Jimmy's questions

When I type "svn add path/to/somefile..." and tab to autocomplete, the system should only complete files/directories that are not currently under SVN control. Likewise, when I commit, remove or resolve files, the tab completion should only complete files that are relevant to what I'm doing (i.e., modified, currently in SVN or conflicted). This is especially important in SVN where every single file name you type could potentially benefit from smart autocompletion, but it of applies to other programs.

I know bash has a bash_completion file that can be used to programatically alter this behaviour but I've not found a decent example of SVN completion which actually completes file names rather than SVN command names.

My question is: Does anyone have such a setup? Does anyone use a different shell or tool that does something similar? Has anyone given this any thought?

It seems so simple: I have two servers running MySQL, one has a nice big database of important stuff, the other is an empty shell ready to be used as a replication slave. These are the steps I should need to take to set up replication:

1. Add a user to the master with the relevent replication & host privileges
2. Run a statement from the slave telling it to 'replicate this db from this server'
3. Done. That's it.

Instead I have to mess around with my.cnf settings on both servers, mess about with binary logs and positions and snapshots. Yes I know some of these things are optimisations for large databases but is this the best way they could think of doing this? I just want to replicate a database, this is a very common practice. I still have not managed it.

Where can I find a decent how-to for this? Everything I've found so-far is either missing some important step, is written for an older version of MySQL or is just plain too complex for me or requires a degree of commitment I'm clearly not prepared to take, and that includes the official documentation.

I know many programs use color - (vim, ack, color-ls to name a few) but there are still many cases where you're stuck with black and white.

There are scripts that will color output based on regular expressions (i.e. "make anything that matches 'dog' red") but these must be invoked with pipes - for example: "> cat myfile | color dog red" and this is useless for anything interactive.

What I'm looking for is something that hooks the terminal emulator (or an terminal that actually does this) and colors anything that matches a given regex, independent of the shell or program i'm currently using. If this works with ncurses as well that would be awesome. I have too many monochrome programs and it would be great if I could specify a list of keywords to highlight/color when they appear or are typed.

I use Guake console which probably uses GNOME Terminal, I don't know if GNOME has this feature already.

I have a Windows 2008 server running in country A and I am in country B with an iPhone.

Country B censors the internet. Obviously this is not acceptable, I want to make VoIP/Skype calls and access restricted sites on my phone.

All I need of course, is a VPN service which I can connect to - as the iPhone supports several types, and I'm home free. The problem is, I already have a perfectly good Windows 2008 server laying around in a data centre in country A doing not much. After unsuccessfully looking at dozens of complex howto's on VPNs, obscure Windows IPSec settings and advanced certification and authentication set-ups I am at a complete loss:

How do I set up an extremely simple, single-user, nothing-fancy VPN between a Win2008 server and an iPhone so that the phone can access the outside? Surely there is a simple, 3 minute-solution to this that doesn't involve getting my hands dirty?