Weekend

Some of the win from the weekend...

• We all went to a car boot sale at the donkey sanctuary, so saw the donkeys and bought some tat. We also bought a big bag of plums which got made into some very tasty jam.
• Would you believe that we had our first barbecue of the year? Well, we've been to a couple but hadn't had one in our own garden. This particular one featured our new speciality: barbecued flatbreads. We'll be doing them again.
• Another gallon of turbo cider is on its way. This time I have added a cup of tea to see how that affects things.
• Finally got around to watching In Bruges and laughed pretty much the whole way through. Great stuff. This was on <3's recommendation, and a good one. One of these days I'll persuade her to watch Fight Club.

Command History

Spotted on an old post from an abandoned blog out in the geek hinterlands, but I figured I'd have a go.

history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn | head

Got that?

Well, I work on quite a few machines, but there are two major Linux accounts I use: my networked (NIS) account and the separate account on my desktop box. So, desktop first...

  110   ssh
   76   ls
   73   td
   48   cd
   47   svn
   38   vim
   16   grep
   10   ping
    9   pushd
    9   less

As you can see, I ssh out quite a lot. 'td', by the way, is a little script I use for managing a to-do list.

And the network account...

  192   sudo
  171   ls
   68   glite-wms-job-status
   48   cd
   42   cat
   41   rm
   35   for
   34   history
   19   firefox
   18   man

So I sudo a lot — I'm an admin, what can I say? The 'glite' command is a grid operation from when I send test jobs out to exercise parts of our cluster (and most of the 'for' commands are sending out test jobs). Amazing how often I trawl history too! The 'firefox' invocations are mostly from yesterday when I was trying to work out why weird things were happening. But that's another story.

Of course, the number of concurrent sessions I have open on both of these accounts does distort the history a bit, but it's still interesting for me to see what I get up to!

firefox -no-remote

While checking out a user query this morning I stumbled across something quite bizarre: I launched Firefox from an (X-forwarded) ssh session on one of our servers, only to have the browser open a window on my desktop machine instead. Yes, I wanted the browser to display on my desktop, but not to actually run there.

So, after a heap of mucking about and fruitless web searching I eventually got fruitful and found the information I needed. Apparently this is a long-standing feature: Firefox on a remote machine will hand off to a process already running on your local box if it is available. This will nicely help to prevent overloading on servers (and is probably usually an appropriate thing to do) but runs counter to my intuition and, if my searching the web is anything to go by, to that of a good many others out there.

It must be said, however, that the majority of users out there will never notice this behaviour, or even begin to give a damn about it.

The way around this, incidentally, is to launch Firefox with the '-no-remote' option. Easy, huh?

[2008-08-24 Edit: s/--no-remote/-no-remote/]