Good FTP clients

• WinSCP (Windows)
• WS FTP LE (Windows)
• FileZilla (Windows, Linux)
• FireFTP (Windows, Linux)

Music players on Ubuntu

I haven't yet found software for Linux that equals Winamp on Windows, for ease of playlist manipulation.

• Movie player - ugh
• Banshee - Can't easily work with albums. Play Queue is too fiddly. Can't copy music between Play Queue, File System Queue and Playlists.
• Amarok - Better than Banshee. Actually lets me see my directories on disk! Easy to make playlists.
• Clementine - Works. Easy to browse files, easy to make playlists.
• XMMS - ?
• Audacious - ?
• Rhythm box - ?
• Songbird - ?

thanks

Know if output is being captured in Perl

if (-t STDERR) {
    print "standard error is not being captured (it's going to the terminal)\n";
    # email the error
}
else {

    print "standard error IS being captured\n";

    # just print the error

}

Developing over FTP

Using Eclipse and RSE plugin:

• Logs in okay
• But seems to always be closing directory sub-trees I've opened in 'Remote Systems' panel
• It wants to do an 'ls' on every parent directory in the hierarchy, every time I change files. Very slow.

Using CurlFtpFS:

• Install in Ubuntu from the software centre
• to mount: curlftpfs -v username:password@server.example.com local_dir/
• to unmount: fusermount -u local_dir/
• Performance is unusably slow... Eclipse wants to know about every single file on the remote server, not just the ones I'm editing.
• Saving the file through Eclipse using CurlFtpFS takes even longer than it would to upload it separately.

Using FileZilla and gedit:

• Browsing is fast
• Editing is fast
• But you have to navigate to every file manually each session, it doesn't remember what you had open
• The system of holding temp files locally is not ideal, but FileZilla detects changes in them very nicely
• You still can't grep over the files as they're all held remotely, and it's a bit fiddly to navigate to a specific file

Editing locally with Eclipse, and uploading after changes are made:

• Write an Ant script to upload any modified files?
• ...to investigate

Using vim's viewports

• :sp [filename] will split the Vim window horizontally
• Can be written out entirely as :split
• [filename] is optional, if it's omitted then the current file is loaded in the new viewport
• :vsp [filename] will split the Vim window vertically
• Can be written out as :vsplit
• Ctrl-e [filename] loads a new file into the current viewport
• Ctrl-w Ctrl-w moves between Vim viewports.
• Ctrl-w j moves one viewport down.
• Ctrl-w k moves one viewport up.
• Ctrl-w h moves one viewport to the left.
• Ctrl-w l moves one viewport to the right.
• Can also use the arrow keys instead of h/j/k/l
• Ctrl-w = tells Vim to resize viewports to be of equal size.
• Ctrl-w - reduce active viewport by one line.
• Ctrl-w 10- reduce active viewport by ten lines.
• Ctrl-w + increase active viewport by one line.
• Ctrl-w 10+ increase active viewport by ten lines.
• Ctrl-w q will close the active window.
• Ctrl-w r will rotate windows to the right.
• Ctrl-w R will rotate windows to the left.

Full article

Run bash in a viewport, with this plugin (easy installation).

Macro recorders for Windows 7

Testing on Windows 7 Pro (SP1), in a Virtual Box (VM) window, running under Ubuntu 11.04.

• AutoHotKey - scripting only, but users have built a recorder too.
• Overall good. Free.
• Steep learning curve, but users on IRC channel are very helpful
• Note: Trying running program in "Administrator mode" if it doesn't seem to work.
• How to develop scripts:
• Use Recorder to get basic outline
• Use included Window Spy to get precise coords (set "CoordMode, Mouse, Screen")
• May need to fiddle with WinActivate parameters
• Put sections of functionality into subroutines and test them individually
• Use TrayTips as debug output
• Make sure you make the script Sleep for at least 300ms between each action
• Quick Macro - Couldn't get it to work. Shareware.
• Auto Macro Recorder - Couldn't get it to work, either. Shareware.
• PC Anywhere - Couldn't even download it.