I didn't know about $@ and that is a good one to know. (Is that POSIX standard, or a GNU extension?)

It is indeed part of POSIX; see XCU 2.5.2 for a complete list of such variables.

(A bit late for a reply, but still.)

It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman."

You might be interested in Kenneth Henshall's explanation about the colorful origin of this character.

(Unfortunately, this is very atypical of kanji/hanzi — most of them are quite boring, which doesn't help at all when it comes to memorizing them.)

Amen. I never figured out why VMware didn't put a little effort into porting its modules to more recent kernel versions. (AFAIK, all the vmware-any-any releases were put out by Petr Vandrovec, a VMware employee. I don't know why he stopped, but he has my thanks for providing a useful service for all these years.)

Like you, I grew tired of struggling with the modules, and hopped over to VirtualBox. My experience so far has been somewhat mitigated; the basic functionality is there, but there's a certain lack of "polish" and I was hit by couple of bugs (ie. serial didn't work right; VB complains about a non-existent mounted device). Still, it mostly works for me, and I'm looking forward to see it mature further.

You were probably aware of this, but USB support is not included in the Open Source Edition. (This is probably what I'll miss most from VMware Workstation.)

I only use it to download repositories because I'm not really much of a programmer.

I assume you do a simple "git clone <url>", then? Did you use --depth or any other option?

Suffice to say that it has happened to me personally on at least two occasions, back when I was a modem user and had lots of communications problems.

Was this a long time ago? Git has matured a lot since its infant years (2005-2006).

I've had git shit itself on me a couple times, so obviously they don't have it right.

From what I've seen of the Git development team, I'm sure they would be eager to correct such a flaw.

If I understand you correctly, you would run git-clone, and lose the connection in the process? This would leave you with an incomplete directory, and running git-fetch in it would fail?

If git craps in the middle of initially fetching a repo it can corrupt itself.

I'm curious, could you provide some details on this? The way that git operates, fetching objects individually, I find it dubious that it would fail like that.

svn is the only SCM that seems to have ANY ability to recover from a fault.

You're kidding, right?

I remember when I switched from CVS to SVN[*]. On more than one occasion, while importing my old work, svn would just choke and die, claiming there was something wrong within my .svn directory. At that point, I had to nuke the working directory and checkout a fresh copy.

Obviously, no data was ever lost (since it was only the working copy that was hosed), but it made me seriously doubt Subversion's ability not to screw up its black box database.

[*] Not too many years ago -- this must've been around SVN 1.3.

Sadly, bell got the right to slow down their resellers lines when they detected p2p stuff on it.

If you're with TekSavvy, all you need to do is set up a Multilink (also known as Multipath) PPPoE connection, which fools Bell's equipment and defeats their throttle.

(Obviously, this is a temporary solution, but I doubt that Bell will spend much effort to plug that hole in the near future.)

To be fair, fluxbox workspaces are the equivalent of E's multiple desktops; I don't think it has anything matching E's virtual desktops. (And yes, I do miss those sometimes.) There is therefore no edge flipping, although moving a window past the edge will move to the next workspace.

As for pagers, there is at least one out there (fbpager), but I found I didn't need a pager as much as I did with E. With a middle-click, I can pull a list of all workspaces, and all windows in any of them (similar to E, if I recall). Most importantly, the "Send To" command makes it easy to send a window to another workspace. Also, you could have the (optional) taskbar display all windows, instead of only those in the current workspace.