Technology

tmux – Linux terminal multiplexer

I stumbled upon a very useful tool – tmux. It is a terminal multiplexer for Linux. If you are using Terminator or screen, you’d want to check it out. If you don’t use either of those, you definitely need to check it out.

With tmux, you can have a single shell in which you can create multiple sessions. You can split each session into a number of windows. You can detach from tmux and all your sessions and windows will remain open and running, much like with screen. Later you can attach back to them again or you can start a totally new instance. The interface is keyboard driven. It is simple and intuitive, but as with any other tool, you’ll need a bit of time to get used to it.

If you are a Fedora Linux user, all you have to do to try it out is: ‘yum install tmux‘. If you can read Russian, here is a quick introduction to most useful shortcuts. Check the official website for the rest of the documentation.

Android vs. iPhone fight is still ahead, not behind

SlashGear points to a new ComScore report of the US mobile market share. Both Android and iOS are growing their market shares, with the rest of the platforms going down.

To me it says that there is still enough space for Android and iOS to peacefully co-exist, despite all the little pushes and punches. Soon, however, they will have to get more serious with each other and we’ll have the chance to observe a tougher fight. Too bad that Steve Jobs is not leading Apple anymore. He is a great man to go against.

LinkedIn email love

In the age where pretty much each and every websites considers it its duty to ask for your email address and subscribe you to some kind of mailing list or notification system, it is still rare to see an email integration done right. Showing bad examples is not my favorite approach to treating the problem, since there are too many of them and they seldom do any good. Today, however, I have a good example to show.

As many of you know, I am a member of LinkedIn social network for professionals. One of the things you can do on LinkedIn is join the groups according to your professional interests. These groups are very much like forums – full of discussions. The groups you are subscribed to also show up on your profile, so other people can easily see what are you interested in.

LinkedIn has a system of notifications, where you could get an email for when something happens in those discussions. You can get individual emails or digests. In most systems that I’ve used until now, the setting is only up to the user. If one gets too many emails, a switch to digest mode usually happens. If too few are coming in, then the opposite occurs. I can’t remember a system that was helping the user to make a decision or to realize a need for the change.

Today I received the following email from LinkedIn.

Apparently, the system is smart enough to realize that I’ve been busy and didn’t have the time to follow up discussions in this particular group. So it not only suggested, but automatically changed a preference for me. It notified me accordingly, and provided a quick way to change it back (‘Change Settings’ button).

This is how you tell your users you love them. I have no other way to interpret this. Very well done!

One more thing

Last year Matt Mullenweg wrote this post and I somehow missed it.

There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.