Since I moved to OSX, one ugly and unstable tool that I had to live with, was the Cisco VPN client. Being completely unhappy with this Cisco  little app, I was always looking for an alternative and few days ago I found it: SHIMO.

Shimo has many reasons to be the best choice for OSX, and I'll just quote few:

• ... full Cisco compatibility
• ... saves passwords in your keychain
• ... automatic (re-)connect on wakeup, network-changes, etc
• ... global shortcuts for fast connect/disconnect
• ... stable and well integrated with the OSX. Better than the Cisco VPN client
• ... statistics screen
  

And the feature I also love: it can be easily integrate with growl for notifications.

If you already have a CiscoVPN connection defined, SHIMO will import your previous settings and use them right away.

I love it!


Goodbye Cisco :)

A lot of times I had to do acrobatics to be able to display the contents of a UNIX folder as a tree.  Well, no more!

Looking for using the ls command in various combinations I found this command gem:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/   /' -e 's/-/|/'

So for a folder where the standard: ls webapps/hello/ will display this:

WEB-INF   actions   content   pages     public    templates

The new command trick:  ls -R webapps/hello/ | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/   /' -e 's/-/|/', will display:

   |---/WEB-INF
   |-----classes
   |---/actions
   |---/content
   |---/pages
   |---/public
   |-----styles
   |---/templates

Neat, eh?

There is also a nice script wrapper for the above command, follow this link for more.