Heather is Linux Gazette's Technical Editor and The Answer Gang's Editor
Gal.
Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning
English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator
for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal
computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other
pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most
everywhere today...
Heather is a hardware agnostic, but has spent more hours as a tech in
Windows related tech support than most people have spent with their computers.
(Got the pin, got the Jacket, got about a zillion T-shirts.) When she
discovered Linux in 1993, it wasn't long before the home systems ran Linux
regardless of what was in use at work.
By 1995 she was training others in using Linux - and in charge of all the
"strange systems" at a (then) 90 million dollar company. Moving onwards, it's
safe to say, Linux has been an excellent companion and breadwinner... She
took over the HTML editing for "The Answer Guy" in issue 28, and has been
slowly improving the preprocessing scripts she uses ever since.
ASUS P5A-B motherboard with AMD-K6-2 300MHz cpu. Other people report
assorted linux boot problems with this board and other ASUS boards.
I can boot my version of linux (Basixlinux 2, based on Slackware 7.1, or
Basiclinux 3 with the SW71 kernel but libc5) from a 2-floppy lilo-boot
version that uses RAMdisk, a loadlin-boot RAMdisk version, a loop version,
or SW4.0 zipslack (UMSDOS). But if I try to boot BL2 or BL3 with loadlin
from a hard drive installation, with the kernels compiled for them or with
bare.i Slackware kernel, the boot process stops at the lines:
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea...
Net4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0
(The Basiclinux kernel gets me two lines further along to something about
TCP).
I tried starting with FreeDOS, DR-DOS, and Win98 DOS (since I have three
other computers that will boot linux with loadlin from Win9X DOS but not
always from the others, and one that will boot loop linux from any DOS
except Win9X). I do not have a hard drive version set up to boot with
lilo. Is that likelier to work? I don't want to use lilo as I work in
DOS more of the time.
I tried telling CMOS that there was no second drive because someone
suggested that method to get linux to recognize a larger drive, but my
drive is 3GB. I have DOS on a master drive and two linux partitions on
the slave drive, with one linux in each, and RAMdisk and loop versions in
DOS partitions.
I am able to mount the linux partitions when running from the RAMdisk or
loop versions and then switch to run linux on them:
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt
chroot /mnt
This puts hdb1 on / and I can then use linux on the ext2 partition.
[Kapil]
But this is essentially what most initrd-based start up procedures do
anyway! So, though I haven't used BasixLinux, I would guess that the
problem is with the start scripts on your ext2 partition in /etc/rcS.d
or some such.
This is a minor nuisance and I suppose I could put it in an rc file, or
just use the smaller version unless I needed the larger one.
I am writing out of curiosity - why are so many computers difficult to
boot with linux?
[Kapil]
The glass could also be half full! Given the variety of hardware that
Linux runs on it is surprising that so many computers boot with it at
all.
Is there a better fix for this one? Is there a better
fix for the other three besides installing Win98 DOS on them (and having
to use a boot floppy to defragment the DOS partitions after that) or
rebooting with a Win98 boot disk to go from DOS to linux?
I also have one Northgate 386 SX 20MHz 4.7MB RAM laptop which has no
cursor in linux. Cirrus video, 256K video RAM, mono VGA. The cursor is
plain white when used in color VGA. The computer in theory can output to
a color monitor in 800x600 resolution.
[Kapil]
Is this with or without X? The question is not clear enough. Are you in
graphics mode or text mode?
Does laptop video treat software cursors oddly? A cursor appears when I
use a text editor. There is a cursor while booting to DOS and in DOS.
Another 386 with identical speed, RAM and video won't boot linux at all -
the screen goes black and I need to reboot. What might cause this
problem?
[Kapil]
Try booting with the additional option "vesafb=off". Some of the older
hardware may not respond well to being switched to graphic mode.
Thanks for your help a couple of years ago getting my first linux set up
to work with both TTL and VGA monitors.
On behalf of The Answer Gang, you're welcome... (/me turns to our Gentle
Readers) and anyone among our readership who'd like to jump in on the problem
(our header does say "...and You!" after all) is welcome to send
replies to you, and encouraged to Cc: tag (The Answer Gang) at
linuxgazette.net.
-- Heather
Mike sent this to his local Python user group, and to our Answer Gang.
I think it's an interesting question, one all you pythonistas out there
might be willing to express an opinion about. Reply to [email protected];
Mike will let his pal know if we get some reasonable statistics, and juicy
replies may end up in a future mailbag.
-- Heather
I got an interesting call from a friend of mine, a PyCon regular who, as
it turns out, lives in Sweden. There's been a discussion on the PyCon
list about whether the $175 conference fee is too high, too low, or
just right. That got her asking me what would it take to get more
Americans to present a talk at EuroPython (in Sweden next July --
http://www.europython.org) and Python UK
(in England next April -- http://www.accu.org/conference), and more
Europeans to PyCon (in Washington DC next April -- http://pycon.org).
I thought I'd throw the question out to y'all for ideas. Not everyone
here is interested in Python, but the same thing applies to Linux and
other free software projects.
She said that she could guess why why not many American presenters would
go to Europe, but she wanted to ask somebody on this side of the pond in
case there were factors she wasn't aware of. I said the main problem
for Americans (besides the expense) is that most people only get two
weeks' vacation per year, so they have to use the time selectively. She
asked why that was, since in Sweden the minimum is six weeks and most
people get nine. I said I don't know, it's just a longstanding
tradition. She asked why people don't demand more. I said people are
much more concerned about health care, and more vacation time is lower
in their priorities.
She said that for her, the main problem with coming to American
conferences is the expense. That seems to be outside our control since
the conference fee is minimal already, and we can't do anything about
airfares or accommodation fees. 'Course the falling dollar will help.
As far as I can tell, the most important thing is just to keep these
conferences going, so that even if people can't attend next year, maybe
they can do the year after, or maybe some overseas people will go to one
and others to the next.
Another thing that's happening in the Python world is different kinds of
events are emerging. These three are traditional conferences with
speakers. In Seattle we've had a couple sprints (=weekend hacking
sessions) without speakers, and I gather those are happening in Europe
too. So maybe the answer is not just more opportunities for speakers,
but more types of events.
