Some of these are just plain stupid, but some are simply different ways of interpreting the standard. A good example is the onChange event. This is a simple event, commonly attached to <input /> elements, that fires when the state or value of the element has changed.

For normal text fields, this event fires when the element loses focus. This is logical, since you don’t want it to fire after every keypress. However, for other types of field, the behaviour differs between browsers. Internet Explorer is consistent between types, and always waits till the element loses focus, regardless of the type attribute. Most other browsers however fire the event immediately if the states of the element are clearly defined. Radiobuttons and checkboxes for instance, are either on or off, so the event can fire as soon as the state changes, but IE still waits till the focus is moved to another object.

This leads to problems when the state of a checkbox or radiobutton has influence on other fields in the form. Take for example a situation where the state of a checkbox determines whether a submit button is enabled or not. In IE, the user has to click the checkbox, then click somewhere else in the form, and only then can he submit the form.

The most common workaround for this is to use the onClick event instead of the onChange event, but this will fire on every click, not just if the click actually changes the content.
I recently solved the problem much more elegantly: In addition to the normal onChange event, add an onClick event that removes focus from the element: onclick="this.blur()". When the user clicks the element, it is changed, and focus is immediately moved elsewhere. This means the onChange event is always called immediately, regardless of browser.

An even more advanced version would move the focus to the next element in the form: onclick="focusNext(this)", with the function defined as:

function focusNext(elem)
{
	var formElems = elem.form.elements.length;
	var thisIndex = $.inArray(elem, elem.form.elements);
	var nextIndex = Math.min(formElems-1, thisIndex+1);
	elem.form.elements[nextIndex].focus();
}

Note that this version requires JQuery. Some browsers support the Array.indexOf() method, in which case you could use:

function focusNext(elem)
{
	var formElems = elem.form.elements.length;
	var thisIndex = elem.form.elements.indexOf(elem);
	var nextIndex = Math.min(formElems-1, thisIndex+1);
	elem.form.elements[nextIndex].focus();
}

However, this method is very sparsely supported, and while you can add it yourself via prototype, I find that JQuery is useful enough that I usually add it to my site anyway.

Let’s start at the beginning:

They came for him one winter’s night.
Arrested, he was bound.
They said there’d been a robbery,
his pistol had been found.

This part is pretty clear. Our main protagonist is picked up by the cops, after his weapon has been found at the scene of a crime. It goes on to tell us that this person is worried, because he has no alibi for the evening in question. But then:

He knew that it would cost him dear,
but yet he dare not say.
Just where he’d been that fateful night,
a secret it must stay.
He had to fight back tears of rage.
His heart beat like a drum.
For with the wife of his best friend,
he spent his final night of freedom.

So the guy does have an alibi, he just doesn’t want to tell the cops about it. This is pretty odd, since in the UK^[1], adultery isn’t a felony, unlike armed robbery. But ok, maybe his best friend is very dear to him, (though apparently not so dear that he’d keep his hands of his old lady), and he’d rather do time than lose his friend. I’ve seen people choose their daily smoke over food for their children, so questionable priorities exist.

But then we get the next refrain:

Over the hills and far away,
he swears he will return one day.
Far from the mountains and the seas,
back in her arms again he’ll be.
Over the hills and far away.

Followed by:

Each night within his prison cell,
he looks out through the bars.
He reads the letters that she wrote.
One day he’ll know the taste of freedom.

So, while he’d rather go to prison than have his best friend find out who’d been keeping his wife warm at night, he’s still planning to get back with her after his time is done. And judging from the letter-writing, so is she. Now, if they both want to be together that bad, surely dumping the cuckoo’d husband now would be better than her playing mommy and daddy with the poor sod for years while he is in prison?

Nonetheless, so far we’re still only talking about people with a lot of trouble getting their priorities straight. They’re mostly hurting themselves: The guy is in prison and the wife is getting it from a man she doesn’t love. While the husband is being betrayed, right now he is blissfully unaware, and ‘no harm, no foul’ is certainly appropriate here, considering the guy who betrayed him is actually doing time for it.

