steamsprocket.org.uk

Author Archive

mintty

How did I not know about this? “Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin. It is based on code from PuTTY 0.60 by Simon Tatham and team.” Previously I’ve been using PuTTYcyg which is a version of PuTTY with Cygwin support added. It’s good, but mintty seems a lot neater – rather than being a […]

Apple Sues HTC for Patent Infringement

As reported by just about everybody, those litigious bastards are at it again. The BBC has a reasonable summary, but Gizmodo seems to have the best coverage so far, including the list of (20!) patents, the full filings, some links to Apple’s related issues with Nokia ((six of one and half a dozen of the […]

Connecting a screen session to ssh-agent

GNU screen is an excellent way of keeping a persistent multi-terminal session for console based programs. It shines when connecting to a remote server – ssh in, run screen to create a session, then do whatever you want in it. At any point you can detach from the session and it will keep running in […]

Using physical disks with VMWare server

For some reason (product differentiation? simple oversight?) VMWare Server 2 ((Downloadable from https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/)) has no option to create a VM using a physical disk. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean that it can’t use them; you just need to import a predefined VM and tell it to use that. It’s possible to create a VM in the […]

Stop amavisd-new wrapping long lines in syslog

Update: Newer versions of amavisd-new (certainly 2.6.4-3) have a variable called $logline_maxlen which does exactly what it says on the tin. The rest of this post is therefore of only historic interest. I administer a mail server that uses the popular amavisd-new to perform virus scanning, and spam filtering using SpamAssassin. That server uses Logcheck […]

POSIX file semantics in Windows

Some Background: BTW: In the context of this post, ‘Windows’ always means ‘Windows NT’. The Windows [[Kernel_(Computing)|kernel]] is designed to support multiple independent subsystems – different application environments – atop its [[Native_API|native API]]. The two most common examples of Windows subsystems are the [[Windows_API|Windows API]] – formerly known as Win32 and used by the overwhelming […]