As you noticed, the use of a wildcard in a command like mount
really blew me away. The remark you added to my article compounded
it. find, great. less, OK... mount?!
[Ben]
[grin] Yeah, pretty amazing. It gets much more amazing when you
install and enable "bash_completion"; all the... well, stuff that has
multiple options becomes available at the prompt. E.g., typing "ssh "
(note the space) and hitting 'Tab' twice shows me a list of all the
hosts in my ~/.ssh/known_hosts; typing "mount " and hitting 'Tab' three
times (since all the entries start with '/', which is displayed
immediately) gives me a list of all the directories listed in
"/etc/fstab"... obviously, completion happens when you have a unique
string: I've been doing "ssh li<Tab><Enter>" for a session at
linuxgazette.net for so long that I'd be lost without it.
If you count the couple of years I had used Coherent prior to
graduating to SuSE Linux, I've probably been at *nix for 10 years
or so. In other words off the steep part of the learning curve,
but, boy, is there ever enough curve left!
[Ben]
That's the lovely thing about Unix, to me. You keep gaining these chunks
of power every time you learn something - and the chunks don't get any
smaller with time. It can be a little tough on the ego for the folks who
think that way... but to me, it's a fantastic opportunity to squeeze any
amount of juice that I may need out of a system. It's not a question of
"is it possible" any longer, but "where do I find the HOWTO?" instead.
Anyhoo, I would like to encourage you to do an article on obscure
uses of wildcards on the command line.
[Ben]
Um. Well... the problem is in defining "obscure". To me, they're not;
they're just how shells operate. To someone else, they may well be
obscure. Say... maybe looking at it in broader terms would be useful -
an article, or even a series on CLI usage in general might be pretty
good!
I'm sorta swamped for the moment - and actually "owe" about three
articles to myself
- but that one sounds like a really good idea.
Like ignoring the consequences of SuSE's apparent elimination of
the need for mount -- there are still questions in my mind but, then,
I bounce back and forth between root and any of several users a
lot and may have messed things up -- what would "mount *" do?
[Ben]
It would give you an error.
Try
to mount every /dev? Cycle through /etc/fstab? root can mount
stuff not in /etc/fstab. Permissions. Users. Mind-boggling.
[Ben]
Essentially, you've answered your own question: "mount *" would just be
too ambiguous. E.g., "ssh " or "ssh ben@" is not at all ambiguous: the
host name is what has to come after either one of them, and it makes
sense that hitting the completion key (Tab) would "complete" them or
show the possible options. I assume you know that 'Tab' works to
complete program names at the CLI, right? Filenames, too -
"vi ~/.bash_p<Tab>" pulls up my "~/.bash_profile" every time.
Keep up the good work
[Ben]
Thanks, Edgar! Heck, you might want to write the article yourself: read
the Bash man page, and take a look at the "/etc/bash_completion" script.
That should give you a good start.
LG #109 - Laundrette
Sun Dec 5 10:23:23 2004
Jimmy O'Regan (The LG Answer Gang)
Question by Mark W. Tomlinson
I had just settled in of a Saturday evening with a wee dram of Irish
whiskey, a good Henry Clay cigar and Linux Gazette #109. I had worked
my way to "Return of the Linux Laundrette" and reached the section "Re:
[LG 87] help wanted #4". This piece caused me to drop my cigar (due to
uncontrollable grinning, giggling and guffawing), setting my sweatpants
on fire.
I'm fine, thanks - I extinguished the blaze by spilling my libation in
my lap - followed, of course, by the water chaser. Be advised that I
will be taking legal advice re: financial recovery for the loss of the
whiskey...
I don't know how you people manage to produce such an outstanding
combination of useful Linux information, non sequiturs and a, ah, rather
<veering> approach to humor (my kind!) - but I certainly hope you keep
doing it for a long time to come.
Well, I'll be compiling it for a while to come: it's a lot of fun to go
back over the offtopic threads every month, especially since there are
so many of them --
Dec 01 08:44:05 <editorgal> lucky sucker, the recent gang must be a treasure trove for laundrette bits.
Dec 01 08:45:29 <jimregan> I felt kind of duty bound to take over the laundrette...
cos most of the time all I do is perpetuate those threads
[though I should have said 'perpetrate' :) ]
Dec 01 08:45:39 <editorgal> lol
Sincerely,
Mark W. Tomlinson
Thanks for writing,
Jimmy
Math bug in Advanced Features of netfilter/iptables article
Mon Dec 6 03:59:45 2004
Barry O'Donovan (LG Author)
Question by Rich Price (PRICER from us.panasonic.com)
Hi Rich, all,
Advanced Features of netfilter/iptables by Barry O'Donovan [November
2004 (#10
] was a very informative article.
Thanks! It's always good to hear positive feedback.
But my "math flag" flew
from my pocket when I saw his example for using the random module.
So did mine on reading the published article. I had actually planned to
point it out with an Octave example demonstrating the difference
between the right and wrong answer in this months article, but when it
came to writing it I discarded the example as it didn't fit with my
layout and completely forgot to add it as erratum.
If there is one thing I have learnt about statistics (and I've learnt
quite a lot between my degree which was top heavy on stats and my
research where I use the damn stuff every day) is that if the answer is
simple, then it's just plain wrong!
If you wish to divide the packets evenly among the four servers then
the example should look like this:
...............
-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m random --average 25 \ -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.5:80
-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m random --average 33 \ -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.6:80
-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m random --average 50 \ -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.7:80
-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.8:80
...............
The reason is that, after 25% of the packets are NATed by the first
rule, only 75% of them will be seen by the second rule. A third of
them would equal 25% of the total. Likewise, the third rule will see
only half of the total and half of that is 25% of the total.
Correct. A subtle and simple mistake that might cause many a sys-admin a
prolonged headache!
When speaking of mistakes and statistics, I'm always reminded of a few
quotes:
...............
"There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind
you make up."
"I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The
first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about
the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies
died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime
Minister. That is a political statistic."
"You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them
are even dumber than that."
"Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a
drunk-they're used more for support than illumination."
"Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you
anything."
