If you use shells and you use wireless or laptops (or the switches at your work keep getting rebooted, etc.) you’ll appreciate the benefit of having a shell session that’s persistent across multiple logins.

Here’s the quick tutorial:

screen
start screen for the first time

screen -d -r
reattach to an old session

C-a
issue a command from within screen, important ones below.

C-a c
new window, (like a tab).

C-a “
prompt and switch to a new window.

C-a #
switch to the window at that number.

C-a C-a
switch to the last window

C-a ESC
scroll mode

Nice little interview with Steve McConnell on IT Conversations.

He covers the genesis of his books and takes time to comment on Mythical Man-Month (turns out to be mostly about documentation) and Extreme Programming (just another tool in the toolbox).

I’m finding that people who reference Steve McConnell in their blog posts often have something interesting to say, so I’ve added them to my rss reader with a technorati watchlist:

http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=60721

I can recommend his
I can recommend his Rapid Development to any programmer/manager who’s working on a project that’s behind schedule or suffering from irrational expectations (again, basically anyone). If you work in software and you laugh at Dilbert, read Rapid Development.