blog.arithm

For as long as I can remember it’s been a royal pain in the butt to log into a Linuxy server from a Windows box and get work done in Japanese. Tera Term, with fairly good multiple-encoding support, was fine back in the days when password authentication was still thought to be secure and most of us associated ssh with testy librarians.

I recently had high hopes for a reincarnation of Tera Term as UTF-8 Tera Term Pro with TTSH2. Though there seems to be a lot of activity, I could never get key-based authentication to work and had to go back to a rather clumsy, hacked version of PuTTY.

I’d downloaded Poderosa some time back but never really played around with it; for the most part I thought it was tabbed, scalable Cygwin. Recently, however, I noticed it’s nifty little encoding pulldown.

Convenient.

Rather than just launching Cygwin I tried out it’s SSH key wizard, maneuvered a login, broke the window into three or four tabs and then split them again vertically, horizontally, and wow.. this thing is really easy to use.

What’s really amazing is that the Poderosa project seems to be sponsored by the Japanese government. Brilliant, as this is a hugely powerful tool for Japanese engineers; many of whom suffer post-traumatic multiple encoding disorder. (“Ok, so if I cat this text through recode maybe I can see what’s going on here, as long as the hankaku doesn’t mojibake..”)

That said, I’d really love to know which section of the government they convinced to cough up funds, and how on Earth they presented it. Someone higher up must be a Linux engineer.

How to have to punch in your password only once per day (or less):

# Defaults specification

# Change the timeout
Defaults:username timestamp_timeout=1000

I would do this in Tokyo, except that no one freaking says anything in public.  Except to apologize.

I’ve been running a 空メール server for a number of years. As one might expect with a rule-based automated email reply system.. once in awhile the thing goes absolutely berserk. Usually I have to flop around the Internet trying to recover the commands I use (and promptly forget) to tame acid-tripping Postfix.

And generally this just boils down to postqueue -p to see what’s flying through and/or stuck in the queue and then postsuper -d ALL to clean it out.

Today, while tidying up, I came across pfqueue, a “console-based tool for handling MTA queues”. Looks great. Promptly tried it out and, surprise, surprise, while it emerges effortlessly on Gentoo, make install fails on my flavor of RedHat.

Need to figure this out. This tool could save me a ton of time.

Oh Lordy how I want to do this.

Just a quick follow-up to Practicing Safe Emacs. Everyone knows that Gentoo is the greatest distro on the planet, superior in all ways to RedHat. Anyway, in Gentoo it’s possible to create a generic .emacs file for all users. A great way to ensure that everyone is, among other things, practicing safe editing.

To set this up, simply cons the commands you want into

/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el

and the config commands will be applied to all users. See the Gentoo Wiki Tip on using this to load Portage-installed Emacs packages.