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
"A statistician is a man who comes to the rescue of figures that cannot
lie for themselves."
"First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure."
...............
Ahhhh.... statistics. So easy to love and hate all at once!
Cheers,
Barry
P.S. Thanks also to John Macdonald and one of our French translators,
Emmanuel Araman, who also pointed this out to me.
I sent the message out last night; so far, the first five people have
responded. My best hopes and wishes go out to the rest, and to all.
[Breen]
Thanks for that, Ben. Please let us know as you hear from more of
our Indian friends.
I surely will, Breen. So far, we've got Vinayak's name to the five who
had responded previously; Sayamindu Dasgupta's address bounced, but I
found a phone number for him at http://peacefulaction.org which he
listed in his author profile. He's OK; seems he's in Kolkata (West
Bengal), and everything is all right there.
Folks, please keep them on your good wishes list or in your prayers, as
appropriate. It may be a small thing in the face of something this huge,
but... it's something. As Pramode said, "there are still human beings
alive who can feel the sorrow in another person's eyes - that's the only
consolation."
[Ben] Are you all OK? I'd appreciate a response if you get a chance. I'd
imagine that many others here are just as concerned; I think that a lot
of people may just be... too stunned by the magnitude of this to come up
with a coherent response, and unsure of their own degree of connection
to you all. Me, I figure that we're all human beings - and that no man
is an island.
My heart goes out to you and all your countrymen in this difficult,
terrible time.
[Kapil]
Thanks for checking. Yes. It is truly a devastating event here. Relief
agencies are doing what they can but every bit counts.
I'm going to be letting people around here (northern Florida) know that
they can contribute to the Red Cross/Crescent India, and am going to
send a contribution myself. [sigh] Sunil mentioned that there's now
another warning out.
[Kapil]
The strange aspect of the tragedy is that people in Chennai who were more
than about 500 metres from the coast were almost unaware that anything
had happened. Since we live somewhat inland we were quite unaffected.
[Nod] Tsunamis are like that. They're slow and quiet, definitely so at
first; the traditional way to commit suicide during one is to follow the
ocean as it recedes from the shore.
Folks - everyone - imprint this in your brain forever: if you ever see
the ocean receding, RUN like hell for the high ground. You at least
stand a chance of surviving, then.
[Kapil]
P.S. There is no word for "tsunami" in any of the local languages which
perhaps gives an idea of how unexpected the event was.
[Vinayak Hegde]
You can add me to the list.
With great pleasure! I just went through our list of authors, and
emailed everyone that was in India; you're just not listed as an author,
so no contact info came up. Glad to hear you're OK, too!
[Vinayak Hegde]
I live far away from the coast (in Bangalore). We did mobilise help and
have donated a lot of clothes/medicines for relief work. Though we
are safe in center of the Indian peninsula, we were shocked by the images
that were shown on television and splashed on the front pages of the
newspapers. I also read that 5 endangered tribes living in the
Andaman and Nicobar islands were wiped out forever and a few islands
were washed away (literally).
[sigh] Damn. The only thing I'd ever heard about Andaman islanders was
the fanciful stuff from Conan Doyle... and now, they're gone. Forever.
Contention from various quarters notwithstanding, this world is not
particularly friendly to man. I realize that it does no good to rail
against the weather, but... blood and hell, man! This is just appalling.
[Vinayak Hegde]
Yeah. It's good to know that I am not the only Sherlock Holmes Fan on this List
The Andamani Pymgy had a major role to play in "The Sign of Four".
Who could forget the thrilling story??
Oh, indeed. And what a picture he draws! Reminded me quite a lot of Jack
London's "South Sea Tales", or perhaps "Adventure", and his descriptions
of the Salomon islanders.
Any news about the latest warning that Sunil mentioned?
[Raj Shekar]
Thanks a lot for writing. I am in Delhi, which was quite far from
where the tsunami stuck. I will be making a donation to the Prime
minister's fund and also write in to the local LUG to see if we can
do more than just sitting. One of the members of the mailing list is
working with the people who have been hit and has written down the
things they need:
https://ssl.cpsr.org/pipermail/india-gii/2004-December/009559.html
[Hiran Ramankutty]
I am absolutely fine. By god's grace I am not near the vicinity of the
Tsunami. But hearing about the disaster itself gives enough sight of
what would have happened.
Pray for all Tsunami victims.
[Krishnakumar R]
I am fine. I had come home (Kerala in southern India) for a 10-day
holiday. But as my native place is far from coastal area,
I was not affected.
I can also vouch for Pramode. C . E , that he is safe,
as I had met him in person day-before-yesterday.
Ben, I really appreciate the concern and the kindness you extend to
all of us. Thank you very much.
It is during the dark times like this that we understand how
precious our lives are; which we usually take for granted. Lets
all extend our help in whatever way we can, to the victims of
this tragedy.
[Ashwin N]
I am fine. I stay in Bangalore which is very far from the coast.
This truly has turned into a catastrophe of immense proportion. Entire
fishing communities have been washed away in some places
Rajith is OK; by extension, Maxin B. John (whom I missed due to the
name...) must be OK as well - they co-authored an article last month, so
I figure they're in close touch.
[Rajith R]
Thanks for checking in. I am ok and I live in
Trivandrum. Even tough it is near sea here there were no problems.
As of press time there our very few of our Indian authors and TAG members
who have not checked in - Raghu J Menon, and Krishna G Pai.
Raghu lives in Kerala,
and somehow it seems like everyone knows Pramode (hey Pramode, check in on
'em will ya? Thanks buddy). If you have news of our friends, please let us
know.
May this New Year be better than our last, and whatever troubles we suffer
draw us closer rather than tear us apart. With love to you all
-- Heather
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
Whoops. Having just looked back over the .reg file, I see that I have
the path for X's fonts entered differently to the rest of the file: this
/is not/ the reason why X doesn't work from a CD.
Saw this on Slashdot today: XliveCD (http://xlivecd.indiana.edu) is a
CD image that autoruns an X session when put into a Windows machine
(it's based on Cygwin).
Forwarding to you a good tip by Robert Whitinger. If you ever
run dry and need fresh tips for upcoming LGs let me know - we've
got a ton of these fun ones.
