Blog Posts Across MELUG North

I was fixing my backups the other day, went looking, and discovered rsync --link-dest. With it, rsync substitutes hard links for files that haven't changed. The result:

tria tria # du -hs backup-*1.7G    backup-2008-03-19
82M     backup-2008-03-20
40M     backup-2008-03-21
40M     backup-2008-03-22
76M     backup-2008-03-23
37M     backup-2008-03-24
63M     backup-2008-03-25
206M    backup-2008-03-26
42M     backup-2008-03-27
101M    backup-2008-03-28
70M     bac…

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For some time I've been running my monitors at 1152x864. I picked it because it was a standard resolution (although uncommon) and the next one down from 1280x960 which was slightly too fuzzy. Unfortunately, it leaves me about ten characters short of three xterms across each monitor. Today I switched to 1200x900. That three xterms across has made my world a much happier place, and you know, anything that cares about resolution is going to want 1024 or 1280 anyway. Continue

While the religious fervor surrounding XML is dying and JSON is saving us from some of the more painful uses of XML, if you use the shell much, sooner or later you'll want to quickly scrape something out of a web page or other XML like document.

XSLT has a good set of functionality for this but its smallest size is a file and that's five lines long. For the shell, the smallest size must be a couple short paramete… Continue

Sometime late this morning I decided to fix a small visual artifact in a 3D plot produced by Gnuplot. That was a mistake.

After spending something like nine hours wandering around the web, poking through Gnuplot's horrible help interface at its built in documentation, rethinking my problem, rethinking my data, rethinking my goals, trying something, building a test case and trying again, and repeating the process, I am back to where I started plus o… Continue

This is the first in my series of posts on Tim Bray's Wide Finder meme. It covers solving the basic problem with classic Unix shell code. Future posts should cover the "wide" part, parallelizing the problem arbitrarily.

A bit of background: As Moore's Law slips and the internet's growth does not, more and more people are interested in problems bigger than any one processor or machine can handle. So everyone had… Continue

Wayan Vota writes, "A Missing OLPC Product: One Printer Per School". I wonder. Think about when we use paper:

• When we're accustomed to reading on paper. The target children don't have decades of reading paper to readjust from.
• When we want to read on the beach, etc., and our computers can't handle it. The OLPC is portable, sand and water proof, and sunlight readable.
• When w
…

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Jill Lattin posted a link to an excellent looking cheat sheet for Unix/Linux shell commands.

Note that while it isn't mentioned on that sheet, modern versions of GNU tar auto-detect file type so both these work:

tar -xf file.tar.bz2
tar -xf file.tar.gz

While there are lists of b… Continue

Why RSS?

With mailing lists, news groups, and web forums, you read whatever anyone who can get access considers on topic. The result is an incredible mix of good content, flames, trolling, and even just low value posts. But if you observe who posts what, you'll find that quality correlates very closely to author.

Unfortunately, the quality posts are quickly lost as they expire from archives, are buried under the unsorted flow, and suffer… Continue