A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked...A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. John Gall via Marc on the O'Reilly radar.
For reasons which might be fairly obvious, I've been doing a lot of repetitive sshing to machines recently (think executing the same upgrade on four mail servers for instance). I pondered aloud in the cube the possibility of an application which would give me a dialog to type in, and then wack that text into a bunch of xterms all at the same time for me. Andrew did some Debian foo and suddenly cluster ssh is presented as an option. It's pretty cool, and basically does exactly what I wanted. It's not perfect though -- some people have complained that it uses gnome-terminal, and about the fonts of all things. I've noticed some odd behaviour if you try to cut and paste into the gnome-terminal as well (instead of the text entry dialog). Interesting, I think it might be time for me and the cluster ssh code to become acquainted sometime.
Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress. As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around. So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up…