A few months ago, I decided to progressively stop using Google products. They
are indeed good products (or were, see Google Reader), but I’m talking about
other reasons, here.
Google products, by essence, are practical. You can login with your Google Account
(almost) anywhere in the world, and you get a full range of applications to
communicate, find information, or work with.
But there are other essential characteristics of these products :
- They are free. This may be an advantage for certain people, but not for me.
I do prefer paying money for a service that I know is reliable, and I pay for it
to be reliable, so that I have something to rant about when the service is not
working (which is unlikely, I admit, but not impossible, and has happened in the
past). In the same manner, Google can decide to suspend your account. You can
virtually do nothing against that, and this has happened in the past. If I pay,
I can be sure that my data is safe (as pointed by Brice in the comments, this
is a horrible simplification, and is definitely not true). On a related note, I
would be glad to give money to startups, if they were providing a service I need
(in the same sense that buying a song instead of torrenting helps the artist).
- They are web-based. This is clearly an advantage, in a sense, but up to a
certain point. Considering GMail, for example. When I perform an operation on my
mail client, I don’t want to wait, it should be instantaneous. And as good as
GMail is (and I’ve used it for 7 years), when you click to do something, there
is sometimes a delay (probably the HTTP request) before you can do something.
The same can be told about any shared and free web application, as far as I’ve
experienced. This is simply a regression in my experience of the software. The
5% of the time I need to access my mail when I haven’t got my PC and I
haven’t got connection on my smartphone is not worth the frustration I have
when GMail is not responsive. This point is not against web applications at
all. My self-hosted applications are fast-as-hell.
- They don’t protect your privacy. It is a know fact that Google reads your
emails, and I consider email important enough not to let anyone read it. Well
yeah, you can argue that only machines are reading my mail, and not humans,
and that the email protocol is not safe, but at the end, I don’t want to have
a third party to read my email, period.
- They don’t place you in control. When use an integrated solution, such as
Google applications (or even a Mac, in a certain extent), I have no control on
what I can and cannot do. If my mail client interface changes in the next
version, I can choose to stay on the current version (even if sometimes, I
should update, because of security fixes). If Google Reader changes, I cannot
do anything. At most Google folks are kind enough to grant the user a
transitional period when they can use the old interface. Don’t get me wrong, I
love when software are evolving, but sometimes, the new version does not fit a
certain usage anymore.
Now, let’s list the applications or services we need, and the feature they
should have to be a decent competitor to Google services :
- An email provider, which has a decent web-based interface, as well as IMAP
support, to stop using GMail ;
- A calendar server, which allows me to publish and share calendars with people
that use Google Agenda or any other calendar software ;
- Instant messaging solution that can reach people on GTalk (because most of my
friends are using GTalk) ;
- A Web-based RSS feed reader, with both desktop and mobile support, to be able
to drop Google Reader ;
- A solution to host my photos, for my familly and friend to view them in a nice
way, to ditch Picasa ;
- A solution to collaborate on documents with friends, to get rid of Google
Docs ;
The ultimate goal of this experiment is therefore to have products that work
(even after complicated installation/configuration, etc.), and are
interoperable. Despite ranting about Google and the fact that the web should be
distributed all day, most of the persons I interact on a daily basis don’t care
(or are not aware), and use Google services extensively. For me to
work/chat/interact with them, my services should be able to connect, or be
compatible, with Google service.
Email
On the advice of several Mozilla folks, I started paying for the most expensive
plan at http://fastmail.fm. It allows me to use a custom domain for my email
address, a large number of those, file storage, etc.
I use Thunderbird, which has, to tell the truth, several minor bugs, but is
fast, reliable, extensible. Almost anything I do which doesn’t involve the
network is instant (reading email, composing email, searching through a huge
amount of old email with crazy filters, etc.). I can use seamlessly a large
amount of email account (university email, personal address, Mozilla email,
exchange university account, etc.), and it just works. I don’t have to give my
password to a third party browser plugin to have desktop notification, and I can
compose my email without having the interface slowing down my typing. One killer
feature for me : space goes to the next unread email, perfect for those crazy
mornings when you received a ton of email during the night.
