Fri, 25 Mar 2005
Externally Edit Your Command Line
Most people know you can change the readline settings to either vi or
emacs style key-bindings, but far less people know you can actually open the
current, or a previous, command line in your editor of choice using
'fc'.
If you type 'fc' on the command line then the previous command will be open in the defined editor; if you want to select a further back command you can use 'fc pattern'. When editing is complete the edited commands are echoed and executed.
The actual editor to be opened can be defined in a number of ways, you can pass the '-e' option to 'fc' to set the editor; but you don't want to do this. If no '-e' is given, the value of the FCEDIT variable is used, and the value of EDITOR if FCEDIT is not set. If neither variable is set, vi is used (which is fine by me :)).
This isn't functionality you'll use on a daily basis, occasionally however it makes some very awkward command line tweaks a lot easier. For full details see "man bash", the "SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS" section.
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Posted: 2005/03/25 11:03 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mind Hacks at Foyles
Mind Hacks is an
O'Reilly book that examines specific operations of the brain and presents
simple experiments (do try this at home :)) to illustrate how it works and
how, occasionally, you can fool it.
O'Reilly and Foyles held a join event in the Foyles gallery in London where they had both of the books main authors do a short introduction to the topic and explain what the book was about. While it started off a little nervous and seemly unprepared they soon hit their pace and had the audience roped in and laughing in all the right places; although the word leopard was seriously over-used.
The talk itself was quite interesting (one of their examples was covered in Malcolm Gladwells Blink which was only recently released.) and the gallery itself was packed, barely any standing room was left and people were in among the stacks watching from the back. All-in-all it was a good night. All I need to do now is buy the book.
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Posted: 2005/03/25 10:49 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
GLLUG March 2005 -- The Slides
There were three talks at the March GLLUG and I can now happily link to
slides from two of them. Bruce Richardson's Linux HA and Martin Michlmayr's Quality
Issues in Free Software projects.
Hopefully these will soon be linked to on the GLLUG website. The first talk of the day, by Pete Ryland, involved a live demo and no slides so there isn't really anything to link to on that one; until we get the audio recordings sorted anyway.
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Posted: 2005/03/25 10:40 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
F-Secure Blacklight Windows Rootkit Detector Beta
F-Secure has released a blacklight
beta download that is available in both GUI and command-line versions.
The full Blacklight
details are now online and after a quick play it seems pretty nifty,
and most importantly, has a command-line version for automated deployment
and scanning. One to watch when it goes gold.
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Posted: 2005/03/25 10:31 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
jMemorize Flash Cards; Not Human Readable
Update: I was completely wrong about the cards being binary. Please see
my jMemorize
retraction for details.
I saw a piece on jMemorize over at unixreview and decided to have a little play. Quick download, runs from the Jar, OK GUI. Not bad on a cursory glance.
I then built a small set of cards as a sample and had a play. Finishing off I saved the card stack and decided to have a look at the file it created, I'd like to generate my flash-cards from existing docs I have so an easy to write format would be excellent. Except jMemorize saves its documents as a binary format! I'm assuming that it's just serialising the stack object out, which means I have no chance of ever exporting any effort I put in or mass generating decks.
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Posted: 2005/03/25 10:25 | /tools/gui | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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