Version 0.3 of monkeytail has finally been release. Changes include:

• inclusion in Debian pending approval (many thanks to Francois).
• file grouping support
• tarball releases (at http://git.dollyfish.net.nz/releases/monkeytail/)
• man pages for mtail and mtailrc

As always, feel free to send feedback/bug reports/suggestions my way :-)

For those of you who have often wondered why ssh X11 forwarding never quite seemed to work right in vservers, the magic incantation is

X11UseLocalhost no

inside your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file in the vserver.

This is because by default ssh tries to bind the forwarding server to the loopback address, and frequently your vservers don't have one :-), changing this option means it binds instead to the wildcard address (so keep that in mind for security :p)

So after having a chat to Grant I've made a couple of minor tweaks to monkeytail.

• The --help switch now prints stuff nicely wrapped for 80 column terminals (for those of us still happily using them ...)
• I've removed the dependancy on the Event module, and instead am now using the core IO::Select module (at Grant's recommendation)

For a long time now I've really wanted to be able to use vim to edit text areas in my browser (opera).

I've noticed a bunch of plugins for firefox but even they only work with moderate degrees of success, and I certainly hadn't come across anything for Opera ... until now!

For those of you who were at the PerlMongers lightning talks, I finally managed to release something :-)

For those of you who weren't, monkeytail is a wrapper around tail designed for web developers (i.e. me). It tails multiple files across multiple hosts, but most importantly, it inserts blank lines when it detects a delay in the messages (i.e. between requests) making it really easy to see which lines belong to which request while debugging.

You can get more information and download it over at the project page.

At Francois' request, I've made a project page for a vcalendar mutt filter I wrote.

I went the way of a generic name because I imagine I'll write at least one more filter, and this way I can happily add it to the existing project.

(a little) More information is available over on the project homepage

So finally the PasteBot (that has been living at http://paste.dollyfish.net.nz) has been upgraded to apache2/mod_perl2, and now has a homepage :-) (although not a very good one).

If you're interested in it, feel free to wander over to http://dollyfish.net.nz/projects/pastebot and check it out.

There is one known issue at the moment, and that is that Text::VimColor and something in the webserver don't like each other. I have a patch I'm going to try push upstream to fix this, but if your instance is randomly working about 50% of the time, and spitting out half or blank pages the other 50%, drop me a line and I'll see if I can help (I'll try write a blog post about Text::VimColor and the weirdness sometime this weekend).

Recently I switched to mutt (after hearing Nigel and Penny talk about it a whole lot).

I'm using a combination of mutt, offlineimap, vim (for actually editing the emails), and up until now extreme annoyance at contact management/insertion.

So today a fellow staffer was trying to write the classic lilst of categories, with a sample of 5 items from each category query. This is a common problem, and I was sure there was some nice simple SQL subquery magic to make it all just work.

So I signed up for an account at ohloh. Turns out I already had a bunch of contributions to stuff :-)