[Ben]
Thanks, Dave - we're always looking for 2-cent tips like these! I
believe Heather has mentioned this in the Mailbag recently.
(And please keep up the great work!)
[Ben]
[grin] Much appreciated; we'll do our best. Keep on reading, and let
your friends know about us; the more folks read (and write for) us, the
better we get.
best,
dave
...............
I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of time learning all
the intricacies of the preg_... pcre functions. But whenever I
go to the shell environment, the rules are different and so are
the results.
Today, I found `pcregrep` and it behaves exactly like the perl
compatible regular expression from php and perl since it does in
fact use the same engine. Now I have only one regex syntax to
know in detail, and my regexs work the same everywhere.
I stumbled across your article on mozilla/thunderbird headers (I'm only
an irregular reader)
I had a look an the "mheny" extension, because I like the idea of
customising the viewed headers, but I found that it CAN also control
the headers used at composition time. Not sure if you "summarized this
out" of your article, or didn't find it to start with
Within the option dialog for mheny extension, select custom headers from
the tree on the left, then pick composition from the drop list on the
right, and you can select existing fields or add/remove custom fields,
which then show up when you compose a message.
However (and I think this means it still doesn't fit your need) you
can't add a default value for a field.
[Brian]
And that's the bingo value: I did try mnenhy, but what I really want is
a constant X-blah header containing a specific value every time I send
an email via Mozilla Thunderbird.
Still a useful find, thanks ...
[Brian]
But you got farther than I did, thanks for the heads up, I'll work some
more with mnenhy when I get a chance. Of course, that I just spelled the
name of the extension right twice only shows that I had to look it up
twice, inside of a minute or two.
i am learning from your website "Linux Gazette" by which i am finding it
easy to learn unix.
but i am having problems compiling and debugging the following program ...
can you please help me out with its solution.
using UNIX filters and awk to write a shell script to filter out comment
statements in a C program
a shell script to count the number of parentheses and braces in a C
program
a shell script to recognize function calls in a C program
a shell script to generate code to do profiling of a C program (to insert
counters to the C program)
using filter or just grep, sed and awk)
hoping for some guidence
sincerely
Amod Damle
(ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY-CHICAGO)
[Sluggo]
The first thing you should see is the TAG Posting Guidelines
http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html
in the FAQ section. There you'll see we don't do people's homework for
them. How do we know it's homework? You don't want to do a useful task:
who cares how many braces a C program has? You choose the tools first and
then the strategy, and you insist on using kludgey tools. If I really
wanted to count braces, I would write a Python program.
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""count-braces.py
Usage: count-braces.py <filename
Print the number of {}() characters in the input file.
"""
import re, sys
braceRx = re.compile( R"[{}()]" )
text = sys.stdin.read()
hits = braceRx.findall(text)
print len(hits)
[Ben]
Jeez. Pythoneers. Always making things more complicated.
Readers who wish to convert JPEG to Postscript for inclusion in a
TeX/LaTeX document (or for any other reason) may want to use:
convert file.jpg eps2:file.eps
^
Note the 2! This is better than the default "convert file.jpg file.eps"
and performs the same function as "jpeg2ps" (which is in Debian
non-free).
Explanation:
The default postscript level for PS conversion is 1 which produces large
and bad conversions since it produces pixelised bitmaps. In PS Level 2
and Level 3 the conversion of JPEG is inbuilt so the above procedure
just adds a bit of postscript header stuff to the unchanged jpeg file.
In other words this conversion is lossless.
You can also use "eps3" as the tag but beware that may be reasonably new
postscript printers that are not level 3 compliant. (Ghostscript is
level 3 compliant).
The following script is my interface to netdate. I modified
the script found at website listed in the script. You have
to be root to set the system and hardware clocks, yet you
can query the time servers as a regular user.
Just saw this at Freshmeat; sounds really sweet, particularly the
per-user configuration capability. Hopefully, the world is heading this
way...
...............
Mail Avenger 0.5.1
by xxx - Sun, Nov 21st 2004 02:48 PDT
About: Mail Avenger is a highly-configurable, MTA-independent SMTP
server. It allows you to reject spam during mail transactions, before
spooling messages in your local mail queue. You can specify site-wide
default policies for filtering mail, but individual users can also craft
their own policies by creating avenger scripts in their home
directories. It includes many features not supported by other SMTP
servers, including mail-bomb protection, integration with kernel
firewalls, TCP SYN fingerprint and network route recording, SMTP-level
analysis of client implementations, SMTP callbacks to verify sender
addresses, per-user mail scripts that run during SMTP transactions,
virtual domain to user mapping for the purposes of filtering, SPF
(sender policy framework), dynamic SPF query construction in mail filter
scripts, support for easily issuing multiple concurrent, asynchronous
DNS and SPF queries from filter scripts, and the ability to run spam
filters such as spamassassin on message bodies before replying to SMTP
DATA commands.
Changes: A critical memory handling bug was fixed in the avenger.local
and deliver utilities.
As past discussions in TAG have shown, I'm definitely not a fan of the
various display managers; I believe that they take away, or obscure, too
much of the control that a user has over X. However, starting X
automatically from your ~/.bash_profile doesn't seem like a very smart
move either: any time you get a login shell (e.g., logging into another
console), you'd be firing off a new instance of X - or at least trying
to, since it would die with a list of error messages.
The answer to this dilemma is a conditional start for X - in other
words, we only want to execute it if it's not already running, i.e. only
on the first login. To do this, just add the following line to the end
of your ~/.bash_profile:
ps ax|grep -q "[ ]`which X`" || startx
For those who just have to know ([grin] I certainly would, if I were
you): the above expression pipes the list of running processes, which is
the output of the "ps" command, to 'grep', which searches it for the
presence of a running X. To make the search more precise, the command
substitution (`which X`) returns the full pathname to X as the search
string. The character class preceding the search string ([ ]) is there
to make 'grep' ignore its own entry in process table (an old 'grep'
trick), and the "-q" option of 'grep' makes it return only a
success/failure exit code instead of the actual matched string. The OR
operator, '||', ties it all together into an expression that says
"either X is running OR (execute) startx".