Fastmail does not have the sexiest web interface that exists. In fact, it is way
inferior to GMail’s (which is arguably the best one out there, Microsoft’s
Web-based Outlook being a good second). But as I said before, I can hardly use a
web interface, now that I have used a native client, and it did the job
perfectly when I had to write an email without having my phone nor my computer.
All the feature you expect from a webmail are present except threading (or
conversation, as they are called in GMail), which is kind of a big deal, but not
much. SMTP is way faster and more reliable than GMail’s. The synchronization
between PCs and devices is instantaneous, and reliable, whereas GMail’s get
confused if the traffic is too high. I suspect the IMAP implementation of GMail
is not very good (which is quite logical considering their market segment, which
is the webmail client).
This interface it tweakable via a custom CSS.
I use a very old Android smartphone (HTC G2, i.e. the second one released in the
world), and the mobile web interface of Fastmail is not beautiful, but very
efficient : fast, minimalistic. It does not have AJAX goodies, and it fits
my usage perfectly. I think I will maybe switch to a native email client for my
phone when I will change it (in the next few months or so), but as for now, I
don’t know the state of the mobile email client market, so this might be a
problem in the future. As a backup solution, I suppose I could install an email
webapp on my server to have a nicer client on the mobile, though, but at the
expense of researching and testing all the clients (remember that all I did for
now was to enter my credit card number in fastmail’s website, and point my
Thunderbird to it).
To finish, I know I could have hosted my email on a personal server, but I don’t
trust myself enough to do so. Email, is for me, the primary mean of
communication, both for work and personal life, and I want it to be up all the
time, while my emails are safe and backuped.
This service costs about $40 a year, which is $3.33 a months. Considering a
decent sandwich costs more than that where I currently live (Sweden), it is
perfectly acceptable. Note that you can pay way less money if you don’t want the
best plan http://fastmail.fm offers. For this price, you have 10Gb of space,
attachments up to 50MB, 2GB space to store file (not very useful if you have
your server), provides an XMPP server and is able to connect to GTalk (but more
on that later).
A calendar server
I think I have found the cutest and easiest calendar server in the world :
Radicale. It is written in Python, and does not add
crapwares in your system, since it’s standalone (i.e. no dependencies).
To start a calendar server, type radicale in the command line (after having
installed the package, of course). Then point your Thunderbird (equipped with
the Lightning addon) (or any other software that supports the CalDav
protocol, this includes iCal and a bunch of other software) to
http://example.com/username/calendarname the calendars are created on
the fly. You can add authentication (I let you dig in in the
/etc/radicale/config, which is basically the unique configuration
file), and a lot of other stuff, but I only use the basic functionalities.
A view of Lightning, the calendar addon for Thunderbird.
I keep my Radicale instance in a tmux, but I guess you could wrap it in a
/etc/init.d script, and it would be cleaner.
In the past, I used to use several RSS feed readers ; RSSOwl, Liferea, and a KDE
software I have forgotten the name of, and it was always a pain when I wanted to add a new
feed : I had to do it manually on all my devices. More over, the read/unread
status of the articles where inconsistent: if I read an article on one device,
it wasn’t mark as read on other devices. That was the primary reason why I
switched to Google Reader in the first place.
But several month ago, I had just started to pay for the cheapest VPS plan at
OVH, and figured out that I could host a web based RSS application. A guy at
Mozilla was using Tiny Tiny RSS, so I decided to give it a shot.
The interface of Tiny Tiny RSS, easily configurable.
Written in PHP, it uses MySQL as database (I seem to recall other option exist for
the database, but this is my current setup), so it can be used on virtually any
hosting plan in the world. It is currently the only software that
require PHP and MySQL on my server, but it definitely worth an instance of those
two software running. I find it way better than Google Reader (and I have used
Reader for at least three years). It has all the features you need (and a
lot of features you don’t need), and a nice mobile interface (which is
responsive enough in my opinion not to have a native application. There
is one for Android, if you feel the need for it). It
is password protected, and you can even have multiple accounts. It imports
OPML files seamlessly, so the transition with Google Reader is very easy.
