Anil Gulecha's Musings

SSHplus Appindicator

My previous little utility – sshlist – got quite some attention, and helped out a lot of folks who were missing sshmenu on Unity. You can read more about the intentions behind this utility in this entry. Benjamin Heil further modified it giving it a simple parsable configuration format, and supporting launching applications.

SSHplus builds on both of the above, adding one the most requested features : supporting sshmenu configuration. SSHplus adds simple identification of sshmenu configuration – it grabs the title, and ssh parameters and sets them up in the menu (as shown in screenshot). It does not yet recognize  other items like profile etc. If you need an entry with very specific formatting, you can simply add the right arguments in sshplus configuration.

Features

• Launch SSH, rdesktop, etc.
• Compatible with sshmenu configuration file
• Launch any application – for ex. VLC hangs a lot on me, and I need a simple way to kill it (screenshot)
• Supports nested folders (but not yet for sshmenu nested entries – coming soon)

Setting up SSHplus

• Download the latest sshplus.py  file from the github repo.
• Copy file  to /usr/local/bin
• Edit file .sshplus in home directory using simple configuration (explained below).
• Launch sshlist.py
• Or better yet, add it to gnome startup programs list so it’s run on login.

Example Configuration  ~/.sshplus

# Application launchers in a folder
folder:Applications
Show top|gnome-terminal|-x top
Kill VLC|pkill| -9 vlc

#back to main folder
folder:
#sep adds a separator
sep

# label: adds labels to the menu
label:SSH connections

SSH server1|gnome-terminal|-x ssh root@google.com
SSH server2|gnome-terminal|-x ssh -p 456 server2
Find the source|gnome-terminal|-x ssh neo@theone.com

sep

# Use rdesktop to connect to Windows Servers
label:RDesktop connections
Win-Server 1|rdesktop|-T “Win-Server 1″ 1.2.3.4
Win-Server 3 (with many arguments)|rdesktop|-g 1320×680 -T “Win-Server 3″ -x l -P -r sound:local 1.2.3.6

sep
label:Putty Connections

# PuTTY
PuTTY-Session 1|putty|-load SavedSession1
PuTTY-Session 2|putty|-load SavedSession2

#If present SSHmenu connections will be automatically added

Thanks to the users and commenters on sshlist who provided feedback, and to Benjamin Heil and Fabio for their modifications. Feel free to fork the project on github.

The Problem

A question goes like this:

“Michelle and Mike begin walking and go 5 miles due north.
Their friend Devrae begins at the same point and goes 12 miles due west.”

The values are:

a) shortest distance between Mike and Devrae      b) 13 miles.

You have to answer if:

a>b or    a<b or   a=b or   cannot be determined.

The answer was said to be a=b with a nice 5-12-13 triangle and Pythagoras rule.

Is that right?

Is that really the right answer?

So, is it? I’d like to argue not. From the question we can only assume M, M and D are humans, and walking around on some land somewhere, on this planet. Let’s say they started walking from a point on the equator. MM go north along a longitude, and D left on the 0 latitude.

On a piece of paper the distance would be 13 miles, but given the curvature of the planet, the distance between the starting point and M/M would be < 5 miles.. because they walked  along a curvature, and the shortest distance (the chord) would be say 4.9 miles. Same goes for D.. the distance from start point is 11.9 miles. Thus the shortest distance is possibly less than 13 miles. So the answer could be a<b.

Then there’s the ambiguity of the directions. Is west the direction of the sunset, or is it simply a reference to the direction left? If the former, the answer could goto cannot be determined because the latitudes are equidistant, but longitudes are farthest apart at the equator, and next to each other at the poles. So the answer would vary depending on the starting point (and it is possible that it is always less than 13 miles, due to the curvature of the planet).

What is that I hear? “Anil, you didn’t think of the mountains and the cliffs! what if they were in the way?”. I think a round flattened planet is a good approximation to make in walking problem (specially one that goes into miles) Think of the problem in terms of 1200 miles, and the distances and curvature become more apparent. Heck, what if the distance is > circumference .. M may end up in the same damn place again.. being only ~12 miles away from D!

So aptitude question writers, please refrain from using walking and driving in your distance questions, and east and west for directions. May I suggest flying spaceships, and left and right.

Of course, there’s the whole warped space thing to consider then.

I upgraded my netbook from UNR 10.04 (which I wrote about here) to the latest 10.10 Maverick. Notes and thoughts below.

Font

Loving the new font! Kudos to the Ubuntu team on focussing on these details, and specially to Mark Shuttleworth’s leadership in driving these changes. I used to previously install Lucida/Mac fonts to make the desktop look good, but the new Ubuntu font is sweet too (and I notice many similarities to Lucida Grande as well). This font is a little less thick,and looks very good in small sizes.

Gnome-do

The old netbook-launcher is gone (and I don’t really miss it.. gnome-do is more than enough). I hardly ever reach for the gnome main menu now.

Misc

• The middleclick solution works as before.
• Like the global-menu applet (apt-get install indicator-applet-appmenu). One more row of free space on the desktop with the menu-bar moved to the panel.
• Set the gnome panel to auto-hide, and save that space as well.

Overall, Maverick is the best to have come out of the Ubuntu project in terms of polish. Kudos to the team behind the release.

Announce

It’s been quite a hectic weeks with great projects, a lot of traveling and big announcements. Here’s a rundown (a tad late, perhaps)

Debconf

I attended Debconf10, and presented on the Nexenta Core Platform. I had discussions with the Debian leaders on how the two projects can collaborate more.

• Slides
• Talk Video
• Great picture

Big thanks to Zack, the guys from kFreeBSD, and Don Armstong for insightful discussions. Also to my employer, Nexenta, who sponsored Debconf10.

Nexenta Core Platform 3

NCP v3 has been released. This release was a year in making, and the big change was the move from OpenSolaris b104 to b 134. This brings in a lot of additional ZFS goodness. Read the release announcement.

And with this we come to one of the biggest announcements in recent OpenSolaris history: the Illumos project.

Illumos

Garrett D’Amore, a Nexenta employee (and my boss), lead the formation of a fully open codebase and community around the Illumos project. This started off as a branch of the OpenSolaris codebase.

Oracle recently “closed the tap” on the ON mercurial gate. So no more continuous and flowing code. The good news is Oracle plans on making huge tarball releases along with Solaris binary releases. Read more on the full leak.

This basically forces Illumos to become a fork.

Illumos has a lot of weight behing it. I witnessed this firsthand as Garrett’s mail and phone were off the hook a couple days after the announcement. The community is large. There were around 350 people in the announcement call. The IRC headcount hovers around 200 (#OpenSolaris is around 370).

And it’s not just the community. Corporations have put their weight behind it: Nexenta, Joyent, Reliant Security, etc.

Illumos is almost fully there as a self hosting platform. With Oracle dropping the ball on the OpenSolaris community, and the OGB collapsing, Illumos has become the de-facto home of the community. Join in if you’re interested in the future of OpenSolaris.

Misc

The Golden Gate bridge

• The Illumos announcement was from the Chrysler building. A marvel in architecture.
• New York is all it’s cracked up to be.
• Ian Bagg is a decent comedian.. caught a live show at Rooster Feathers.
• Thanks to Ketan for accompanying on the bike ride around San Franciso and Sausalito.
• The Nexenta offices are nice. Working in person is.. different than working over SMTP, IRC and skype.

Hi visitor,

This site is currently being reworked. Check back soon!