But we’re forgetting one thing: A crime was committed. From the first verse, we already learned there was an armed robbery, but shortly after that, we got this:

Over the hills and far away,
for ten long years he’ll count the days.
Over the mountains and the seas,
a prisoner’s life for him there’ll be.

Looking at the British sentencing guidelines for robbery, we see that 10 years for robbery is in the heaviest category of verdicts for that crime, meaning either someone was seriously injured, a very large sum was stolen, or both.

So while the subject of the song is languishing in jail for being too much of a coward to own up to his best friend, a very violent criminal is on the loose, enjoying his ill-gotten gains.

But it is even worse than that. Remember why the guy was arrested? His weapon was at the scene. Now, I don’t own a gun, but I imagine it’s not something you leave lying around. Call it a hunch, but I dare suggest that, should the bloke cooperate with the police, there is a good chance they’d be able to find out how and by whom the weapon was stolen, thus leading the police to the real criminal. This could, quite probably, even be done while keeping his real whereabouts of the night a matter between him and the police, in exchange for his help in getting the real felon, something the police will probably prefer over sending an innocent man to gaol.

So, to recap, we not only have two persons with considerably twisted priorities, one of them serving time for the wrong crime (I’d submit that while he might be innocent of robbery, he should still be persecuted for obstruction of justice), we also have a violent criminal walking free because of the illogical actions of those two. Well done!

Making sense of it all

In the title, I promised I’d make sense of it all, so now I will. I have devised a small script that is, according to me, the only reasonable explanation for the story described in the song.

Our main characters:

Bob: A hapless video-rental clerk with the approximate IQ of a Venus Flytrap, but without the killer instinct. Bob spends his days watching the store’s porn collection and dreaming of one day meeting a woman who’ll fall hopelessly in love with him.

Clyde: A slick con-man and part-time crook. Took Bob under his wing during childhood, as a sidekick who does as he’s told was a good thing to have around when appointing blame for one of his failed antics. Bob in turn was honoured by being included, and has always looked up to Clyde.

Debbie: Clyde’s voluptuous wife. She knows what she wants, and is not afraid of getting dirty to get it. Debbie is one of the many reasons for Bob’s hopeless adoration for Clyde, as well as the subject of many of his wet dreams.

The movie starts with Debbie and Clyde planning their retirement. The following evening, Debbie knocks on Bob’s door, dressed in her skimpiest outfit, and upon being let in, explains to him how she’s always been turned on by the fact that his manhood is bigger than his brain (which Bob mistakenly takes as a compliment). She proceeds to undress herself in a sensual manner, until Bob’s pants burst open from arousal, at which point she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. On the way there, she slips into his closet and takes his firearm. In the bathroom, she opens the window where her hubby is waiting outside, and passes him the gun, as well as one of her stockings. She then returns to Bob and proceeds to take one for the team, after which she pressingly reminds him that Clyde can never, ever, ever find out about this.

Meanwhile, Clyde pulls the stocking over his head and uses the gun to stick up the local bookkeeper. This being the night before the Derby, the bookie is understandably pissed off, and responds to Clyde’s request for the contents of the safe by saying ‘Over my dead body’, to which Clyde wittingly replies by shooting him twice through the frontal lobe. Clyde busts the safe, leaves the gun and makes his way home, where he joins his wife in the shower.

The following day, the local constabulary, having successfully looked up the weapon’s serial number, knock on Bob’s door, and, concluding that his intelligence matches that of someone who would leave a registered firearm at the scene of a murder, take him in.

Bob’s brain, being slightly out of its depth, latches on to the last thing said to him that made sense: Debbie’s persistent demand that Clyde never finds out about their (very brief) liason. Clinging to that like a drowing sailor to a piece of driftwood, Bob keeps his mouth shut and is soon escorted off to the local slammer.

Meanwhile, Clyde and Debbie have caught the earliest first-class flight out to paradise, and are enjoying the spoils of Bob’s sacrifice. Together they send Bob the occassional letter to remind him how much Debbie loves him, and can’t wait for his sentence to be over so they can elope together, thus making sure all Bob’s blood remains in his pants, and not in his head where it might cause his brain to work long enough for him to wonder why the letters are postmarked in the Bahamas and realize he’s being played.