Basically, it was a drop in replacement, I don’t miss a single feature of
Google Reader. TTRSS (as it is called by its author) is very fast, provides a rich
web interface, and runs on your own server, usually with a huge bandwidth, so
information retrieval are very very fast.
The development of TTRSS has somewhat slowed down, but the author still
implements features and bug fixes. The single thing that is annoying, is that it
binds several key combination (I think ctrl+pageup/down and ctrl+tab), in a
way that it doesn’t change tab anymore in my Firefox. I might patch that in the
future (or write a quick Firefox Jetpack addon or userscript), but it’s
nothing terrible.
Photos hosting
There is lots of web-based images gallery, but I didn’t want a bloatware, so I
settled on the old genethumb.sh by Sam Hocevar. But it was ugly. So I rolled
out my own utility, yadfig, Yet Another Damn Fine Image Gallery, which has all
the cool features (or at least the feature I need): command line driven,
automatic thumbnail generation, nice
HTML5/CSS3 frontend, static HTML pages generation, etc. Yes you can’t add
comments, rate the pictures, but it doesn’t need anything apart from Python, a
library to get the exif tags, and a web server to work. You can see an example
here. And if it does not fit you
needs, make a pull request, since it’s open-source and on
Github. The codebase is tiny, so you should
be able to do what you want in a minute.
Instant messaging
As a fastmail.fm user, it is trivial to have an XMPP server which is not
Google’s : Fastmail provides for its paying customers an XMPP server, based on
ejabberd. In your Empathy (or any
other XMPP client), type in your fastmail.fm user name and password and
voilà. Then you can import all you GTalk user list, and your good to go. Your
contacts will have to confirm they know you, however.
I personally have a very basic usage of IM, I only use it for instant messaging,
no crazy plugin, no group chat (I use IRC for that), and it works very well.
I’ve heard that Fastmail’s XMPP server supports XMPP extension, and I might dig
in it, but for now, I’m completely satisfied.
For now, my usage of this solution is however quite hypocritical. I still talk
to people only on GTalk, but this experiment proves that if any of my contact switches to
another provider, as long as he/she still uses XMPP, the hassle will be minimum,
and that we can have a decentralized solution that works with a minimum
of work. I’ve heard that you can connect to Facebook chat using a
similar method, but I don’t use Facebook much these days, so this is not a strict
requirement for me.
I might try to host my own XMPP server in the near future, though.
Document sharing and collaboration
This is probably the toughest part. When I’m working with programmer (which is
most of the time), we happily use git with Github, or my own server, but
when I have to collaborate with non-programmer, sometime Etherpad is enough,
sometimes not. I’m looking forward to LOOL (LibreOffice OnLine), but in the
meantime, I haven’t found a solution as user-friendly as Google Docs.
This is a shame, because Google Docs tends to produce horrible documents.
Perhaps I should try more to push people (even non-technical) to Markdown (since
it’s trivial to grasp the minimal subset you need), and Etherpad, and produce
good quality documents, ready for the web (which is kind of a big deal), for a
print using a LaTeX converter, and which does not use a crappy and slow web
interface, with a nonsense WYSIWYG editor which makes you lose you time over
styling for crappy result.
Conclusion
As for now, I have successfully replaced all the Google services I used with
equivalent (or better) services. My GMail accounts is still active for spammy
services and
for the time I tell all the people who might want to communicate with me my new
email address. I still need to find a better solution for the
document sharing and collaboration part, but I was planning for a lot tougher
transition. I rediscovered the joy of fast, responsive software in the
process, and learnt a lot, which are both quite nice externalities.
I’ve not searched a replacement for the Google Search, since the last time I
checked, the quality of alternative solutions was depressing. I might
investigate in the near future, and I’ve heard Duck Duck Go is acceptable, so I
might give it a shot.
If you have comments, alternative software or solution, or anything (relevant to
this post) to say, please feel free to drop a comment, or contact me by all
the means you find.
