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use ssh tunnel when other application can not establish a stable connection

Recently I worked from home, to communicate with my mates, my company use IRC and there is an IRC server set up on office server. I use irssi as my IRC client. All work well until I change my work place from my home in BeiJing to my wife’s hometown(FuJian). It seems irssi can not establish a stable connection to the IRC server in office.
At first, I tried ssh to my computer in office and run irssi there. It works but there is some problems: I tweak a script that use Growl to notify me whenever there is a IRC message for me, and with Sound notification. It work very well locally, but not work well remotely, there is a delay for the sound playing(I use esound to play sound effect file).
Later, I got another solution from greg(thanks!), building an ssh tunnel for IRC server, then I can run irssi locally. After I gave it a try, it worked very well!
To make the ssh tunnel, run command:
$ ssh -Nf -L 6667:IRC_SERVER:6667 GATEWAY_IN_OFFICE
Then in irssi, connect to “localhost” as the IRC server.

It seems ssh does a really good work on network connection. Thank you, SSH!

[irssi] eye candy in irssi

I found a funny script [http://juerd.nl/elsewhere.plp?href=../files/irssi/figlet.pl] for irssi, that use a tool named figlet[http://www.figlet.org/] to display large characters made up of ordinary screen character. And the script understands the color format control code in irssi, so with it you can create some outstanding colorful characters!

To use it,first install figlet tool; download the figlet script and put it into ~/.irssi/scripts folder, then in irssi run “/load script figlet” to load the script.

In irssi, input “/figlet ^C2 foo ^C4 bar” will generate following:

[irssi] completion in irssi

in irssi, you can define as many completions as you like by simply input command:
/completion ty thank you
/completion -auto ltns long time for no see

so when you input ‘ty’ and press Tab, then ‘ty’ will be replaced by ‘thank you’. If you use -auto option, then when you input ‘ltns’, to get the completion, you can press Tab or just press space. Simple and powerful. Try it!

[Irssi] Irssi rocks!

I heard irssi before, but only one week ago I start to learn it. Within this week, I am excited on the wonderful experience of irss. If you are like me: I focus on highly configurable, efficient, powerful, easy to extend. And the most important thing is it is command line based(so I can use it locally or remotely). If you are not interested on these features, then you can skip my post now(I hope not 😉 ).

screenshots first:

NOTE: there are tens of screenshots at http://www.irssi.org/themefiles , if you want to see more screenshots before you decided to try it on my computer.

The main features of irssi are at http://www.irssi.org/about .

I am still learning functions of irssi, but based on what I learned till now, it is really worth you having a try!
I will post more in future!