The movie ends with Clyde and Debbie toasting their Margaritas overlooking an idyllic sunset on a white beach. Credits roll^[2].

There you have it, next time you hear the song, you finally know what is going on.

1. ^[1] Gary Moore is from Northern Ireland ↩
2. ^[2] For casting I was thinking: George Bush Jr. as Bob, Pierce Brosnan as Clyde, Jessica Rabbit as Debbie, Robert De Niro as the bookie and John Cleese as the detective to arrest Bob. As director I was hoping to get Michael Bay, though that might mean replacing Bob’s revolver with a bazooka. ↩

It is extremely well suited for large fileservers due to a combination of reliable software RAID (modes 1, 5, and 6), checksumming and snapshots. Combined with the option of nested filesystems and the ability to set options on each of these filesystems seperately this means it’s extremely scalable, as well as endlessly configurable.

A quick introduction: ZFS works on two levels, pools and filesystems. All pool configuration is done through the zpool command, while filesystem configuration is done through the zfs command.

Pools

Pool configuration is generally only done once, and after that the zpool command is only used for either maintenance, repairs or expansion. Before you can use any ZFS filesystem, you need to create a pool, a collection of one or more disks or partitions ZFS can use to store data. The most basic pool is of course a single disk, but this wouldn’t give you any redundancy whatsoever. Using two disks, you can create a mirrored pool, using three or more disks, you could create a RAID 5 pool (called raidz by ZFS), and with four or more disks, RAID 6 (raidz2) becomes an option. It is possible to combine multiple multiple RAID sets into a single pool, so you could for example have a single pool consisting of two mirrorred 500GB drives, and five terabyte drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

Note that building blocks can be either complete disks, partitions or files, but since using a drive as two partitions means you lose two blocks if the drive fails, this doesn’t really add security, and using files makes you dependent on another filesystem. It is not possible to nest RAID levels, so building a RAID 5 set out of 3 mirrors is not an option.

Expansion

But what happens if your pool is getting full? Lets say we have a three-disk RAID 5 pool, consisting of three 500 GB disks, giving us about 1TB of usable space. Ideally, we’d add a single 500GB disk to grow that RAID set to 1.5 TB. Unfortunately, this is one of the few things not yet supported by ZFS. There are some alternatives though:

Adding a new RAID set. If your system has enough free connectors and bays, simply add several more disks to the system, and add them to the pool as a new RAID set. For example, we could add three 1.5TB disks in a raidz configuration to the pool, growing it by an effective 3TB. ZFS will automatically spread any new data over all disks to optimize performance.

If your system doesn’t have the available hardware to add more disks, you can grow the existing RAID set by replacing the disks one by one, allowing the array to rebuild after each swap. This is what I recently did in one of my servers. It was running the above mentioned three disk raid setup with 500GB disks, and one of them had failed. I purchased three new 1.5TB disks, shut down the system, and replaced the damaged one.

After rebooting, I gave the command:

[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zpool replace honeycomb ad6

Where honeycomb is the name of the zpool, and ad6 the drive to be replaced. By indicating only one device, I’m telling ZFS to replace the device with a new one at the same location. Once it’s done, shut down, replace the next disk, and repeat.

While the rebuilding is in progress, you can use the status command to see how far along the rebuilding of the array is:

[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zpool status -v
  pool: honeycomb
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool
        will continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
 scrub: resilver in progress for 4h35m, 93.59% done, 0h18m to go
config:

        NAME            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        honeycomb       DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1        DEGRADED     0     0     0
            ad6         ONLINE       0     0     0  229M resilvered
            ad8         ONLINE       0     0     0  229M resilvered
            replacing   DEGRADED     0     0     0
              ad10/old  OFFLINE      0  137K     0
              ad10      ONLINE       0     0     0  337G resilvered

errors: No known data errors

Here you see the last disk in the array being replaced. Note that because the old disk is offline, the rebuilding is done by recalculating the data from the other disks in the array. If the old disk is still operational, and you have a spare SATA port, you could replace the disk while the old one is still connected, possibly speeding up the process.