Voir les commentaires
Table of contents
htop > top
If you ever worked on a UNIX thingy, I suspect you’ve had a process spinning, or
filling up the whole memory, or something nasty like that. In the Windows world,
you could probably rush to ctrl+alt+del to fire up the task manager, and kill
the process.
But on our lovely UNIX, our beloved teacher told us all years ago: top, way
to go, just type in in a terminal, see what’s going on, and eventually, lookup
the line of the resources-greedy process in the table, while the screen is
flickering and all because everything is messed up on the machine and kill it
by pressing k, followed by the PID of the process, that of course, you have
forgotten. Easy, no ? LOLWUT, says the Windows, user. And he’s right, LOLWUT
indeed. Its damn hard to see the percentage of RAM used, also. Oh, and it’s
ugly.
Here come htop, on its white horse, ready to free up some precious minutes and
relieve your eyes. Please compare the damn thing:
Better, isn't it ? Notice the fresh colors ! (top on the left,
htop on the right)
And below the eye candyness, it has some very powerful feature:
- Process selection, using the arrow ;
- Display nice graphs on CPU usage for each cores, memory (including virtual,
resident, etc.) ;
- Kill (or in fact send any signal to) the selected process using
F9 or k ;
- Sort the processes by RAM usage, CPU consumption, uptime and several other
goodies, using
F6 ;
- Ability to display the parent-child tree using F5 ;
- Customisation (color scheme, layout, etc.);
- Search (oh, I love this one) using
F3 or /;
- Run
lsof on the highlighted process ;
- Run
strace on the selected process (very useful for debugging) ;
- Tag process using the space bar, to track them more easily.
Oh, and the best feature: it’s command-line based, so I can run it on my server,
via ssh on a remote machine, and I don’t have to use the mouse to do thing.
And I can even run it from a tty when my machine is completely crashing and
unresponsive (which happens way too often when you try to benchmark stuff).
vim > *
So, I don’t want to troll or anything, but let’s face it, vim is the best text
editor available on any OS (including Windows, having worked three months on a
Windows machine using the Windows port of GVim). It has all the features of
the other text-editors (via the wonderful plug-in system), and has the
powerful characteristic of being modal. While pointed as a disadvantages by
many persons (who are not vim user, obviously), it is by far the best way to
edit text (especially for a programmer, but since I write this blog in GVim, I
tend to think it fits any kind of writing).
This won’t be a article on vim feature, since there are plenty on the internet
(ask me if you want a good introduction), but rather a list of reason why it
is superior.
- It is available on any OS, command-line, graphical. By any, I mean virtually
all Windows, UNIX (including MacOSX, all BSDs, all Linux distros).
UNIX/Windows/other.
vi is part of POSIX. If you learn vim, you can edit text
on any operating system, without problem. It can allow you to edit text over
ssh, and is so lightweight that you don’t even notice that you’re editing a
distant file.
- It has a text-based configuration : I keep my configuration in a
git
repository on Github, and if I have to use
another computer, I do a simple git clone in my home, and it’s all set up
according to my exact preference. A text-based configuration allow one to share
his tricks. And I love sharing.
- It has plugins for any languages that exist, and is extensible. The
vimscript language has binding in all major script languages (Python, Ruby,
etc.), and is quite simple to learn (in fact, the community is so active, that
when I need a particular feature, in 99% of the cases, I just have to git
clone a repo on Github).
- It make you reach efficiency level that you can’t even imagine when you’re not
using a modal editor. I personally hate it when I have to delete a string
between double quote. I have to press
ctrl+left multiple times to go before the first word in
the string, then press ctrl+delete for each word in the string. In vim, I
can issue di", meaning « Delete Inside
” ».
- It integrates with other command-line tools in a nice way : you can
make
from vim, and navigate between the errors, same for grep (or rather ack,
see below), you can directly filter the text you are working one using the
powerful UNIX machinery, insert text from the shell, etc. Again, it can seem a
bit weird to insert text from the command line, but in fact, it is really
useful (and calling sort directly on a file is definitely a cool feature).