I use this whois website a lot because of the information it gives. If
you sign up you can see all the domains that a server has.
thanks,
Jared Belkus
Just in case you're a sysadmin thinking, geez, just how many sites am
I running on this machine again... did I miss any during that upgrade...
-- Heather
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
The Answer Gang
Linux Gazette 110: The Answer Gang (TWDT)The Answer Gang 110:
...making Linux just a little more fun!
The Answer Gang By Jim Dennis, Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Breen, Chris, and...
(meet the Gang) ...
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and
You!
We have guidelines for asking and answering questions. Linux questions only, please.
We make no guarantees about answers, but you can be anonymous on request. See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LGSearch Engine
Here's a nifty HTML device for previous/next/goto page links similar
to MS Access's record selector.
I had to use the "display:inline" style on the form to keep it from
jumping to the next line. I also used that for the <DIV> to keep the
gray background from spreading the entire screen width.
[Ben]
_Nice!_ I'll be playing with that gadget. Thanks, Mike! As to "iv",
well...
ben@Fenrir:~$ su -c 'apt-get install iv'
Password:
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Package iv is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
ida
E: Package iv has no installation candidate
In the spirit of exchange: if you want really nice pull-down (or
pull-out) menus and don't mind JavaScript, take a look at Tigra Menu
(http://www.softcomplex.com). A really nice, free implementation that
works fine with every browser I've tested (which even the best CSS-based
menus I could write - or find - don't.)
It looks like that's a different program. The 'iv' I found was in
Gentoo and its homepage is http://wolfpack.twu.net/IV
(http://packages.debian.org and the copyright file didn't list the home
page, so I googled "ida graphics software" and found a listing at
http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/ports.php?c=graphics&n=ida
that links to the above page with the correct domain name and
author's name (Greg Knorr). But the Debian package says the original
is the Debian source, so maybe he's a Debian developer. Or maybe
Debian no longer lists the external home page in the copyright file?
AMD64 Shuttle
From Mike Orr
Answered By: William Park, Jimmy O'Regan, Huw Lynes
Searching for alternatives to my 450 MHz Master of Slowness. I could
get a motherboard+chip for my empty case. Or I could get what I'm
currently drooling over, a Shuttle. There's an Athlon 64 jobbie for
$359 (SN85G4):
[Huw]
Downsides to the shuttle (I have a P4 one myself):
you pay a premium for the form factor and they can have heat problems.
they are noisier than you would expect.
it's built on the nforce3 chipset.
The ad seems to say it includes the CPU, although I'm surprised it
doesn't say the speed.
This compared to the $150-200 I'd spend on a regular motherboard and
CPU. Which seems the better deal? Gentoo has an Am64 version. Does
the 64 bit make enough difference to justify the $60 over a regular
Athlon?
[William]
Unless you need 4GB+ memory, then you probably don't need 64-bit. Since
you're asking such question, you definitely don't need it. :-)
I would advise against Shuttle. They have heat problem, and their power
supply is not the quality stuff.
[Huw]
x86_64 is a better design than the old x86. Hypertransport makes
enough of a differerence that an x86_64 system is pound for pound
faster than a P4 system. But it really shines when you throw a lot of
RAM at it. Being able to seamlessly address more than 2GB of memory is
a very good thing. Of course with your budget that's just academic. If
you still want one for the cool factor (which is justification enough
IMHO) then get a motherboard based on one of the via chipsets not the
nForce3. I'm basing this on what a dog the nForce2 was so it may not
be entirely fair, plus I have a cheap via based Athlon64 at work that
installed Fedora Core 1 (x86_64) out of the box with no fuss. This was
decidedly different behaviour from some of the weird Opteron chipsets
I've had to deal with.
What would be the most politically correct video card for this puppy?
Meaning, which manufacturers are doing a good job of making their
specs open? Matrox G400 has been my reliable standby, but I had
good luck with an nVIDIA chip recently, and my current computer has an
ATI 3D Rage IIC.
[William]
Use what you have.
[Huw]
Sadly there are no politically correct graphics cards. Capitalist
running-dogs like myself prefer nVidia. Mainly because their engineers
are helpful.
<mind control>
Buy the Athlon64, you don't need it, but you want it.
</mind control>
[Jimmy]
Aw, you're not even trying. "Buy the Athlon64 now for the coolness, or
invest in it for the ability to seamlessly address more than 2GB of
memory" -- offer a choice that isn't, because the brain only listens to
the 'or'. Standard sales trick.
[Huw]
The 2GB limit is a major pain though. A certain badly
written renderer which we shall not name has a favourite trick whereby
it runs full speed at the 2GB per process limit and then dies in a
small shower of zombied process. When the 64bit version comes out
it'll have to find a new trick.
My main concerns are --
1) Speed
[Huw]
x86_64 is definately faster than straight x86 but I'm not sure it's
worth the price difference given that you are not going to be doing
anything to take advantage of it's extra features. Personally I'd buy
a P4 and spend the difference on a DVD-RW.
2) Noise
[Huw]
The shuttles are not silent. The new PSU's are much quieter than the
old ones. I know this because I was sufficiently irritated with the
old one to upgrade. They are quieter than a standard off the shelf PC
though.
3) Size
I don't anticipate having more than 640 MB of memory, so the 2 GB doesn't
apply. I thought Shuttle had solved the heat problem in their later
designs; if that's not the case, that's another strike against it.
[Huw]
The shuttle and its ilk are definite winners here.
Depends what's in the case. I have a P4, 512MB RAM, 120-GB PATA drive,
CD-RW/DVD and a Fanless nVidia 5200. I haven't had any heat issues but
I'm not sure I'd want to fill the spare PCI slot or put in a second
hard drive. If you want to pack a lot of kit in then you are probably
better off looking at more generic case designs.
Any gentle readers out there willing to give comparative heat and noise and
raw high end power notes
on the obviously smaller mini-itx form factor, write to The Answer Gang!