After all disks have been replaced, you need to export and import the pool, after which ZFS will see the larger disk size, and grow the system accordingly:

[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zfs list
NAME                                  USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
honeycomb                            908G  23.3G  5.26M  /honeycomb

[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zpool export honeycomb
[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zpool import honeycomb
[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zpool status
  pool: honeycomb
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: resilver completed after 4h56m with 0 errors on Mon
  Jan 17 11:21:38 2011
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        honeycomb   ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad6     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad8     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad10    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
[root@honeycomb /honeycomb/]# zfs list
NAME                                  USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
honeycomb                            908G  1.84T  5.26M  /honeycomb

As you can see, the pool is complete again, with no trace of the failed drive, and the diskspace is grown by little over 1.8TB^[1].

Next time, I’ll go deeper into the zfs command and creating filesystems.

1. ^[1] Not by 2TB, as you would expect, since for marketing reasons, harddrives are specified in powers of 10, not powers of 2, as computers see them. ↩

The only real problem I have with Macs, are the users. For some reason, pretty much all Mac users excibit a brand-loyalty that borders on the aggresive, while I’ve yet to meet a PC user that won’t admit his PC crashes, and generally isn’t all that great. (I’m currently in an ongoing struggle to get my system to remember its screen resolutions when restarting. AARG!)

So why aren’t we all using Macs? Several reasons:

Price

However you put it, Macs cost a lot of money. The question whether they are expensive is debatable. You generally get some pretty good components, and the systems are invariably stable and easy to use for beginners. But even if they’re good, they still might be out of reach for many people. (A good example of the ‘Boots’ theory of economic injustice at work).

Side note: While to somebody who builds his own systems, all pre-build computers look fairly expensive, the markup on the ‘options’ when you buy a Mac really are ridiculous. My advice: buy the basic model, and let a tech-savvy nephew upgrade the memory and disks if required. That’ll save you several hundred bucks right off the bat.

Choice

Compared to Windows PCs, Apple doesn’t offer a whole lot of choice. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most ‘options’ in the PC world are mostly marketing differences, and hardly noticable in daily use situations.
It’s also worth to note that these limited choices are part of the reason why Macs are so stable: By limiting the number of devices that can be used on the system, Apple can develop all drivers in-house, or at least keep close control over them. Most Windows instability issues are not caused by Windows, but by third-party applications and drivers, and Microsoft generally works very hard to keep up with all the problems arising from this.

A big pet peeve of mine however is the non-existence of a ‘normal’ Mac. There are laptops, SFF machines, all-in-ones and overpowered super computers, but there simply is no normal desktop machine. This pretty much forces people to buy either the all-in-one, which is a shame, as they’ll have to throw out some pretty good components when they want to upgrade (environmental aspects anyone?), or the small-form-factor, which is generally a bit underspecced. I think the first is the worst of the two evils. Displays have historically always been long-time investments, and especially if, like me, you work with images, a good display can easily cost more than your computer. Being forced to buy a new one each time you upgrade is just ridiculous. There is a reason all-in-ones never took off in the Windows world: They combine the bad traits of laptops (bad upgradability/expandability) with the bad traits of desktops (bad portability), without any redeeming features.

Compatibility

Sad as it is, most of the world is still stuck using Windows+MS Office. Most Mac users I know still use MS Office on their Macs ^[2]. Nearly all of them also have Parallels or VMWare installed so they can run Windows when needed (which in turn forces Macs to have much more memory than a similar Windows-only PC, as virtualization is a real memory-hog). Aside from the graphical sector, very few companies will consider Macs as their primary system. If you have a PC at work, having a Mac at home throws up an extra hurdle many people don’t want.

But for Grungni’s sake, Apple: Two button mice are useful, look into them!

What about Windows?

What about Windows? Windows PCs are cheap, there are more options than you can wave a stick at, and since they’re still the most common system, inherently compatible. Their problems? The most cited issue is instability, but I think part of this problem, and part of the reason people like Macs, is the amount of options, and the necessity of a certain level of technical understanding in order to use those options. And of course, the two issues are related.