- When you are proficient with
vim, you experience a kind of zen, which is
explained in details by the author of
this
article on Stack Overflow. You speak another language, and any text manipulation
you want to do can be expressed in the language, in a couple keystroke. In a
week, you keep up with you old speed (using a regular text editor), in two
weeks, you cannot understand how you managed to live this long without using a
modal editor and you get a nice speedup.
- You don’t have to touch the mouse to do a single thing in Vim. This result in
less movements, an more focus, since you don’t lose your concentration while
ranting about your text editor while doing modifications (which happened to me
way too often in the past).
- This one may not be a good reason to use
Vim for everybody, but I think a
cool thing with this software is that you can always learn something new, a
guru trick, discover a new plugin, etc.
- Last but not least, I gives you nerd-credibility. And you know how much this
is important.
zsh > bash
I’ve heard some people are still using bash these days. Considering how much time
zsh saved me since I started to use it, I think it’s worth a try.
Install it, and then type chsh login, where login is your login. It should
prompt you for the shell you want, make sure to type the full path (i.e.
/usr/bin/zsh or something). Then, you can either use it vanilla, or with one
of the cool config available on the internet
(here or
here).
Among other features :
- Very nice completion of files (for example, if you type
evince, and then
tab tab, it will auto complete to show only pdf files).
- If you have a server on which you authenticate without having to type a
password (public key, session reuse, etc.),
zsh completes the remote files
when you are doing an scp.
- Very powerful globing :
ls .vim/**/*.txt searches for text file recursively
using ls under the .vim directory (i.e. search all plugin documentation),
vim -p *(as-30) open the files accessed less than 30 seconds ago (zsh
autocompletes at each step of the command, so you don’t have to remember
everything : vim -p *(<TAB> yields the list of options).
- Spelling correction (i.e. find typos in your commands).
- History call substitution :
cat !$ replaces !$ by the last argument of the
last command, cat !* will replace !* by all the arguments of the last
commands, (!:n expands to the nth argument.) etc.
- Fully compatible with
sh or bash scripts.
- Auto
pushd & popd thing : dirs -v show the stack, cd ~N change
directory to the Nth.
- Fuzzy directory substitution :
/u/lo/li<TAB> yields to /usr/local/lib.
- Deep directory naming :
hash -d moz=/home/paul/workspace/mozilla-central,
and then cd ~moz.
vared : edit an environment variable on the fly.
nc > telnet
I guess you’re used to use telnet when doing network programming/debugging. It
is definitely a handy tool when you want to see how a server is responding. But
to debug a client, it is quite useless. And these weird escape key sequence are
always a pain to remember.
Here comes the mighty netcat, dubbed the swiss army knife of network
programming. It can act both as a client and a server, both in UDP and TCP, and
has a proper stderr output.
Some examples:
# the new wget
nc blog.paul.cx 80
> GET / HTTP/1.0 # type this, followed by two new line
>
>
# See what header a browser sends : open localhost:8080 in you browser
nc -l 8080
# Network file transfer
# on the fist computer
nc -l 1234 > file
# on the second computer, file transfer
nc 10.0.0.2 1234 < file
# Power of UNIX : compressed file transfer over network in one line
nc -l 1234 | gzip -df > file
cat file | gzip -f | nc 10.0.0.2 1234
# Send UPD packets to another machine
ns -u 10.0.0.2 1234
As far as I know, there is no case where telnet is superior to nc. However,
socat, dubbed netcat++, is considered a superior alternative to both
netcat and telnet, although not available in standard on a machine. It is
capable of much more, at the expense of an harder to remember syntax (for me
anyway).
ack > grep
Are you tired to type:
find . -name .git -prune -o -name '*.cpp' | xargs grep "symbol"
Anyway, I know I were, before going to the self-explanatory
http://betterthangrep.com, and to issue a sudo aptitude install ack-grep. It
is really a delight, as a programmer who doesn’t like IDEs:
- Color output (yes,
grep knows how to do that, but has no clue about the fact
that it has matched in a .c file);
- Language awareness
- Ignore
.git, .hg, .svn, binaries, core dumps and such;
- Regexp as file argument;
- Ability to have a default option set in
.ackrc;
Here is a command with a similar behavior as the previous one:
Nice, isn’t it ? Of course, you can replace the --cpp switch by --js, --c,
or even --java for the masochists.
