ShellSink at the Open Source Bridge Conference

I'm going to be in Portland for the Open Source Bridge Conference (OSB) to talk about ShellSink. The abstract I submitted is overly ambitious as I promised to cover shellsink usage, implementation as well as distribution via Launchpad. I've decided to stick to usage and implementation of shellsink as I am giving a presentation entirely dedicated to distributing software via launchpad at OSCON this year. Of course, OSB has the totally awesome 24hour hacker lounge as well as an entire day dedicated to uncoference antics and open space shennanigans, so if anyone feels shortchanged I'd be happy to spend some time talking about launchpad (or whatever) in any of those situations. Please drop a line if you are going to be at OSCON or OSB this year.

Using shellsink with ZSH is easy

You don't have to use bash to use shellsink. Shellsink will work with any shell that supports the following features:

• Concept of a command that always executes before your command is run
• Concept of a history file
• Concept of appending to the history file each time you run a command

Z-Shell is another great shell and when configured correctly it supports all these things. Here is a set of instructions to make shellsink work for zsh.

1. Grab the sample zshrc
2. Concatenate that to ~/.zshrc
3. make a symlink from .bash_history to .zhistory like this:

   ln -s ~/.zhistory ~/.bash_history

4. Restart your shell

Easy, right? Here is a list of my References:

• http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Zsh#Shell_History
• man zshmisc
• man zsh
  

ShellSink Server Upgrade

On the same day that our government gets an upgrade, ShellSink gets an upgrade. Specifically, a new version of the server is live! The changes are all performance related and it enables me to bring the client behavior into line with the way google has designed app engine to scale. That is, to make lots of very simple requests instead of fewer complex requests.

Unfortunately, this version is not backwards compatible with older versions of the client. You must upgrade your client! Why would I make such a drastic change? Simple, nobody is using shell_sink but me! That means I'm sure 100% of my users will upgrade. It doesn't explain why I need a blog entry to tell myself about it.