In Praise of screen

I've used screen for a few years now, but I only recently learned about one of its highly helpful features. As I was using my XO laptop in text only mode (ctrl-alt-fn-2), I was using screen to simulate multiple terminals, and I needed to copy and paste text between them. In the past, I've usually used screen when ssh-ing into a machine, and putty (my ssh client of choice) provided copy and paste, so I had never needed screen's system.

It turns out, screen's built-in, cross-window copy-paste system is a breeze to use. Press ctrl-a [ to enter copy mode, press enter to mark the start point and enter again to mark the end point. You have now copied the text. Switch to the desired window, and paste in the text using ctrl-a ].

This feature is especially handy in the XO laptop, where I've never been able to figure out how to copy and paste in the Terminal Activity.

For me, screen's most useful feature has been the ability to detach and reattach to a session which continues to run on the server. If I lose my ssh connection, all of my processes continue to run, and I can reattach to my screen session as if nothing ever happened.

Screen can be difficult to understand if you've never seen it in action, so I recommend watching this video. You can also learn more in this tutorial.

XO Give One Get One - Round Two

As I was looking for some information on running the XO laptop in text mode, I stumbled across this page in the OLPC wiki:

One Laptop per Child is launching its second 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program starting in November, 2008, delivering its XO Laptop globally via Amazon.com. Although the first iteration of the 'G1G1' program was extremely successful and sold more than 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

The laptop's operating system will be Linux-based (it will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports).

If you've been thinking about getting one of these little green machines, it looks like the window will open once again. I wrote about the program last year. (Here is a list of all posts I've made on the XO Laptop.)

As for running in text mode, I've settled for using the terminal by pressing ctrl-fn-alt-1. To switch back to the normal view. press ctrl-fn-alt-3. For some reason, I can only start screen as root.

The Ascention of JavaScript

I added a couple of new things to my little JavaScript library (q12). It turns out there was a flaw in the library when making HTTP requests which included custom HTTP headers in Firefox3 (and maybe others). If you ever run into (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader], try opening the HTTP request first (as I recently learned). I've always said that writing this library was for education more than any anticipated serious use.

I also added a function for ARC4 encryption, which doesn't provide strong security, but it is still used in some places.

This has been quite a big month for JavaScript. In just a couple of weeks V8, Tracemonkey, and SquirrelFish Extreme have leapforgged one another and improved the state of JavaScript execution speed. It's gotten me thinking.

The more I use JavaScript, the more I like it. The language itself is extremely simple, I would argue even simpler than C - it's the APIs in browsers which are sometimes complex and inconsistent ;-) With all of these optimizations, JavaScript is looking better and better as a language in which to implement a new dynamic language.

Between the Just In Time compiler (JIT) and the polymorphic inline cache, some state of the art tools are coming to bear on one of the most widely available programming languages today. JavaScript is making strides to overcome a very difficult problem: maintaining complete runtime flexibility while providing speedy execution. There are significant investments being made in JavaScript as a language, and it seems that some of these open source components should be reusable. I'm not sure how much of these libraries would stand alone, but it would be a very interesting experiment to see if a new language could be implemented in JavaScript.

A Revived Project

q12 is back!

I'm slowly starting back up again on my note taking wiki application. I created my own version of TiddlyWiki several months ago, but then started working on other projects. I'm planning to rewrite my note taking Ajax application to run on Google App Engine, and as I was getting started I realized that there were a few things missing from the Ajax library that I had written as part of this project.

I had created my own simple unit test framework in JavaScript, and I finally got around to uploading the unit tests for the library to the open source project. I've also been learning about manipulating browser cookies from within JavaScript. Aside: Cookie's in JavaScript are weird! When you say document.cookie = something, reading document.cookie doesn't give you the same thing back (the expiration, domain, and path information are squirreled away somewhere else).

I've also added a minified version of the q12 library, it weighs in at a mere 10k. Download the library today!