Here is another one that kicks ass:
Hell yeah, it searches the location below . for things that are not in
Javascript files.
Oh, and there is a killer feature, I let you try it out, because, obviously,
you’ll use this tool:
On Debian and cousins, the packages as well as the name of the program is
ack-grep (because ack is a kanji converter/checker), so I suggest to put
this nice little line in your .zshrc (because of course, you don’t use bash
anymore, do you ?).
gdb, valgrind, strace, ltrace, and ptrace > printf
Using Linux, MacOS or another flavour or UNIXish system, you have the advantage
of having a whole range of debugging tools that have been polished after dozens
and dozens of years of system programming by amazing people.
And yet it is common to debug using printf statements. Okay, I can acknowledge
that gdb is a bit frightening at the beginning, but, being a command-line
tools, numerous wrappers exist : ddd, QtCreator, Eclipse, cgdb you name
it.
Anyway, I prefer to use it on the command line, as often. I won’t write a full
gdb tutorial, because I’m in no way the most knowledgeable person about that
program, but there is plenty of tutorial on the internet.
If you really want to debug using printf, use at least fprintf with stderr
at first argument, because stderr is unbuffered, whereas stdout is
line-buffered (that is, it waits for a '\n' or equivalent to output the line
on your screen, meaning that a printf("plop"); is not printed
immediately). Also, there is almost no excuses these days to have a handy
header file containing a ready to use set of logging functions, which has the
benefit of handling all this for you (plus thread safety, colors, date, thread d
printing, etc.).
valgrind is probably the most powerful debugging program available to the UNIX
programmer (from my modest experience). It allows you to track down memory leaks
(using the --leak-check=yes|full), to profile the heap (with massif), the
cache miss rate (with cachegrind), to profile using call graphs (with
callgrind), to find deadlocks and other concurrent problems (using
helgrind and drd for stack memory), to find pointer overrun (using
ptrcheck).
Additionally, I like to use the kcachegrind program, which analyse graphically
the output of numerous Valgrind tools (cachegrind, callgrind, etc.).
Numerous converters between file formats exist, to be able, for example, to use
the cool kcachegrind interface with gprof dumps.
It is often useful to know what is doing a given program, or where your own
program seems to lock under certain circumstances. strace and ltrace are
able to print, respectively, the system calls and the library calls a program is
doing, as well as pretty printing in a convenient way the arguments of the
functions. They are invaluable to have a quick idea of what is happening, before
throwing in a heavier tool such as gdb.
When it comes to reading manpages, I find it important to have a comfortable
software : colors, key bindings, other features such as search can bring speed
and efficiency to you manpages reading, when it comes to search for a particular
command line option, or a errno value of a system call.
At first (when I was a baby programmer), I used more, because I did not
question myself. I typed man ls, and read the whole thing, and eventually, I
had no idea that more was the program used to display the text with all
formatting. I used to think man was the whole program, rather shitty because
it did not allow me to go up or other fancy feature, but hell yeah, it gave me
access to knowledge so I wasn’t complaining.
Eventually, I knew about less, and thought that it would be cooler to use it
as my pager for man pages. I discovered the -P switch for the man command,
and it was pretty cool. I had search, I could move down and up, and had a
plethora of other shortcuts that I forgot.
Once, a guy (I think it was the mighty Maxime
Gaudin), showed me most, which,
logically, was better than more or less. And for one obvious reason, it had
all the features less had, but had color support. Yes, but not quite. One
thing I find horrible is that the G (that is, capital g), is bound to
« Go to line ».
Consider a typical use-case :
« Let’s go to the bottom, to see a quick example »
As a Vim user, I press G, and, with most, and I’m stuck, I don’t know what
to do, so I type iiiiii, and eventually Enter and then it tells me that
iiiiii is not recognized as a number, and then I remember that most uses t
and b to go to the top and the bottom. Which seems logic, but I don’t like it.