-- Heather
/dev/ub
From
Answered By Frodo
A few days ago, I changed to kernel 2.6.9 on one of my machines and suddenly
none of the sd devices were made for my usb harddisks. Turned out, 2.6.9
now uses the /dev/ub/ structure instead... took me a while to figure that one
out... lol
Low Performance USB Block driver (BLK_DEV_UB)
It does not seem to be enabled by default... guess I accidentally enabled
it, but it actually does seem to work a bit better with some of my devices,
when using USB 2.0 instead of USB 1.1
(some external harddisks seem to not be happy with the way Linux used to
handle USB 2.0)
[Heather]
ooh so it isn't merely cosmetic. ok.
am trying to find out, what exactly happened
what I do know, is that the "old" way did a usb to scsi thingie...
config BLK_DEV_UB
tristate "Low Performance USB Block driver"
depends on USB
help
This driver supports certain USB attached storage devices
such as flash keys.
If unsure, say N.
might just make it a lil warning:
"If you happen to enable BLK_DEV_UB, your USB attached storage devices will
no longer be known as /dev/sdxn (where x is a letter and n a number), but as
/dev/ub/x/partn."
> You're using the UB driver. Does it work if you turn that off and use the
> usb-storage driver instead?
Damn, you are right - this is a new driver...
I didn't notice that, i did rely on hotplug to load the correct modules.
Removed the ub driver and everything is fine now.
That means - just unloadin ub and loading usb-storage didn't work.
I had to remove it from the kernel config and rebuild the modules. Actually
usb-storage was the only module being rebuilt. Looks like usb-storage's
functionality is different if ub is built."
btw, about the linux-usb.org link... I know that page... but there seem to
be quite a few external hard disks (WD, for instance) and cases for hard
disks, that do not work too well with linux' usb2.0 driver afterall...
quite probably the fault of those devices... but it stinks anyway :)
[Heather]
having to rebuild usb-storage? aw man, that does suck. can you keep both
forms of it around or does it subtly affect other things too? (not to be
tested with usb data you care about mind..)
nah, it seems to replace part of the usb stuff...
(well - usb-storage)
the rest seems unaffected
[Heather]
A bit of binary diff on the other usb modules might be in order :/
Now I know where the device files are, I have no problem with it... it "just
works" G
LG in developing countries
From Sluggo
Answered By: Ben Okopnik,
Ramon van Alteren,
Offer Kaye,
Brian Bilbrey,
Kapil Hari Paranjape
Dear readers, your editors have been discussing the changing PC/Internet
environment since LG's early days, and we're wondering what's the
minimum level of hardware and bandwidth now in the remoter parts of
Africa, Latin America, and Asia? Are Pentium/K6 computers above
300 MHz universal now? Are people still downloading the FTP files
because they can't afford the hour online to read LG interactively on
the web? Or is that no longer an issue? If we started allowing
articles to have more supplemental files, more images, more tarball
examples, would that cause an undue burden to any readers or does it
not matter?
[Kapil]
There seem to be two separate questions --
1. How hard is it to maintain a mirror of LG if the bandwidth/hardware
requirement is upped?
Speaking only from my experience this should not be a problem in
India providing that only "biggish" sites like ours try to maintain
a mirror.
2. How hard will it be to read LG if the bandwidth/hardware requirement is upped?
As long as there is a low-bandwidth low-hardware version of LG that
is available, you can always up the requirement for a high-end version.
So what is low-bandwidth?
A. Speaking only for India. Most places still have only a dial-up phone link.
This link takes them to an ISP who will probably give them a share of
64K-512K link to one of the hubs in the bigger cities which are then linked
quite well to the rest of the internet and each other (the hubs that is).
And what is low-hardware?
B. In a recent meeting to disburse funds to Indian universities for the purchase of
computers, I heard that some of these place still have 486's. However, with
the recent drop in prices of entry level Pentium class machines (to approximately
half the earlier price) this should change in a year or so. At the same time
working hardware has a way of trickling down over here so it is not impossible
to find even a 386 in some places.
However, the use of GNU/Linux in India at this level is still very low. Since (whether
we like it or not) LG is only read by people with some familiarity with *nix, the above
data may not be entirely relevant.
For years we got letters every few months asking for an e-mail or print
version of LG. That was unfeasable for us to provide, so we steered
people toward the FTP version, TWDT, and TWDT.txt instead. The mirrors
complained whenever we regenerated the FTP files or made bulk updates to
back issues, because of the bandwidth it cost them. One student wrote
from a school in Africa, saying they all read LG from a shared copy
downloaded at the school, but the school couldn't afford the online time
to read it interactively on the web. Others said they paid by the
minute or megabyte for their Internet connection, and each megabyte was
a significant choice.
Yet now we hear that Pentium-level computers are widely available in the
poorer parts of Latin America, many governments are switching to
Linux, and community wireless networks are sprouting up in villages in
India and Africa. It's been over a year since we've gotten a bandwidth
complaint from a reader or a mirror. Does that mean this is no longer
an issue? Or that those readers now have more local resources for Linux
information/help and no longer rely solely on LG? Or that we lost those
readers/mirrors during the move from SSC and they never found our new
address? Unfortunately, the the nature of this problem means that those
who are the least connected are the ones least able to write in and tell us
about it, so we need to hear from others from those countries and
regions who can tell us what the situation is.
On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 11:35:51AM -0800, Mike Orr wrote:
Dear readers, your editors have been discussing the changing PC/Internet
environment since LG's early days, and we're wondering what's the
minimum level of hardware and bandwidth now in the remoter parts of
Africa, Latin America, and Asia?
[Ben]
(A shovel and a pitchfork for minimum hardware and a wheelbarrow for
bandwidth - but note that even these are not available in all areas. :)
The term "minumum level" contains assumptions that render the answers to
this question less than useful.)
How? The question about whether most people have a 300 MHz Pentium or
better was an attempt to see whether most readers have a computer
capable of running a modern graphical browser and KDE comfortably.
[Ben]
"Minimum", in this venue, always starts at zero. Asking what the
"minumum" hardware is will have people responding with their stories of
woe about building TCP/IP stacks with hay and mud, and being too poor to
get quality mud. Phrasing the question as you have predetermines the
field of answers, since people who do not consider their hardware as
"minimum" will not respond, and so you'll get the answers that only
reinforce the point you're trying to make as opposed to the true state
of the situation - a perfect example of the "statistics" that Barry was
talking about just a few days ago.
