Ryan Tomayko

TMUX – The Terminal Multiplexer (Part 1) —

Alternative to GNU Screen with some interesting features. Vertical splits look especially interesting:

I’m looking forward to Part 2.

dtach —

Not sure how I never heard of this program before:

dtach is a tiny program that emulates the detach feature of screen, allowing you to run a program in an environment that is protected from the controlling terminal and attach to it later. dtach does not keep track of the contents of the screen, and thus works best with programs that know how to redraw themselves. dtach does not, however, have the other features of screen, such as its support of multiple terminals or its terminal emulation support. This makes dtach extremely tiny compared to screen, making it more easily audited for bugs and security holes, and also allows it to fit in environments where space is limited, such as on rescue disks.

GitHub has rake tasks that use dtach to manage redis and maybe some other things.

virtualrb —

Christian Neukirchen’s utility for managing multiple virtual ruby installations.

Google's undocumented favicon to png convertor —

I’m using this on all of my “linkings” index pages now (see here, for example). It works pretty well. I really like the idea of integrating a piece of the destination site’s visual identity instead of using a generic del.icio.us/bookmark icon. Some site’s with favicons don’t work properly, however, and I’d give anything to have another parameter that let me override the default globe icon (this one: ). It’d be nice if I could say, grab the favicon for this domain but if it doesn’t exist, give me the favicon for delicious.com ().

Why aren’t you using ionice yet??? —

I’m more than a little embarased that I’ve never heard of this utility. I think most modern kernels prioritize IO with normal nice, though…

The rsync(1) Algorithm —

Some detail on rsync’s “rolling checksum” algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.