Batch file: Trillian global disconnect and reconnect

I use Trillian for most of my instant messaging, because it allows me to connect to AIM and Yahoo through one common user interface (it also supports ICQ, MSN, and IRC, but I don't use [it for] those). The features I like about it are numerous, but one of my major complaints is the way it sometimes has trouble reconnecting after being disconnected from one of the networks.

Normally, it tries a few times to reconnect, automatically. But sometimes it seems like it gives up too soon. When this happens, you have to right click the system tray icon, go to the "Connections" submenu, and choose "Global Disconnect". Then, you have to do the exact same thing, but choose "Global Reconnect". The initial "Global Disconnect" is usually required, because Trillian is stuck in a state where it thinks you are connected in some way, such that just doing "Global Reconnect" wouldn't do anything.

As anyone that knows me could tell you, I hate doing extra steps, particularly involving the mouse, when a simple keyboard shortcut could suffice. So, several years ago, I made this simple batch file, which doesn't do anything magical, but I use it almost every day.

The batch file, included in the box below, uses TrillKey to send a "Global Disconnect" command to the currently-running instance of Trillian. Then, it waits 1 second, to give Trillian time to deal with the first request. Then, it uses TrillKey to send a "Global Reconnect" command to Trillian. For the brief delay in between commends, I use the 'sleep' command from cygwin, but a couple other ways to put delays into batch files can be found here: http://malektips.com/xp_dos_0002.html.
To call this batch file, I have a shortcut to it on my desktop, with a shortcut key assigned to it (Ctrl-Alt-T). Works like a charm!

@echo off
c:\programs\trillkey.exe disconnect
sleep 1
c:\programs\trillkey.exe reconnect

While writing this post, I noticed that I'm using a really old version of TrillKey (from 2002). The latest version includes additional features, so my batch file can be simplified to a single command:

@c:\programs\trillkey.exe disconnect delay 1 reconnect

TrillKey can do a LOT more than just disconnect and reconnect, though. I highly recommend checking it out.

How to send an SMS from cell phone to an AIM user

I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but I only learned about it recently. Some cell phones let you sign on to instant messenger clients (usually AIM), but that can be less than ideal. When I did that a couple years ago, every single communication my phone did with AIM counted as a text message. That includes messages you send or receive, as well as sign-on related messages, and even disconnection messages. I'd get disconnected fairly frequently, and every time that happened, it would cost me 2-3 text messages to sign back on. At 10 cents a pop (unless you pay for a plan with a bucket of monthly text messages), that got annoying pretty fast.

Well, I recently found out that you can send a message to an AIM user, using your cell phone, without logging on with any actual AIM client. Just send an SMS text message with the following format:

Recipient: 265010
Message: AIM_screen_name: message text

I know there are all sorts of "mobile AIM" features, but this is one simple one that has come in handy several times for me, already.

How to list just directories in bash

This morning, I was trying to find a way to list just the subdirectories in the current directory, in a bash shell script I was writing. I thought it would be simple, but everything I tried seemed to either take an extraordinarily long time, or felt like an ugly hack.

The first thing I tried was:
find . -type d

But this was extremely slow, because it was recursively searching inside every subdirectory as well. I just wanted a list of subdirectories inside the current directory. I won't bore you/clutter this post up with any more of my less-than-ideal methods.

What follows are a couple of ways of doing what I was trying to do, which I found in a post (and its comments) on the Ubuntu Blog, "List only the directories":

ls -l | grep “^d”

This works, but gives a 'long' directory listing, when all I wanted was a list of directory names.

---

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1

This one was my favorite, since it used the method I originally tried, but it fixed the slowness by using parameters to avoid recursion. It gave me a couple warnings about the order of the parameters, though, so I changed it to this:
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d

---

ls -d */

This gave me the same output as the 'find' method did, but some timing tests showed me that the 'find' method was about 2 times faster.

A Handy CSS Debugging Snippet

From A Handy CSS Debugging Snippet:

* { outline: 2px dotted red }
* * { outline: 2px dotted green }
* * * { outline: 2px dotted orange }
* * * * { outline: 2px dotted blue }
* * * * * { outline: 1px solid red }
* * * * * * { outline: 1px solid green }
* * * * * * * { outline: 1px solid orange }
* * * * * * * * { outline: 1px solid blue }

This code, if placed in your stylesheet, outlines every element on the page with colored boxes. I like this because it's simple, and I learned something from it. I had no idea that you could use an asterisk for a css selector. Then, the idea of stringing them together to represent the elements that are most deeply nested with different colored outlines. Pretty slick!

I will probably still use the many functions in the Outline menu of the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, for most of my everyday outlining-for-debugging needs. There are also bookmarklets out there to do this type of thing. But, this snippet deserves a spot in my toolbox, because it seems like it could could come in handy someday.

Disabling Message Center in RealPlayer via a simple registry edit

Random tidbit of potentially useful information...