I couldn’t get used to it, constantly triggering the go to line feature, and
losing several seconds each time. For a heavy terminal user, clearly, most is
not an acceptable program.
Finally, I present the magnificent vimpager script, which has all the features
vim has (let’s say it’s sufficient), including the perfect key mapping
(hjkl to move, / to search, etc.) and the coloring of manpages. As a
bulimic vim user, it is absolutely perfect for my use of the terminal.
Additionally, several keys have been remapped, such as q to quit the pager,
which seems quite logical and consistent. I would say that a user of less
should use vimpager, as the key bindings are similar, and vimpager has
color support.
Don’t wait, grab a copy of vimpager there :
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1723 !
On a related note, when you want to consult a file but in read only, I was used
to type less file, but in fact, during a late night read of the vim manpage,
I found the view variant, which basically starts vim in read-only mode.
lsof
When you do development things, or sysadmin stuff, you always need to know what
process has this file opened, or which ports are used by that software.
Well, I guess you could probably strace them using a nice cuisine of grep
and friends, but guess what? There is a cooler way. And it’s always nice to be
cooler, right ?
Let me introduce … lsof a.k.a. Mr. « I’ve got the longest list of
options in the whole UNIX history » a.k.a.
LiSt Open
File
Let’s start gently. Which process has the file file opened :
Then, the other way around : which files (including sockets, pipe, etc.) has a
certain process opened :
lsof -p PID # PID is the PID of the process
lsof -c firefox
Another useful thing, listing the processes and file that are opened under
/home/user, but not in /home/user/secret_things :
lsof +d /home/user -d /home/user/secret_things
And for network guys, list process interacting (i.e. connecting to,
disconnecting to, connected to, etc.) list IPv4 addresses, using TCP,
connected to paul.cx, and restrict to HTTP connections :
# full version
lsof -i 4TCP@paul.cx:http
| | | |_ using HTTP
| | |
| | |_ interacting with paul.cx
| |
| |_ using TCP
|
4 ipv4
# short version :
lsof -i @paul.cx:http
# show all connections
lsof -i
So, here it is, no complaining ever about opened file somewhere or socket
already bound to a port without SO_REUSEADDR, eventually preventing a server
to run.
vim-orgmode > todo.txt
Honestly, I’m probably not the guy who uses vim-orgmode the most, and in the
best bay, as I use it as an
outliner/todo list manager, but anyway,
it is pretty awesome, compared to my previous solution, the famous todo.txt
everyone has.
Basically, it consists in one Vim plug-in which tries to be an
orgmode-clone for Vim. So, yeah, it doesn’t have all the
feature (since emacs’ orgmode can probably wash the dishes, using
esc-meta-alt-ctrl-d), but it works well enough for me:
You can write things like this:
* This is a top level fold
** This is a sublevel fold
This is text.
- These are …
- items of a list
- You can insert:
- date using <leader>sa
- lists using <leader>gil
- tags using <leader>t
** This is another sublevel fold
This is text.
* This is a toplevel fold.
and it gets nicely formatted. The whole point is, for people not familiar with
how an outliner works, that TAB folds and unfolds the folds, keeping the file
structured, clean and nice. I tend to think that clearly organized notes are
freeing the mind from having to think and remember about stuff.
If you’re crazy enough to have emacs installed (I’m not, at least on my
server, that makes me half-crazy, I suppose), then you can do a <leader>eh
or a <leader>ep to export as html or pdf, respectively. But I tend to use
Markdown for the things I want
to publish (like this article), or Latex if I want it to be pretty.
For reference, you can rush to
/doc/orguide.txt.
The installation process is quite usual, for a Vim plug-in: source the .vba,
or clone it in the ~/.vim/bundle directory if you are a user of the
powerful pathogen plug-in (it you’re not, you should, trust me).
If you tend to like graphical/web software, you can use
TiddlyWiki instead, but you should definitely put
some authentication in front of it (I use vim-orgmode in a tmux over ssh
on my server, so I don’t need anything else). Oh, and consider to use more
command line based tools, because, you know, it’s nicer and all.
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