Coredump

My work setup is like this: I have two monitors, one for a maximized Thunderbird window, and the other for a PuTTY window, Firefox, Outlook (minimized to tray, and only used for calendar reminders mostly), and IE. Well, I do open other windows, but I tend to use the above most often.

I use PuTTY extensively to manage remote Unix systems. I also like my desktop uncluttered, so instead of multiple PuTTY windows, I only use one. I log on to a “jump” host, fire up `screen`, and I’m all set.

At home, I have a similar setup. Below is my .screenrc:

# Default sessions
screen -t MISC 4
screen -t EVEY 4
screen -t INES 3
screen -t IANDEXTER_COM 2
screen -t IANDEXTER_NET 1
screen -t HOME 0
 
# Scrolling buffer
defscrollback 99999
altscreen on
 
# PuTTY fix
term xterm
termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@
 
# Status line
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}%-Lw%{= bW}%50> %n %t %{= kG}%+Lw%< '
 
# Key bindings
bindkey -k k6 detach
bindkey -k k7 quit
bindkey -k k8 hardstatus alwayslastline
bindkey -k k9 hardstatus alwaysignore
 
# Other stuff
startup_message off
autodetach on
defutf8 on
crlf off
setenv LC_CTYPE en_US.UTF-8

The Default sessions section opens up windows for my other hosts (guess how I name my boxes ;)). I also have a pretty large scroll buffer — useful when tailing logs. The hardstatus lines show the sessions and highlights the active one. I got the (not-so) fancy-schmancy color codes from here. Lastly, I bind the F6 to F9 keys to, respectively, detach the screen session, quit screen, toggle off the status line, and put it back on.

My .screenrc at work is more or less the same, except for the sessions I open. I can also tellscreen to use a different shell (I’m an unabashedly Bash fan, heh) apart from what is default in the systems I manage.

I was on the RH300 rapid track training last week. The five-day training included the Red Hat Certified Engineer examination on the last day.

The instructor (GyachI lead developer and Linux Users Group Singapore founder, Greg Hosler, no less) facilitated some very interesting discussions, interspersing them with his own copious experience not just with Red Hat but with Linux development in general. To say that we learned a lot from him would be an understatement.

And, as a bonus, I passed the exam. I’m now an RHCE. After getting the RHCT certification (for RHEL 4) two years ago, I planned on taking the RHCE exam immediately the next year. Well, two years is not that bad, considering the changes that had happened.

Now, looking forward to the RHCA certification. Heh. (I wish!)

(… And a partridge in a pear tree. Heh.)

Not much updates from me, except:

• Got three more great finds from Booksale: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, The Confusion (Vol. 2 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson, and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — all for under a hundred pesos.
• I had the pleasure of trying out two sleek notebooks: an Acer Aspire Gemstone and a Gateway T-6311. Both were from balikbayan kamag-anaks who asked me to, er, stress-test their new toys. More on this when I’m done playing with them. Suddenly, I’m craving for a replacement to Mathilda (my Dell Inspiron) — not!
• My bro gave me a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external hard drive. Yay! It’s 500 GB in a cool black finish, with a footprint of an office stapler. It now rests next to the 19″ LCD monitor. All I need now are a cheap NAS solution and a UPS, and my home computing setup is complete.
• Due to several NDAs I signed, I couldn’t blog much about what I do at work. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting engagement. I’ll be in between team deployments (but with the same client) next quarter, so that gives me some breathing space to take on vendor and in-house training. My blogging will more or less be the same — I’m actually thinking of changing my tagline to “Posts of a weekend blogger”.

Originally uploaded by iandexter.

At SMX, SM Mall of Asia. Lots of prizes were given away, but none came my way. Still, it was fun. One word: Mocha.

At work, I do a lot of directory traversal: going from one location to another within the whole (global) filesystem structure. So, to conveniently go back to a previous directory, I use pushd and popd, aside from the usual cd:

$ pwd
/home/iandexter
$ pushd /etc/sysconfig
$ pwd
/etc/sysconfig
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/iandexter

You can even echo $DIRSTACK to list the current directories in the stack, and push multiple directories.