If you’ve ever had the message dialog shown on the right, and you clicked ‘Continue Anyway’, you are no longer allowed to complain about windows being unstable. What that message means, is that the hardware you are about to install was made by a company that was too cheap to pay Microsoft to check whether their drivers would actually work with the OS. The difference between Mac and Windows? Mac doesn’t give you the ‘Continue Anyway’ button. Windows tried that approach with Vista, but was forced to change the policy after too many complaints. Apparently Windows users like the ability to destroy their PCs.

In a similar vein, the Windows configuration gives you so many options, that most users hardly know how to set them. A good example of this is the way how people jumped on TFT screens when they first came around, ‘because they didn’t flicker’. If they’d just adjusted the refresh ratio on their CRT, the flicker would’ve gone. But that setting is hidden four levels deep, so most of them didn’t even know it was there.

Of course, the Mac kernel is more stable than the Windows kernel (which is hardly surprising, considering Apple ripped most of it from FreeBSD and NetBSD). But this is in part because Microsoft has been working very hard to keep up with all those ‘bad drivers’ I mentioned earlier. And even then, if you look closer, you’ll notice that nowadays it usually isn’t Windows that crashes, but the software you’ve installed on it. Ever since they switched to the NT kernel (Windows 2000/Windows XP), Windows itself has been a very reliable system, provided you took care of what you installed on it.

Me?

So, why am I not a Mac user? A bit of all, but mostly choice. To illustrate: Penelope, my main workstation, runs a triple-screen setup, currently has 6 harddisks and 4 CD players. The only machine Apple sells that would be able to do that, is the Mac Pro, and even the cheapest model costs more than I have spend on the base system, all of the updates and all of the replacements ^[3] on Penelope since I first built her in 2000. That’s over 10 years of keeping a system current, and I’m still out ahead. I like the ability to pick and choose my components, but if I’m brutally honest to myself, I wouldn’t notice the difference between most components in my daily use.

Of course, my choice of software is heavily Windows-based, but I’m sure that if I really were to switch, I’d be able to find alternatives. The only Microsoft software I use is Windows itself, most of the rest is open source, or at least free, and usually available for the Mac. I’d really miss Winamp, and I’d be a bit sad about having to exchange ACDSee for the more expensive Lightroom, but I’d get over that eventually.

There is the fact that I don’t really like the Mac-OS interface, but that’s completely personal, and I’d probably get used to it over time.

So, what to do?

Depends on what you want. If you’re looking for a good laptop, and like the Mac interface, seriously consider a Macbook or a Macbook Pro. They’re not that much more expensive than a similarily specced Windows laptop, are very well built (especially the Pros) and you get Unix-grade stability. (Do see my earlier remark about the nephew-upgrade-path).

If you’re looking for a normal PC to do email, office-related tasks and browsing on, and really would like the whole Mac experience, go for a Mac Mini.

But if you want a powerful system, want to be able to upgrade in the future without having to fork over the price of a new system, and want more than the basics (extra disks, lots of RAM, etc). Seriously consider getting a Windows PC.

Horses for courses, people. Horses for courses.

1. ^[1] Aside from the one I have weekly with my father, which is just our way of saying ‘hello’. ↩
2. ^[2] Which I think is a bit strange, I use Windows, and I haven’t used MS Office since Windows 3.1. If you really want to be free from Microsoft, there’s your chance. ↩
3. ^[3] If you run that many disks, replacing them when they wear out becomes a serious budget issue. ↩

Turns out MSI did (although I think anything but solid-state capacitors would’ve given up after the kind of use I’ve put to these). I’d noticed the bulging caps a few months earlier, when I was trying to install some additional memory^[1] (which incidentally didn’t work, probably due to those caps) but the system worked fine for a few more months before finally refusing to boot.

So I looked at the values of the affected caps, counted how many siblings they had (even unaffected caps, no sense in leaving a bomb ticking in there) and headed off to Badcaps.net. I decided not to experiment with solid state caps, as chances are good I’ll upgrade Penelope way before I wear out these caps as well anyway.

So, time to stick a soldering iron into some PC equipment.

