Nearly a year ago, Mark Jason Dominus blogged about runN, a program he’d written. I’ve stol– uh, I mean, adapted his version for my own ends, with a couple of differences. This is a rationale for my changes.

SSH is great; it’s highly secure, and actually easier to use than insecure alternatives like rsh or Telnet. In fact, it’s so easy to integrate SSH with everything else you do that it’s commonplace to rely on it for all sorts of things. But oddly, that very ubiquity tends to reveal an unexpected problem when you try to use SSH for, say, accessing a revision-control system: merely connecting to the remote end and performing the handshaking necessary to set up the encrypted channel takes an appreciable amount of time.

So herewith instructions on how to eliminate that overhead.

Something I find awkward about Git is that it doesn’t seem to deal with the concept of a tracked but uncommitted file — that is, the situation you’d get into with CVS after running cvs add on a new file, but before committing that file to the central repository.

Eric Sink has an interesting piece about MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare. The basic idea is that one way of categorising software is by who uses it:

• MeWare: only the developer
• UsWare: the developer, among others
• ThemWare: people other than the developer

I think most programmers can see what Eric’s getting at there. If you’ve ever worked on, say, a piece of software used exclusively by people in a different department of the company you work for, you know how hard it can be to ensure that the software actually meets those people’s needs.

However, I took issue with one particular thing Eric says.

A colleague approached me today regarding a unit test he was writing. He was constructing a series of test cases from a data structure; his code at the time used a multi-line string of which each line had several fields which together described a test to run.

GNU Screen is an extremely useful piece of software, but one that requires an annoying amount of hackery to make it useful. Herewith a description of why you want to use it, and what you have to do to make it work better.