From a comment by Wulf on the Google Operating System blog:

While playing around in my Registry, I found an interesting entry from RealPlayer.

If you change

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\RealNetworks\Msg\
Preferences\Frequency > (default)

from 1 to 0, the 'Message Center' (read: ads) won't come up anymore...

I haven't tried this, as I so rarely use RealPlayer that I don't even remember the annoyance that this tip claims to prevent. But, I did go ahead and make this registry value change, in the hopes that someday, something might less annoying. :)

I actually took this opportunity to try out REG.EXE, the "Console Registry Tool for Windows" (it came with Windows XP Pro), which I've never gotten around to messing with... So this is how I changed this particular registry key:
reg add
HKCU\Software\RealNetworks\Msg\Preferences\Frequency
/ve /d 0

screen in cygwin needs System attribute on SockDir files

This will not be of use to many, if any, but I expended effort trying to figure out how to solve this today, so I'm posting it here for future reference, if nothing else.

Today, at work, I ssh'd to my home computer, and tried to run 'screen -r -d', to reattach to an existing session of gnu screen at home. Here's what happened:

$ screen -r -d
There is no screen to be detached.

I knew this was not true, so I tried this:
$ screen -list
No Sockets found in /tmp/uscreens/S-myusername.

I didn't believe it, because I knew I had an existing session open, so I looked for myself:
$ ls -l /tmp/uscreens/S-myusername/
total 2
-rw------- 1 myusername None 54 Jul 24 14:35 1696.tty0.spugbrap-home
-rw------- 1 myusername None 54 Aug 2 14:19 3500.tty0.spugbrap-home

I saw it right there, so I looked to see if one of the processes that I had running in my existing screen session was still running:
$ ps | grep perl
3204 368 3204 1760 13 1003 14:20:05 /usr/bin/perl

Sure enough, there it was... So, I took a look at my SockDir on my laptop, at work, to see if permissions might be involved in some way:
$ ls -l /tmp/uscreens/S-myusername/
total 3
srwx------ 1 myusername None 53 Aug 2 14:18 2568.tty1.dave-laptop
srw------- 1 myusername None 53 Jul 4 01:05 3600.tty1.dave-laptop
srw------- 1 myusername None 53 May 15 15:42 960.tty1.dave-laptop

Ah hah! There was a difference! The 's' at the beginning of the permissions list on my laptop's SockDir contents, but not on my home machine's.

So, I went searching for what the heck that 's' stands for, since usually, if anything, I either see an 'l' (L) or a 'd'. I checked the help, info, and man pages for 'ls' and 'chmod', but didn't find anything that actually matched this flag. The closet thing was 'suid + executable', but when I tried to chmod that onto one of my files, the permissions showed '-rws------', which is not what I was looking for.

A google search or two, for things like 'srwx------', 'srw-------', 'srwx srw', 'cygwin srw', etc. didn't turn up anything useful - at least not in the first pages of results.

I tried looking at my laptop's SockDir in windows explorer, and looking at the advanced security properties of one of the files. Nothing looked interesting. Then I looked at it from a command prompt (4nt), and saw this:
[c:\]dir c:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername
[...]
0 bytes in 0 files and 2 dirs

Oops, let's try with 'attrib' instead of 'dir':
[c:\]attrib c:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername
__SA_ C:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername\2568.tty1.dave-laptop
__SA_ C:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername\3600.tty1.dave-laptop
__SA_ C:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername\960.tty1.dave-laptop

Ah hah! The 'system' and 'archive' attributes were set on these files. So, I verified that these flags were NOT set on the files on my home machine:
$ attrib "c:\\cygwin\\tmp\\uscreens\\S-myusername\*"
C:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername\1696.tty0.spugbrap-home
C:\cygwin\tmp\uscreens\S-myusername\3500.tty0.spugbrap-home

Sure enough, there's the difference. So, I set the 'system' attribute on those files (didn't bother with 'archive' attribute, though I'm not sure what causes it to be there on my laptop but not on my home):
$ attrib +"c:\\cygwin\\tmp\\uscreens\\S-myusername\*"

Verified that it worked:
srw------- 1 myusername None 54 Jul 24 14:35 1696.tty0.spugbrap-home
srw------- 1 myusername None 54 Aug 2 14:19 3500.tty0.spugbrap-home

Then, I tried connecting to my existing session, and it succeeded.

While preparing this post, I experimented a little bit more, and noticed that, for some reason, my home pc is not creating these screen socket files with the required 'system' attribute at all, anymore. I'm not sure why this is happening, now, because I can't think of anything I've done, recently, that might have caused any different behavior as far as permissions and such.

I will post again if I figure this out, but for now I am content with adjusting the attribute manually. In theory, I can keep each screen session alive until my next reboot (which is rare), so I shouldn't have to do too many manual adjustments like this. I also welcome any comments on how to solve this problem, or any other useful tips for effectively using gnu screen in cygwin.