Man, it’s good to finally do some technical blogging again.  Until I get my technical site up and running, I’ll do some random stuff like this.

Tonight I saw “PLAYterm” on slashdot and really loved the idea.  I’ve always learned Unix and networking tips and hints by watching masters do their magic on the command line.  While I still like reading about it (Unix Power Tools still is a favorite reference book), watching someone was amazing.

PLAYterm lets someone record their command line session and embed it into a webpage for others to watch.  The brave among us even allow for people to post comments, which could be used to give suggestions and praise or provide a chance for bullies to belittle and deconstruct.

I decided to give it a try, seeing as how I had a little hard time getting the required “ttyrec” program to work on my particular setup, which is Cygwin running on my Windows 7 laptop.  It’s basically getting 99% of linux on a windows box.  What better useful step than showing others how to get it working on their system?

PLAYterm seems to be PERFECT for someone like me who wants to document a lot of network / firewall / scripting things that I’ve collected over the years, wait, decades.

So here’s my PLAYterm-hosted tty recording of how to get ttyrec to compile on Cygwin (note: the embed code doesn’t seem to work on Google Chrome, and the display is bigger than my blog entry space will allow… so some of the right edge is cut off. Just follow the link above to see it on playterm’s site).