Today, a friend sent me an interesting discovery: a website working only with Windows.

Ok… this is certainly not the first time you've heard something like this. So let me rephrase this:

Today, a friend sent me an interesting discovery: a website where TCP connections only work when initiated from a Windows computer.

Ahh… never heard this one have you?

I've done most things using CLIs: Commodore 64 don't have GUIs or mouses (well.. there was GeOS ), AmigaOS is quite UNIX+X11-like, and I can't live with Windows without Cygwin installed.

When I bought my MacBook, one of the first things I did was to launch the terminal. My last meal crawling its way back through my throat forced me to close it fast!

Ok... it's not that bad, but it doesn't seem to allow turning off that annoying bold and use 16 colors instead. The option "Use Option as Meta Key" is nice, but at the same time a pain... how am I supposed to type @, , {, [, … without a normal "alt" key? (BTW I'm mostly using a "French Canada" keymap) On the other hand, I'm not used to type ESC followed by left-arrow or w or … I want my meta key!

Then there's iTerm. It can turn off bold and use 16 colors. Not bad.. but I can't seem to get a working meta key.

So my quest is over... I want rxvt-unicode back! It supports everything and have the greatest UTF-8 support I've ever seen: Hit Control-Shift and 2022 and you get •, hit Control-Shift and click on the bullet, and you get an overlay saying "2022".

After being asked by a few friends about how to get rxvt-unicode working under Os X, I decided to dump this in my newly born blog.

Thus, in this article, I'm going to describe (tersely and yet verbosely enough, I hope) how I launch various X11 or shell applications like gnuplot, urxvt, ssh to server <insert_server_name_here> or gucharmap using QuickSilver.

Be warned that I'm assuming at least some knowledge on how to use a terminal, what is a shell, and such.

For years I employed a conventional backup methodology to backup my personal server to my home server: monthly full backups, weekly and daily incrementals to save space.

A few months ago, my home internet provider (Vidéotron) vitiated the quality of their service: from unlimited monthly usage, they slammed a 100 gigabyte limit in our face.

This led me on the divine quest.. “How to quit byte-drinking in 30 days”. I kind of failed and ultimately went for a commercial link, but still have found a marvelous piece of software… Dirvish.

I wish I had made that discovery years ago!

Each night my full backup takes less bandwidth (and time) than a daily incremental previously took (thanks to rsync).

The full tree of what I backup can be accessed like any other file on my drive and takes less space than the previous backups did (thanks to hardlinks)!

Restoring a file doesn't require hours of untarring to find what I'm looking for.. simply cd, copy/scp, and enjoy (or use the included locate-like system to find things first).

For those using a Mac with Leopard, it's very similar to Time Machine.