I don't like color in my command line windows. Colorization in ls's directory listings drives me bonkers; it's the first thing I turn off on a new system. I have, however, relented and added a little bit of conditional color to save me from an all too frequent error.

I have access to a lot of UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Some are machines I run, some are my employer's, and some belong to customers. Most all of them I've never physically seen but instead access through remote ssh, secure shell, connections. My normal command line prompt on these machines looks like:

A few weeks back I got a Roomba Robotic Vacuum (http://www.irobot.com/consumer/product_detail.cfm?prodid=9) as a wonderful gift. Shipped with it was the optional remote control. The Roomba is fully automatic, but it's programmed to pick up dirt not to chase the cat -- you need the remote for that.

However, long time readers (you poor bastards) will remember that I try to maintain a strictly one remote coffee table (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00022.html). That meant the Roomba had to go onto the Phillips Pronto TSU-2000 Universal Remote. I thought for sure I'd find a CCF file for it, but it looks like only the people with newer remotes are getting the Roomba. Fortunately someone in the RemoteCentral forms helped out with instructions on how to back-convert the remote configuration and after a few wasted hours I can now steer the vacuum from the couch. Apparently I became a yuppie when I wasn't looking.

I've been rolling this one around in my head for a few years now, and I think it's finally coming closer to fruition: I'd like to start an old style social club.

In his book The Great Good Place Ray Oldenburg, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of West Florida, says:

"Most needed are those 'third places' which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase 'third places' derives from considering our homes to be the 'first' places in our lives, and our work places the 'second.'"

Working from home I distinctly feel the need for at least a second place. Each day I head to the local coffee shop and drink more coffee than I should around semi-familiar faces. It's a pleasant time, but it's not community. Similarly in the evenings I frequently find myself wanting to get out of the house and amongst friends, without incurring the organizational and monetary expenses of an organized restaurant or bar outing.

I get a lot of email, and a good percentage of it is spam. To help filter the spam from the ham I use software called SpamAssassin (http://useast.spamassassin.org/). SpamAssassin applies hundreds of tests to each incoming email and increases or decreases the mail's spam score depending on the result. If the total spam score for a message is above a pre-set threshold (4.0 for me) it gets put aside.

The tool scp, UNIX for secure copy, is a wrapper around ssh, secure shell. It lets you move files from one machine to another through an encrypted connection with a command line syntax similar to that of the standard cp, local copy, command. I use it 100 times a day.

The command line syntax for scp is at its most basic:

scp <source> <destination>

Either the source, destination, or both can be on a remote computer. To denote that one just prefixes the file name with "username@machinename:". So this command:

I've got a policy here on the unblog where I only do entries about things I've created. When I wanted to hype the Diplomacy at Sea V/Dip Con event coming up March 2005 I had to find something to do with it first, so I volunteered to set up their website.

Whenever I need to set up a quick site I head over to the Open Source Web Design site (http://oswd.org/) and pick from their vast array of great designs. This time I went with one called Evolver. It has a clean look and clean code. Rialto did a great job of synthesis and design on this one.

I added a RSS feed to the Minneapolis Security Camera Project site. Subscribers to it will see any new cameras as soon as they're posted. If you're not yet using an RSS aggregator let me know and I'll chisel the list on a stone tablet and mail it to you whenever it's updated.

The feed is at http://mpls-watched.org/map/rss.xml

History of the World is a fine game from Avalon Hill. It's distributed by Hasbro now, and it's one of the rare Avalon Hill games that Hasbro managed to improve when they "cleaned it up".

History of the World uses dice to simulate combat, and they do so in a way so as to intentionally skew the likelihood of success toward the attacker. There are, however, various terrains (mountainous, ocean straight, forest), types of attack (amphibious), bonuses (strong leader, elite troops, forts, weaponry, etc.) which can affect the success rate of an attacker.

I use the Mozilla web browser on a few different machines, and its lack of roaming profiles/bookmarks is a source of annoyance. When I bookmark a site on my laptop, I want that bookmark to be available on my desktop machine. In order to achieve that I use a kludgy network of scripts, CVS, crontab entries, and the bookmarksync application.

Bookmarksync (http://sourceforge.net/projects/booksync/) is a tiny little program that takes as input two different bookmark files and outputs the combination of the two. It works just fine in all respects, except that it converts tab-group bookmarks into bookmark folders.

Back when I started at the University of Minnesota in 1995 the course registration system was terminal/telnet based. Students would register using a clumsy mainframe-style form interface. When a class a student wanted was full or required unsatisfied prerequisites, the student come supplicant would go to the department to beg for a "magic number" which, when input into the on-line registration system, would allow him or her admission into the course.