[Offer Kaye]
"Running KDE comfortably" on a 300 MHz Pentium?! You must be joking...
Have you tried opening a recent version of KDE? It's a hog - both
memory and CPU. I have an 1800+ AthlonXP with 512MB of RAM, and even
so KDE is sloooow to start up and apps take a while to open, including
Firefox (a browser considered both modern and "light").
Yes but you have to draw a line somewhere. KDE 3.2 is reasonable but not
snappy on my 450 MHz Duron, but KDE 3.3 on the same machine is so slow it
makes Windows look fast by comparision. It may not be KDE's fault: the
first is on Debian and the second on Gentoo, and the system startup/shutdown
on the Gentoo side is much slower too. I just bought a 2600 AthlonXP
chip (decided to wait a year or two on the Shuttle), so we'll see how
much that helps.
BTW, I got a Foxconn micro ATX motherboard to go with it. Hadn't heard
of that brand before, but it had a VIA chipset and Award BIOS so I
figured it was more standard than the mobo next to it with an nVIDIA
chipset. I paid $6 more for less, haha: two memory slots instead of
three, three PCI slots instead of five or six. But I thought back to
when have I ever used more than three PCI cards simultaneously, and the
answer was "never". Presumably the nVIDIA chipset would have been
compatible enough since it wasn't nVIDIA video, but I figured why take
chances and did I want my money going to a company that offers
binary-only drivers? The salesman reassured me that a micro ATX mobo
would fit into a regular ATX case; we'll see.
It's interesting how the prices of chips and motherboards have reversed.
My standard rule has been to buy whatever combination is currently
selling for $150. In the past that's meant a $50 chip and $70
motherboard. But this time it's a $99 chip and a $55 motherboard. They
did have $50 chips but they were AMD Seperon. I haven't heard of those
before. They came out a couple months ago as a replacement line for the
Duron. Gentoo doesn't mention them as a supported platform although I
assume they're compatible.
[Brian]
BTW, I've got one of the top end Sempron's, a 3100+, running on an Asus
K8N mobo (nForce3 chipset). The motherboard itself is bloody amazing.
Socket for the processor. Heatsink over the single (or composite? can't
tell) chipset. A few small (8-12 pin) smc glue logic chips, batches of
electrolytic caps, sm resistors, and lots of connectors. But overall,
the impression is of a barren field... picture here:
The 3100+ Sempron is a 64-bit A64 with 32 bits lopped off, and half the
L2 cache, sort of the modern day equivalent of the 386SX, I guess.
The other components in the system are a 160G Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
HD, an old 4x DVD+RW burner, and 512M of RAM.
Still, the board/processor combination is fast, supported well by the
2.6.9 kernel. The ethernet is on the chipset, and runs with the
forcedeth driver, which is making some good strides now that nVidia
decided that since a reverse-engineered driver was available in spite of
their non-assistance, they might as well help make it better. Audio is
acceptable as AC97/i810 equivalent. I'm running an ATI 9200 Video card,
and the whole thing is wrapped up in an Antec Sonata case.
I've thrown Debian Sarge, Xandros, Fedora Core 3, and a couple of *BSD
variants at it, all have run. OpenBSD has no driver for the ethernet
ported yet. Everything else just worked, and it's the fastest "cheap"
system I have.
It's not as robust as the 2.5 year old dual Athlon box, but true SMP
just keeps trucking when a single processor box starts wheezing.
So, I'd count this report as a positive recommendation for the
nForce3/Sempron combination on recent (2.6 kernel based) distros.
The Sempron is just the Athlon renamed, which explains why there's only a $5
difference between the same-speed chips. Seems AMD's marketers were
getting nervous about the brand-name dilution effect of having their
luxury chip (the AMD 64) and their proletarian chip (the Athlon) both
called "Athlon", afraid that consumers wouldn't notice the difference
and would, ahem, fail to appreciate the advantages of the higher-end
chips. (Although "higher-end" is open to debate, since the price of the
64-bit chips is pretty close to their same-speed 32-bit counterparts.)
AMD also seems to be preparing to ditch Socket A by designing a Sempron
that will fit in their AMD 64 motherboard (socket 754), as well as
versions for future Intel socket designs.
So, given that 64-bit doesn't mean squat on machines with less than 4 GB
memory, what happens in 2038 when the UNIX clock rolls over? Will we
all have to switch to 64-bit anyway or else?
I'm putting this all in my huge case from two years ago, the one whose
mobo was apparently water-damaged in my fire. Maybe I can get the neon
tubes in front to light up this time. I looked through my old receipts
to figure out what speed chip was in there without prying off the
heatsink. Cyrix/66, AMD Duron/150.... Was it really that slow? The
mobo manual said it could take a chip up to 1800. At the time I
thought, "That's three times faster than I'll ever need...."
I put the "300" on in case somebody should come up with a Pentium/70
or something. The bandwidth question should be obvious. If I've put
in unhelpful assumptions without realizing it, please tell me what they
are so the questions can be improved.
[Ben]
In my opinion, there's no way to get an accurate picture of what the
situation really is unless you travel to India, Africa, South America
(however you choose to define it), etc., and spend a few months
traipsing a wide area and taking a census - and even that data would be
of limited use since it's a constantly-changing variable.
So, in short, my problem with the way the question is phrased is that
the answers to it *can't* give any new insight. They can, however, be
used to stack the cards. I'm not accusing you of doing this, but I am
saying that this form of the question is not useful.
However - dear readers, please feel free to let us know what challenges,
if any, you've encountered in your LG-reading experience. Our purpose is
to deliver the greatest amount of high-quality content to you, and to
"make Linux a little more fun"; this implies and requires access to that
content. We can't buy you all new computers and high-speed network
access - I just rattled the change in my pocket, and had to admit to
myself, bitter as it may be, that it just wasn't enough - but if there's
something we can do to improve access to LG, we'd love to hear your
ideas.
Through the magic of email plus my own desire to make LG serve as
many people as possible, this editor's door is always open. Come on in.