A quick note: Contrary to popular belief, replacing capacitors on a mainboard does not void your warranty. This is for the simple reason that if you’re replacing caps on a board that’s still under warranty, you’re an unsalvagable moron and don’t deserve warranty anyway.

So, how does it work? You’ll need the following items:

• A proper soldering iron. Not one of those dime-store things with a tip bigger than a teaspoon. You’ll want something that preferably has temperature control, and a fresh tip. In my experience, a small screwdriver tip works best.
• A solder-sucker, desoldering wick, or something similar (sucking up hot solder by mouth is an option, but only if you film it and post it to youtube).
• Sufficient work space, preferably with adequate anti-static measures.
• Basic knowledge of electronics. If you can’t tell a capacitor from a resistor, there is a real chance you will fail. If you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation, there’s also a real chance you’ll accidentally invent a time machine. Your call.

Now, Badcaps.net has very comprehensive manual for removing and replacing capacitors on their website, but I’m going to waste time rewriting all of that here. I’ll also illustrate with pictures, so your television-addled brain can comprehend it better.

Removing the old caps:

Apply heat to one of the contacts, melting the solder (If you have problems getting the old solder to melt, applying a bit of fresh solder often works).

While doing this, pull the capacitor away from the leg you’re heating, freeing the leg from the board. Don’t use excessive force, or you’ll pull free the motherboard traces.

Repeat this process for the other leg, and the capacitor can be removed. Repeat this for all bad capacitors on the board. If any of the old caps has leaked electrolyte on the board, make sure to clean this up before continuing, as it is highly corrosive and will damage the board irreparably.

Cleaning the holes:

To install the new capacitors you’ll have to open up the holes in the motherboard, which most likely still have solder in them. The most common method for this is using a solder sucker. Simply heat up the solder, hold the tip of the sucker near and push the trigger. However, with old, sluggish solder, this often doesn’t work as desired.

An alternative is desoldering wick. Simply place the wick over the hole, lay the soldering iron flat on top and allow the wick to suck up the solder. This has the advantage of not giving the board a hefty wallop, but the disadvantage of applying more heat to the board for a prolonged period. If there are a lot of nearby components, this may be undesirable.

A final option is then to use a steel pin. Make sure the thickness of the pin is at least that of the legs of the new capactitors. Place the point of the pin on the hole from the top of the board, heat the bottom and push the pin all the way through. Allow the solder to cool while wiggling the pin, and then rotate and wiggle the pin back out. Clean off any protuding bits of solder, and you’re done.

Installing the new caps:

If you really need help soldering a capacitor to a PCB I’m wondering why you even own a soldering iron, but for the sake of completeness:

Stick the two legs of the capacitor through their corresponding holes in the mainboard. Make sure to get the polarity right. Caps are usually marked at the negative pin with a lot of minus signs, as well as the fact that the positive terminal is usually longer. On the board, the negative terminal is usually filled in, and the positive terminal is marked with a +-sign

Clip off the terminals roughly 2mm from where they stick through the PCB. Note that this is the part most people (including the Badcaps.net tutorial) get wrong. You clip the wire first! Clipping it after soldering puts a very big strain on both the solder connection and the mainboard traces.

After clipping off the leads, making sure the capacitors are properly seated, and verifying the polarity one last time, carefully apply a drop of solder to both junction points.

Voila: A nice row of non-bulging capacitors, ready for another 5 years of abuse.

Some closing notes:
Keep the old and the new capacitors seperate, especially if they’re from the same manufacturer.

I find it’s best to remove all identical caps first, install their replacements, and only then to move on to the next capacitor type. This way you prevent accidental switching of capacitor values.

And of course: I’ve got a degree in this crap, you probably don’t, so you’re doing it at your own risk. If you use this as a manual to completely ruin your PC, I won’t accept any liability. You’ve been warned.

1. ^[1] I’m not saying the PC stays the same for five years. I see it as a work in progress, I’ve been using basically the same system since 2001, I’ve just swapped out components as they were worn out or became too outdated. More of the former than the latter, surprisingly. ↩

First, let me get this straight: I don’t believe in the ‘one OS to rule them all’ crap. Horses for courses, and for server work, my horse rides a command line FreeBSD install.

