Occasional Rants from the Fearless Leader

tostita

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Startup repair diagnosis and repair log
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Number of repair attemts: 1
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Root cause found:
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No OS files found on disk.

Repair action: Partition table repair
result: Failed. Error code= 0x490
Time taken = 3136 ms

When I have started multiple terminal sessions to server computers via SSH, I often run into problems when I forget that I have started a program in a different login session. Running pine multiple times is the worst, because of the little locking dance it does with the other pine sessions. Just thinking about it makes me unbearably sad, as if all the joy had drained out of the world. So, to defend myself against these ghostly login sessions, I now invoke the Patronus Charm:

[rbulling@tiamat:~/public_html/linux]$ patronus
Lumos!

Traversing floo network at pts/2, dementors spotted at:
pts/11
pts/5

Specialis Revelio!

Dementors found:
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
rbulling 18987  0.0  0.1  7000 2164 ?        S    10:45   0:00 sshd: rbulling@pts/5
rbulling 18993  0.2  0.0  5328 1372 pts/5    S    10:45   0:00 -bash
rbulling 19051  0.1  0.1  8048 2432 pts/5    S    10:45   0:00 elinks http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/
rbulling 19105  0.0  0.1  7000 2148 ?        S    10:45   0:00 sshd: rbulling@pts/11
rbulling 19110  0.2  0.0  5332 1372 pts/11   S    10:45   0:00 -bash
rbulling 19173  3.2  0.1 12528 3472 pts/11   S    10:45   0:00 pine -i

EXPECTO PATRONUM!

[rbulling@tiamat:~/public_html/linux]$

After running this, all the processes associated with the other terminal sessions die, so you are left with one and only one working login session. Unlike issuing kill -HUP -1, the traditional way to deal with this problem, the patronus script will not harm processes associated with your current terminal session, or any daemon processes you may own. So, you can even run it safely as root.

I wonder if this is the first published example of Harry Potter fan fiction in Bourne shell script…

• X11 (from the OS installation disk)
  
• iTerm (thanks colinmac)
  
• Xcode (thanks oddlystrange and kernelpanic)
  
• MacPorts (thanks kernelpanic)
  
• Adium(thanks kernelpanic)
  
• Quicksilver (thanks kernelpanic)
  
• VideoLAN (thanks kernelpanic).
  
• xPad (thanks kernelpanic)
  

I bought a Mac Mini tonight.

Calling All Mac Addicts:

Tell me all the cool things I should do with this box.

I'm hoping to use it for cross-platform software development and experimentation.

Nitty Gritty Details

The glowing screens inside the Apple store at Pentagon City Mall drew me in. My big kids played video games while I got the baby to fall asleep. Finally the lure of returning to the mother ship became too much for me. I spent 9 years as an Apple ][ fan in the 1980s. I walked out with the Mini (the higher-end version with the 2GHz processor, the 120GB hard drive, and the SuperDrive), a Bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse, and a Canon Pixma MP600 color printer.

[Edit: see the freely available version.]