Showing headlines posted by eggi

Here's a funny fake news-byte I found (although it's a bit old). You can check out the rest of the "late-breaking" mock-news at bbspot.com. And, of course, if you want to get the original (un-family-friendlified ;) version of this bit, you can check out the Fake News Story here in all its glory, so to speak ;)

Hey there and happy Saturday! One more work week down and an indeterminable amount left until you either shuffle off this mortal coil or figure out some other way to beat the game ;)

Yesterdays post on sorting Perl lists and removing duplicates did end up being a bit heavy at the end, as I feared. I received my fair share of "here's how you can do it better" emails, which (although I'm not trying to do my most succinct and efficient work here) I always appreciate. In all seriousness, I really do enjoy getting different perspectives on methods and practices put up on this blog. I'm always looking to better my own skill-set, so keep the free advice coming.

This may be the first time I've run a series of posts where the topic was different every step of the way. That's a good thing, because I get just as bored as anyone else reading about the same thing over and over ;) So, following in the footsteps of our posts on Number Pools And Guaranteed Combinations Within Fixed Lists and Perl List Permutations, we'll move straight ahead to the next logical step, which is almost an entirely different subject altogether.

I think I promised yesterday that all posts having to deal with Number Pools And Guaranteed Combinations Within Fixed Lists would have that string in their title, but, upon further reflection, it seems like it would make every title waaaay too long, and none of the parts would get indexed correctly, since Google might discard them as duplicate content based on the title tag

It's been a while since we've taken any time to look at any formal systems or number systems (all the way back to The M I U Puzzle, so today we're going to kick off a quick beginner post that is, somewhat Linux and Unix independent(although we'll be scripting and using Linux/Unix tools to do this work for us in future posts). It's going to segue into something more complicated in a future post, but, for today, we're just going to lay the groundwork. In fact, the beginnings of this process will seem almost brain-dead simple. Which is okay, because they pretty much are ;)

Another year has come and gone and, once again, the most counter-intuitive holiday rears its head ;) Today's a day when we celebrate labor by not doing any at all. Probably most comedians have already covered this material extensively, so I'll not tread on sacred ground.

You may recall, just a few days ago (I think...), we put out a script do language translation using Yahoo/AltaVista's Babelfish interface. I mentioned, briefly, in that post that, when translating something into a foreign language, I always like to do a "reverse translation" using the translated output from my original query, and see how close the back-translation comes to what I originally wrote. It can make for hilarious results. In fact, unless you're entering something like "hello," it's almost guaranteed to come back goofy when translated back to English (or your native language).

Trolling the net some more, I found a whole ton of funny Unix, Linux, mainframe, compiler, VAX, VMS, etc, error messages and I think we have enough material to span two posts here. So, in effect, today's post is also a "live test" of how long a blogspot posting can be. If it overruns, and the bottom gets clipped, you can get the material from its source at TMK.com.

Today's post, as the title suggests, is veering slightly off the beaten path of this blog's general content. But, in keeping with this blog's tradition (and mission) of exploring all things Linux and Unix, it's not too far of a stretch. Hopefully the "Mac" in the title didn't put anyone off (Like, say "Vista," might ;). We're actually going to be looking at their underlying Linux subsystem, which is where we come full circle and it all makes sense. Mac has been fronting their BSD'ish CLI for quite a while now and, if you can use RedHat, Suse, FreeBSD or any of the other myriad varieties of Linux on the market today, OS X's insides should be easy enough for you to figure out. I'm happy, also, that Mac has a Linuxy ( Is that a word? judges? ;) command line interface. The marrying of the fancy windows interface with the bare bones power of Linux should make it easier for the next generation of computer-savvy users to not only enjoy the pretty pictures ( and the funny sounds they make when you click on them with a pointing device), but also (by necessity) possess a rudimentary knowledge of the more powerful underpinnings of all that Window dressing.

Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is a follow up (and the finishing touch, I hope ;) to a whole slew of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap at reference.com. If you missed any of the others, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to access the online Thesaurus and, of course, the online dictionary. This time we're breaking the chains and losing the albatross by finally attacking (with some level of precision) the Online Encyclopedia and producing a shell script does it as much justice as we could muster.

