• screen -ls (list screens)
• screen -r (reattach)
• Ctl-A c (new screen)
• Ctl-A A (rename screen)
• Ctl-A <num> (switch to screen)
• Ctl-A d (detach)
• Ctl-A M (monitor for activity)
• Ctl-A _ (monitor for silence)

After getting those commands under my belt, I was very impressed and I use screen all the time now. However, a lot of Screen’s power comes from the customization of Screen through its startup files. Good information about startup files is scattered across the web, so I’ll share what I’ve put together.

Below is my ~/.screenrc file, compiled from the information at softpanorama, from Matt Cutts, from the Screen FAQ, and from the Screen manual’s command list. I’m using this on Ubuntu 8.10 servers over at Slicehost and on my MacOSX 10.5 laptop.

UPDATE: Added more comments around the termcapinfo setting that enables scrollbars to work as expected.

# For a complete list of available commands, see http://bit.ly/jLtj

# Message to display in the status line when activity is detected in a
# monitored window.
activity              "activity in %n (%t) [%w:%s]~"

# Detach session on hangup instead of terminating screen completely.
autodetach            on              # default: on

# When a bell character is sent to a background window, screen displays a
# notification in the message line. The notification message can be re-defined
# by this command.
bell_msg              "bell     in %n (%t) [%w:%s]~"

# This command controls the display of the window captions. Normally a caption
# is only used if more than one window is shown on the display.
caption               always          "%{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{+b kw}%n*%t%f %?(%u)%?%{= kw}%?%+Lw%?"

# Select line break behavior for copying.
crlf                  off             # default: off

# Select default utmp logging behavior.
#deflogin              off             # default: on

# Set default lines of scrollback.
defscrollback         3000            # default: 100

# If set to 'on', screen will append to the 'hardcopy.n' files created by the
# command hardcopy; otherwise, these files are overwritten each time.
hardcopy_append       on              # default: off

# This command configures the use and emulation of the terminal's hardstatus
# line. The type 'lastline' will reserve the last line of the display for the
# hardstatus. Prepending the word 'always' will force screen to use the type
# even if the terminal supports a hardstatus line.
hardstatus            alwayslastline  "%{+b kr}[ %H ] %{ky} Load: %l %-=%{kb} %c  %Y.%m.%d"
msgwait               15

# Set message displayed on pow_detach (when HUP is sent to screen's parent
# process).
pow_detach_msg        "BYE"

# Set the default program for new windows.
shell                 bash

# Default timeout to trigger an inactivity notify.
silencewait           30              # default: 30

# Change text highlighting. See http://bit.ly/11RDGZ
sorendition           gK

# Do NOT display copyright notice on startup.
startup_message       off             # default: on

# Set $TERM for new windows. I have more luck with 'linux' than Terminal's
# default 'xterm-color' (^H problems). Comment out to use the default.
term                  linux

# Tweak termcap, terminfo, and termcapinfo  entries for best performance.
termcap               linux           'AF=\E[3%dm:AB=\E[4%dm'
termcap               xterm-color     'AF=\E[3%dm:AB=\E[4%dm'
terminfo              linux           'AF=\E[3%p1%dm:AB=\E[4%p1%dm'
terminfo              xterm-color     'AF=\E[3%p1%dm:AB=\E[4%p1%dm'

# Allow xterm / Terminal scrollbars to access the scrollback buffer. This
# enables the behavior you'd expect, instead of losing the content that scrolls
# out of the window.
termcapinfo           linux           ti@:te@
termcapinfo           xterm-color     ti@:te@

# Use visual bell instead of audio bell.
vbell                 on              # default: ???

# Message to be displayed when the visual bell is triggered.
vbell_msg             " *beep* "

I have Leopard setup to automatically log me out after 75 minutes of inactivity. However, that automatic logout is cancelled by Safari when Safari has multiple tabs open.

About a month ago, someone nearby my home got a Linksys wireless router. The network is open and still named “linksys”. It’s actually somewhat convenient for times that my network is down (like when I’m overhauling my home network layout — I’ve never had an unscheduled outage with SpeakEasy that wasn’t my fault). Unfortunately, my laptop likes the new network more than it likes my home wireless network and would always connect there first. Not cool.

Finally, I’ve tracked down list of networks to which Airport will connect and removed a bunch of cruft. For example, I don’t think I’ll need eircom any time soon. To open the list of preferred wireless networks, navigate: Apple menu > System Settings > Network > Airport

After I removed everything except tmobile and my home network, I discovered that I could have simply re-arranged the networks in order of preference, putting my home network first. Oh well.

The installation was painless, but requires administrative rights. After the ODBC driver was installed, I used the ODBC Manager to configure an ODBC connection to the Access file I received. This opened the Actual Technologies configuration wizard which made the setup a snap. Once the ODBC instance was defined, I was able to open Excel 2004 and pull in the records without any difficulty. The trial edition limits the result set to three rows, but it was obvious that the product did exactly what I needed.

Here’s an interesting detour for you, though. I actually took the time to scan the license agreement and was surprised to see that the license included the copyright for an open source project to read MDB files. Well, who needs a commercial product when you can have the open source product on which it was built?! Too bad that it didn’t compile under OSX. Well, it might have compiled with enough work. The ./configure script wanted GTK libraries. I thought about it for a few minutes… How far was I will to go to avoid spending $30 bucks? But then the reason I use OSX instead of Linux is that I decided long ago that I’m willing to trade money for mortality (time); I’m willing to pay to not have to futz around making things work. I love OSX for many reasons, but the biggest is that it just works.

So Actual Technologies got my money and I got a license key to unlock the driver to return more than three rows. The product works exactly as advertised and I highly recommend it. And Actual Technologies is local to Chicagoland, so I’m helping the area technology industry. Go me!

