Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
05 2006
... for 4 days sucks!
If anyone wants me I'll be going through the backlog of shonky tat on my e-mail servers for the next couple of hours. *cry*
posted at: 12:39 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Thanks to Kevin Lyda for posting some useful examples of bash (and other shell) bang expressions to the ILUG mailing list. Reproduced here so that I'll remember them :-)
Most modern shells support csh's bang commands - bash, tcsh and zsh
all do. While some bang commands don't work in all those shells, all
of the following do. The plus side to using them is that no matter what
shell you're using, these shortcuts will work.
For the purposes of these tips, every tip will assume these are the last
three commands you ran:
% which firefox
% make
% ./foo -f foo.conf
% vi foo.c bar.c
Getting stuff from the last command:
Full line: % !! becomes: % vi foo.c bar.c
Last arg : % svn ci !$ becomes: % svn ci bar.c
All args : % svn ci !* becomes: % svn ci foo.c bar.c
First arg: % svn ci !!:1 becomes: % svn ci foo.c
Accessing commandlines by pattern:
Full line: % !./f becomes: % ./foo -f foo.conf
Full line: % vi `!whi` becomes: % vi `which firefox`
Last arg : % vi !./f:$ becomes: % vi foo.conf
All args : % ./bar !./f:* becomes: % ./bar -f foo.conf
First arg: % svn ci !vi:1 becomes: % svn ci foo.c
Various shells have options that can affect this. Be careful with
shells that let you share history among instances. Some shells also
allow bang commands to be expanded with tabs or expanded and reloaded
on the command line for further editing when you press return.
On May 13th I had the privilege of helping the University of Limerick Computer Society to host a discussion on Software Engineering in Open Source Software with Alan Cox. I've made both audio and video recordings of the event, but thus far I've only had a chance to process the audio. Video will be released soon.
I would like to put forward the theory that massive gravity wells form in airports, centred on active luggage conveyor belts. Unlike more stable gravitational centres such as planets or black holes, these airport-specific gravity sources seem to form leading up to a given belt becoming active and populated with luggage, and gradually recede in force as luggage is removed. This results in people being able to overcome the attractive force and wander off in a selection of almost random routes, statistically weighted heavily towards meandering through the most inappropriate and legally invalid customs channel.
I can only perceive this gravitational force by observation of the effects it has on surrounding objects. A halted baggage carousel will be devoid of surrounding people up until the point at which some helpful airport staff-member announces that there is the merest hint of probability that your baggage may emerge from said machine. This seems to activate the gravity well generator. Adults and small children flock to the belt. In some airports they have been forward thinking enough to draw a line about half a metre outside the belt, to try and make people stand back - but this appears to be merely ornamental in any practical sense. Despite the best efforts of the alighted waiting passengers, the gravitational forces drag small children, adults, airport trolleys, buggies, bags, handbags, sporting equipment, pets, boxes and all manner of other paraphenalia right to the edge of the carousel. This provides a tremendously entertaining obstact course to be negotiatied as one tries to remove one's luggage from the moving belt. That's if you can see the bags on belt or can muscle your way in to close enough to the belt to claim your property as it slides gracelessly by.
We know that gravitational force exerted is proportional to the mass surrounding the theoretical centre of gravity. This seems to fall down in the case of baggage belts since the additional mass of lots of heavy bags, people attracted and various miscellaneous objects falls woefully short of the requirement to exert such a perceived force. I, personally, have never been inexorably pulled to stand right next to a carousel, leaving no room for anyone else to see their luggage, much less have any glimmer of hope that they might be able to reach it in time or even remove it. Perhaps the gravity is selective in some may?
Some readers may think my theory somewhat flawed - but I've thought about this long and hard (well, the bones of 10 minutes) and the only other conceivable explanation I can come up is that people collecting their baggage at airports are idiots. They are devoid of clue and hell bent on making life for themselves and everyone else more difficult. I'm sure that can't be the case...
posted at: 13:58 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Today we learned that you shouldn't put yoghurt in your hair - not even if your friend thinks it's a good idea or if you're pretending you're a customer in a hairdressing shop and a pot of Bob The Builder yoghurt is your conditioner/shampoo/$random hair product that 4-year olds think is important.
posted at: 20:20 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
...that one small (snack size) Cadbury's Flake bar provides a sufficient amount of chocolate to both feed a four year old child AND leave sufficient crumbs to completely cover the entire surface of a double bed.
posted at: 00:10 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Today we were contemplating having egg and chips for our tea. Róisín seemed a bit confused about this and questioned me on the technicalities of this bizarre combination of culinary fare:
Róisín: What's egg and chips?$DEITY only knows what she'll be coming out with when she's five!
Me: It's chips with some egg as well.
Róisín: No! (Gives me a look that's a combination of disbelief and inquisitiveness.)
Me: Yeah - it's like fish and chips, but instead of the fish you have egg.
Róisín: (Stomping off to the back garden, shaking her head as she goes: ) Egg and chips?!? That's ridiculous!
Sinéad & I: (Collapse in a heap on the couch with laughter.)
Inspired by a posting by my sister on her shiney new magical toaster, Sinéad requested that I type an e-mail to my sister. In fairness, I was sitting next to Sinéad on the couch at the time, with a laptop on my lap... here's what came out (with apologies to CBeebies and the fine work they do there) :
Subject: Sinéad wanted to tell you...
... this thing - but she made me type it :-( Grrrrrrrrrr! Women! (etc.)
You will need:
You have to:
The end.
Sinead is looking at me with a big smile on her face now and staying very quiet (except for the incessant giggling which started about ingredient number 2 and has continued through the whole thing...)
She's quite adamant now that she hasn't made this up but saw it on CBeebies - I'm not sure if that'll make it taste competent or not... I guess you can give it a whirl.
See you soon.
Hugs,
-->Gar
...you can kill a machine in the face by running `sfdisk -l /dev/hdc` (where /dev/hdc is a CD-ROM drive with no media inserted.)
posted at: 20:51 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
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