If today's title throws you off a little, that's good. I was going for an allegorical representation of the output of today's Perl script in the title of this post. The beauty of it is, even if I don't succeed, I have done my job, since (although this script is supposed to produce upside down and backwards HTML pages) the outcome of any input handed off to today's script may, or may not, have every single line reversed and in top to bottom order. In fact, when it comes to the more complicated issue of handling tags that dictate image, span, table, style and other such extravagant beautification, it may turn out a web page so horribly disfigured that you'll hardly recognize it. ...although, maybe that was the point. I allow my friends to talk me into wasting my time on folly like this far too often. ...probably because I enjoy it ;)

Today, we're putting out a little Perl script to deal with the obscure. Now, I realize that my view is biased heavily by living on American soil, but I can't remember, for the life of me, the last time I came across a Hebrew web page. And by Hebrew, I mean the whole reading from right to left thing. I probably wouldn't even understand it if I recognized it when I saw it ;) It did remind me however, that HTML 4.0 introduced a tag to deal with just that sort of translation. Come to think of it, when applied more liberally it would be a great translation tool for Japanese comic books that read from right to left and from back to front. Anyway, all this talk of forward and backward, left and right... just add up and down and I'll be running to the drug store for some Dramamine ;)

This week's start-off Linux/Unix bash shell script is a follow up to our previous online dictionary shell script and Thesaurus shell script. I was thinking of doing the online Encyclopedia today, but, for some reason, I got sidetracked on The BabelFish Language Translation Site. This script offers the full functionality of the original website's text translation, except I left out the HTML page translation part. I figure if you're going to translate an entire webpage, it would look a lot nicer using a regular web browser ;)

For this Sunday's Linux and Unix humor break, I found this dated (yet still relevant) joke on the net and, not being able to believe I found it, downloaded the page immediately. This morning, when I woke up, I checked again and the page where I found the Hacker Test actually does exist! This is important because, when you don't sleep regularly, reality may or may not be valid. Just because something happens to me in the middle of the "day" doesn't mean I'm not dreaming ;) Check out the rest of the long list of jokes and Susan Stepney's web site. It's a great collection of information. Fun, entertaining and informative. I don't know Susan personally, but I dig her site and wish her the best. At the very least, check out the jokes. There are plenty of goods ones to be found there. The world needs more educators with a sense of humor :)

A fine Saturday to you, or Sunday if you're an Australian who (according to my time charts) lives in the future ;) Today, we've got some more jokes and humour, of a Unix and Linux flavour. None of our senses of humour are probably exactly the same, but I try to pick out some halfway decent stuff for you and then, of course, refer you to the joke page where I found these little nuggets and heartily recommend that you check out the main workjoke.com site just in case you find a whole bunch of other stuff that makes you laugh on their other pages. I can't vouch for the content on a site I don't control (a lot of the jokes there are the same ones you've heard 50 times already today), but I thought this site offered a good bit of variety and some fresh material that warranted a little wholesome all-American co-opting. Of course, the credit for the content goes first to workjoke and then to the respective authors to whom they give attribution.

Wow, it's been a long work week. Figuratively, of course. The official version is that it was a standard 5 days ;) Tonight's post is a bit on the lighter side (both the material covered and the overall tone), as I haven't had much time to write this week. It's like my wife says; I should take some of the 1500 word rants I put down and split them up every once in a while. She's a smart lady. One of these days I'll start listening to her and take it easy on my keyboard ;)

Today's post is about a program I got turned on to at work, and which makes our script on linux server information reporting seem a bit lackluster. Then again, there's something to be said for not having "too much" information ;) What we're going to look at today is something you (and your technical colleagues) might love (or hate -- check out a message board or two to keep an accurate reading on the heated and irregular pulse of the user community at large ;)

How to manipulating your disks using their Universal Unique Identifiers.

Another odd Linux command from the back of the closet. We're going to take a look at a quirky little command (The use of the term "quirky" is my personal bias creeping in ;) called "pidof" that you can, absolutely, find on RedHat ES versions 4 and up. It's probably on lots of other distro's, too, but I can only afford to muck with what's in the free-server-pool at any given moment. This command is actually very interesting and, given that RHEL3 boasts the "pgrep" command, I was quite surprised when I bumped into it. I'm not sure if it seemed contradictory or complementary; just unexpected.