I upgraded to Quicktime 7.0.4 as well. That hasn’t given me problems, but apparently it doesn’t like Flip4Mac — the Quicktime plug-in to play Windows Media formats that has just been bless by Microsoft.

I also ordered family packs of iWork and iLife to upgrade the two Mac laptops in the house. When those arrived at the end of last week, I eagerly installed them.

iPhoto ’06 seems to resolve the constant iPhoto instability I suffered. The firwst time I launched it, it upgraded my 3,000+ image photo library to its new format without incident. iPhoto ’06 is much more responsive and has not yet crashed on me. Thanks, Apple — although I don’t think I should have to pay for such a critical a bug fix. One of the new iPhoto’s much-touted features is actually turning into a curse — iPhoto scrolls too quickly now — it is very difficult to stop in the general vicinity of the photos I desired using the touch pad two-finger scrolling. Finally, photocasts — despite being poorly named — are just as easy as Steve made them look on stage. I haven’t trying opening one on a non-Mac yet, but the couple I tested with my wife were sucked right into her iPhoto like magic. I can see this being an excellent way to share photos of the kids, family vacations, etc. once the entire family is Mac-enabled.

iWeb is a very nice personal Web site generator. It is easy and fun to use — in fact, it may inspire my wife to create her own little corner of the Internet. I’m playing with it now to determine if I want to migrate my aviation blog over to iWeb. It would certainly be prettier in iWeb.

I don’t use Keynote much, so I can’t really espouse the value of Keynote 3′s upgrades in iWork. However, I’ve just taken over work on a newsletter for one of my organizations and appreciate the new Pages themes. The embedded image manipulation is nice, but otherwise Pages is pretty much the same — a simple page layout engine for the rest of us.

That’s all for now.

However, I noticed that she was vertically scrolling her applications “the old fashioned way”, like have to on my PowerBook: by moving the mouse cursor to manipulate the scroll bar. I showed her how to scroll by using two fingers and she was ecstatic. A few days later that I observed that she had entirely converted to two-fingered-scrolling and that it was really working out for her.

Every once in a while, she would hand me the iBook to look at something on the screen, such as a Web site, and I would get to use the two-fingered scrolling. I started envying her that feature. It works so smoothly, so intuitively, I would find myself trying to use it when I returned to my PowerBook.

I tried gaining similar functionality using SideTrack but scrolling along the right side of the pad never clicked with me. I recalled seeing a couple of drivers for earlier iBooks and PowerBooks that mimicked the two-fingered scrolling. Performing a Google search I found iScroll2.

I’ve been using iScroll2 now for three weeks. It’s a good product and hasn’t demonstrated any undesirable side-effects on my PowerBook, which is running 10.4.3. It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the native support in my wife’s iBook — in particular, it doesn’t alway’s “catch” when I’m using two fingers and it’s scrolling is a little jumpy when it does — but it is an adequate solution for me.

Unfortunately, way down in the VueScan release notes, under “Mac OSX Release Notes” is this little clause: To use the Epson Perfection 3170, 4180 or 4490 with VueScan, you need to first install the Epson software for this scanner.

Grumble, grumble. I missed that earlier. So I went to Epson’s Web site and downloaded just the OSX driver. The driver’s installer is a bit strange — it creates a folder with another installer inside of it — but when I was done running that installer, it seems that Epson’s driver was present and no new unwanted applications were to be found cluttering my drive. Therefore, I’m not overly upset with the need to install an Epson driver. [Updated 01Dec@2203: In fact, the installer did drop two applications into /Applications: Epson Scan and Epson Scanner Monitor. If no major harm comes to my system from dropping them in the Trash, then I'm still okay with the whole thing.] VueScan detected the scanner the first time it was launched after the driver was installed.

I haven’t used VueScan at all yet, except for a quick proof-that-the-scanner-works scan, so I can’t give a review of its performance. I can say that its UI is very functional, but lacking aesthetic appeal I’ve come to expect from Mac applications. It’s like a UI I would design, rather than the UI a good Apple developer would design. I’ll probably have more to say later once I’ve used VueScan some more. Oh, and I’ll probably have some feedback about the scanner, too. Sometime. In the future.

Searching for “osx imposition software” was quite fruitful. I eventually tried the demo of BookLightning by metaobject, which sells for $49. I drag-n-dropped my 4 page PDF onto the applications and it immediately produced a new PDF with my desired layout. If I hadn’t caught a snippet of instructions on metaobject’s Web site, I’d have found the application as confusing as others have on VersionTracker. The application gets two-thumbs up from me, but I’m still pondering if the orientation of the second page at 180 degrees from the first will cause headaches on the duplex printers I use.

1. The instuctions are excellent. Follow them exactly and the operation is a cake walk.
2. Unslinging an NSLU2 (“slug”) requires a real hard drive — a flash drive does not work. Or, it does not work with the amount of tinkering I was willing to perform.
3. Install OpenSSH as described before the final reboot, while you are still logged in to telnet. Otherwise you have to unplug the drives reboot (again) to regain telnet access.
4. Mac OSX does not have arping installed by default (and it’s not a package on fink), so accessing RedBoot is a really frustrating matter of exact timing. (It does appear to be available through OpenDarwin’s Darwin Ports project.)

Installing a Java JVM was simple too, thanks to these instructions, but JamVM does not run Jetty out of the box, so I’ll investigate running Tomcat and Resin next. If necesary, I will then compile Kaffe on the slug and try all of the containers again.

I have left the extension installed on my laptop and have not suffered any instability or problems as a result. And I like the idea of being able to read Linux partitions from my laptop in a crunch.