Ever smacked yourself on the head because you didn’t launch that long-running command inside a screen?
Well, reptyr saves the day. It’s a nifty little tool that reallocates the PTY to any of your running processes.
Have a look at the github page: https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr
Got a long-running process? Simply run
reptyr
and reptyr will change the PTY of the process, suddenly taking input for it from the screen terminal and writing output to the screen terminal.
Awesome!
Thanks Bram
It’s about time I penned about FOSDEM ‘09. It’s been some years since I last attended FOSDEM, but I’m glad we made it, even though we could only go for one day.
Bdale Garbee’s keynote was entertaining, but I actually wanted to see the Augeas talk as I want to start using Augeas in my Puppet setup. Raphaël Pinson did a good job in his introductory talk.
I also wanted to attend Remko and stpeter’s talk on XMPP as well as Dave Cridland’s XMPP talk.
Remko in full action
All in all, FOSDEM hasn’t changed much: it’s an interesting conference, but most of all it’s a way to meet up again with the people you don’t always get to see in real life anymore…
I’m finally going to FOSDEM again. A couple of reasons:
So I hope to see you all at FOSDEM!
Today, I took the drastic step of dropping all mails marked as spam. I finally valued the time I loose when sifting through my spam folder looking for false positives before emptying the folder over the risk of false positives.
From now on, people should learn to write emails that don’t look like spam!
Aaaahhhh….
Kris pointed me to a nice video showing another nice possibility of the AMS sensor that is in all recent Apple notebooks.
Sometimes, it amazes me how a simple idea can turn out to be so cool: just detect a tap on your screen to switch screens. This idea was Erling Ellingsen’s idea.
I just installed it this afternoon and it’s really cool, though it will need some finetuning so it always switches in the right direction…
I have some doubts whether I will continue using it, because I like Exposé more than DesktopManager…
Anyway, one feature request would be to filter out annoying colleagues’ banging on the table…
Yesterday I gave a small workshop on how to use a Linux machine as a digital multimedia center. As the intended audience was not the Linux-savvy geeks, I chose to use KnoppMyth and built myself a machine with MythTV 0.19-fixes on some very nice hardware, thanks to Kris: a total of 300 GB harddisk space and a Hauppauge PVR-500.
Anyway, if you want to read more about it, I’ve put my presentation online. You can download it here.
I wish I could say this conference was perfect. It’s nearly perfect: good talks, good food, good accomodation, very nice surroundings (stay tuned to see the pictures 
), but the worst IP access I’ve ever seen on a Unix conference. 
Having said that and having hooked up to a working uplink port this time, I found a very small amount of time to update you on our stay here in Durham.
But let’s start with day 0. Which started way too early and with a swollen throat…
Kris and I took off at Brussels Airport at around 9:30 am on Tuesday to land 90 minutes later at Newcastle International Airport. We spent some time cruising through Newcastle. Which is a nice city, provided you like shopping. I honestly think this city counts more cash registers than inhabitants and more malls than bus stops.
Next, we took the train for a 10 minutes ride to Durham. Durham is a very nice medieval town in northern England. As for now, you’ll have to take my word for that, at least until I’ve found the time to upload some pictures. Chances are that won’t be the case until I’m back in Belgium, though.
For the conference itself then. As Kris and I only arrived in Durham late tuesday afternoon, we didn’t enroll for the samba tutorial. Given the fact that the audience is very diverse, most of what is mentioned would probably have been repetition for us anyway.
The first day of the conference itself then. We started off with an LDAP workshop given by Andrew Findlay. It was obvious this wasn’t his first talk about the subject. Even though most of the technical stuff he touched wasn’t new for me, it was nice to get some insight on historical reasons for LDAP features and decisions.
After the lunch I had to give my talk, which was a first for me: never before had I presented a paper at an international conference…
I wish I could say it didn’t show, and as the speaker I can of course claim I’m not in the right position to judge. I was however ready with my talk way before time. Which was actually a good thing, because with my sore throat, I’m not sure how much longer my voice would have lasted. Luckily there were quite a few questions regarding my paper and most of them were out of interest and not just because I’d not been clear enough on things.
In the evening, there was the Google sponsored conference dinner. Based on the reputation of the English ‘cuisine’ in the civilised world – I’m pretty sure I will end up being lynched for statements like this one – I didn’t expect much. But I was pleasantly surprised. First we had some nice quiche, followed by roast pork, steamed vegetables and Yorkshire pudding to be finished off by dessert which was fruit rolled in some kind of pancake with a custard sauce.
I really did enjoy it
Day two of the conference was the most interesting one, to me personally. Talks I remember are the talk on device mapper multipathing by Alasdair Kergon, the talk on Kerberos by Simon Wilkinson and the talk on Apache, mod_include and mod_rewrite by Aaron Crane from The Register. Kris’ talk, I’d seen one or two times before so there wasn’t really anything that surprised me there, except for Kris being a bit more nervous than I’d known him before. No thanks to Ray Miller who added some more to the pressure …
Overall, I liked the conference and liked the people who attended it. Met some interesting fellow Unix administrators.
It’s certainly worth a repeat…
Next up, Kris and I will try and find something to eat, which won’t be too difficult with Durham being a university city.
Tomorrow, we’ll have to catch a taxi rather early because we have to get to Newcastle’s airport by twenty to ten (AM) to check in for our flight back to Belgium.
I’m looking forward to it. I’m not quickly homesick, but whenever the return date of a trip nears, I’m glad to return home. I’m starting the to miss Belgium…
As you undoubtedly notice, I found the time to revamp my website. I still have a lot of work to do, such as add extra picture sets, add the content from my previous website, etc…
Nevertheless, I’m already rather proud to have this nice and shiny WordPress powered website.
As WordPress is actually a blog or weblog site, I will be trying to use this site as a blog. Don’t expect daily blog posts or anything because I’m not that much of a talker
Anyway, we’ll see how this thing turns out…
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