Digression: I’ve never much seen the point of Unix desktops, as they spend most their time trying to do what Windows is made to do. (Hint: If you really want a Unix-based desktop system and still be able to communicate with the rest of the world, start wearing turtlenecks and buy a Mac).

However, for server work, Unix is simple unequalled. You get unparallelled uptime (I was a wizz at getting Win2k uptime^[1], but that’s just peanuts to what I get out of FreeBSD without trying. I’ve had servers run unattended with high loads on outdated versions that even the developers considered buggy), great performance on minimal hardware, great server software, and professional-level monitoring, redundancy and security tools.

But of course, running a command line server system limits you to remote shells, and these in turn limit your multi-tasking abilities. At least if you’re on real terminal, you can use Alt-F1 to Alt-F10 to switch consoles, but opening 10 PuTTY instances, while effective, clutters the taskbar.

Screen turns all that upside down. Let’s get it in to your system.

If you’re using BSD unix, as you should be, just type:

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/screen
# make install clean

If you’re one of those wannabees using Linux instead of Unix, use one of the 42 million ways of installing packages on your unstandardized system. It’ll be there, trust me. Just don’t expect me (or google) to know where. Maybe ask Linus. He’ll probably tell you you should use another distro.

The standard options are fine. Let it rip, and a little while later it’ll tell you it’s finished installing. Now type:

# screen

Now, was that hard?

You’ll get an info screen which will disappear if you click a button (which you’ll do, and regret, cause you realize you have no clue what to do now, and figure that text probably told you exactly that).
So I’ll explain: You are now in a session with a potentional ten virtual consoles. You start with one though. The one you’re now in. If you feel scared, try typing:

# exit

It’ll tell you screen is terminating. It won’t tell you whom it’s terminating, probably John Connor. Short version: You’re safe.

Open screen again (see above), and this time, don’t wimp out. Try doing something. Get a directory listing (I know, CRAZY!). See, just like a normal console. Now hit Ctrl-A, followed by ‘C’. Where’d your directory listing go? I’ll show you in a minute. First go to another directory, and get another listing.

Done? Now hit Ctrl-A 0. If you are not getting the first listing, you did something wrong. Go to jail, do not pass start, etc. If you do get the first listing, you have probably figured out that Ctrl-A 1 will get you the second console (with the second directory listing) again. Good <igh>^[2].

Other useful commands:

That’s the basics. There’s lots more, like copy/pasting between consoles, saving screenshots and whatnot. But on the whole those commands are pretty much all you’ll ever use. If you want more, try typing

# man screen

Now, that makes multitasking a whole lot easier, but it ain’t half of the usefulness of screen. Next time I’ll explain how screen can turn that one little PuTTY session into a roaming, growing and partying affair.

1. ^[1] Sadly, Penelope’s latest hardware upgrade also forced an OS upgrade. Luckily, Windows 7 is very strippable. ↩
2. ^[2] Insert Gender Here ↩

For the old registered users, the old website parts are (for now) still available at the familiar links. I’ve imported the old ‘cats’ log into the new site, my photography experiments are mostly over at my Tripodplaces log and everything else was either unfinished or crap, and was ditched.

By now we’ve grown accustomed to being used as heated mattresses during the night, as well as the fact that entering the kitchen will be greeted by a combined chorus of cat voiced convinced of the fact that such an action means dinner time.

Sam has taken it upon himself to guard me when I’m taking a shower. He’ll scratch the door until I let him in, position himself on the washing machine and happily stay there until I’m finished, after which he’ll inspect the puddles and start begging for food. Either he’s scared I’ll drown, or he considers it his own personal sauna. Ben never joins him, though he will sit outside whining, which is their usual action when the other is locked up somewhere.

Included portrait nicely illustrates why evil overlords always have cats. They pose better.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

1. ^[1] Though technically, they’re not really boys anymore. ↩

On a similar note, we’ve observed before that while their mother generally fled to the darkest corners of the house when there were strangers around, Ben and Sam have no such need for privacy. Any lap that’s warm and has a hand around willing to stroke is a good place to sleep, and if there’s no such place, new people are once again interesting things to attack, run around on, or beg for food.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]