux -
Software Engineers should keep lab notebooks
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren’t, in general, taught to take notes as they [...]
May 2nd, 2010 | Filed under Software Engineering