[Jimmy]
But beware the curmudgeons! And please be aware that an opinion given
with the utmost brutal honesty is the /start/ of the discussion, not the
end. Don't make me quote the 'Haggle' scene again.
[Ramon]
I've just returned from Uganda for a Development project on Linux
and Open Source software in general.
Apart from giving a course on Linux system administration I helped setup
a local mirror with open source software and more importantly
documentation. Among the documentation was the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) including The Linux
Gazette.
Due to poor bandwidth offerings in Uganda we've resorted to updating
this mirror using a portable harddisk that gets filled in Europe and
sent through diplomatic snailmail to Uganda on a quarterly basis.
I don't think hardware is that much an issue. In Uganda the issue
definitly is bandwidth. I work for a foundation that partners with a
rural university, bandwidth there is 64k down / 16k upload for the
entire university which has to be shared with 400+ students and 50+ staff.
Internet slows down to a crawl during the daytime........ (500B/s or less)
Common offerings from local ISP's are 16Kbit links for $50/month, if
you're living in the capital, otherwise you're out-of-luck or dependant
on local NGO's with internet access / cyber cafes.
Unlike India, telephonelines are non-existant. Nearly everyone has a
mobile phone, normal phone lines are only present in some government
buildings, large companies and possibly NGO's. The quality of the
phonelines is horrible.
Although I'm not entirely sure, I think that the entire country has
something in the order of a 4-6Mbit link to the rest of the internet.
At an ICT-conference I visited somebody quoted a $8000 figure for a
1Mbit internet link to me.....
We (eacoss) currently operate the only local open source mirror in
Uganda and we're unable to update it through the internet. We would not
be affected that much by this change because of the update-method for
our mirror however other people in the eastern african region might.
That said, the other point that kapil raised, also holds true for Uganda
and Eastern Africa in general. Linux/Opensource software is not (yet)
widely used. The EACOSS foundation (www.eacoss.org) is trying to promote
that, however reality is that most people are using windows.
This is changing (rather fast) however with M$ and other big companies
starting to enforce copyright protection schemes, and licence costs
generally way beyond a local year income.
There is a desperate need for more knowledge on Linux/Open source and
more advanced knowledge on networking, software developement, etc in
general, so the gazette could definitly fill a gap.
[Ben]
Thank you, Ramon: it's always good to get info from people in the field.
The most interesting part for me was that my own estimate of how things
were in that part of the world was very close to what you've reported.
As to the "sneaker-net" method of information transport into Uganda, it
reminds me of the old joke: "never underestimate the bandwidth of a
station wagon full of magtapes." It may be slow, but it's still valid.
Linux-friendly hardware
From Sluggo
Answered By: Jimmy O'Regan,
John Karns,
Thomas Adam,
Karl-Heinz Herrmann,
Ben Okopnik
Is there a FAQ somewhere of hardware manufacturers' track records
regarding open specs and cooperating with free software?
I.e., the Tux-friendly seal of approval. Not for things that are
just passively compatible with Linux, but for manufacturers who take
steps to cooperate.
I can see a possible logo, although it's not quite the right message:
[picture of Tux, with a gun hanging on the side. "Cooperate, or the penguin gets it"]
If not, it
would be good to have one in LG, as a way to reward good manufacturers
and punish bad ones. I'll write it up if people can send me facts and
links. Off the top of my head...
CPU, MOTHERBOARD, HARD DRIVE:
(not much to say; I think they're as open as we can expect)
BIOS:
(what issues here? flashable under Linux? is the open BIOS project still active?)
(LinuxBIOS is a port of Linux that runs in place of a BIOS. It's
mainly used in clusters, and boasts a record boot time of 3 seconds).
-- Jimmy
VIDEO:
I think Matrox has been cooperative. nVIDIA has their notorious binary drivers.
[Heather] ATI has been somewhat cooperative, in that they allow information out after
their boards are old enough. This is decent but I've encountered their
proprietary driver not supporting an old enough board while the X11 community
still hadn't gotten the open source support filled in, reducing one to raw
VESA support. Wah. Temporary problem, timing just sucked is all.
PRINTERS:
I think Epson has been cooperative, but many Canon printers are Windows only. Lexmark had their offensive DMCA clause for toner cartridges.
[Thomas]
> PRINTERS -- Lexmark had their
^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
Nah... I just don't see how those two are related. :P
[Karl-Heinz]
Well -- I like my Optra E312. speeks PCL and Postscript. The latter
better then some monster-printers of varying manufacurers I've seen in
offices.
CD/DVD:
could be more open but that's more of a legal issue and pressure from Hollywood than of manufacturers stonewalling.
MODEM:
winmodems bad. Is there a software-only modem for Linux? My friends with Macs like to gloat about their software modems, although the counterargument was why distract your main CPU when you can have a dedicated chip doing the work.
[Jimmy]
There is support for an IBM softmodem in the kernel, and there was a
project to get some Lucent modems working, though that pretty much fell
by the wayside. There is a software modem available, though it only goes
as far as 28.8 (the author shifted focus to other nifty things like tcc,
qemu, and ffmpeg).
[John]
The lucent modem / Linux situation seems to parallel that of the nVidia
graphics cards, in that proprietary binary modules link to the kernel
using the same or similar methods. Although hardware UART modems will
undoubtedly remain preferrable for Linux users, I've always had pretty
good luck with the Lucent modems. As winmodems go, they're probably one
of the easier varieties to deal with. Not to say that they won't be a
pain when you find yourself dealing with a combination of kernel and
libgcc for which they haven't issued an update, but for me, that's
happened only once in the 8 yrs or so that I've been dealing with them.
[Jimmy]
No, there actually is some open source software that accesses Lucent
modems from user-space. It doesn't work as a modem, but the author just
wanted to be able to use it as a phone. Someone else tried to couple
that work with the software modem I mentioned, but I don't know if it
works at all.
There hasn't really been any work done in this area for years though.
[Heather] The reason that hasn't been notable work on a true softmodem for Linux is because right around the time it was getting some progress, the genius who was making the progress,
Tony Fisher, died of cancer
-- a terrible loss apparently for linguistics fans as well.
See http://linmodems.org and search downward for "generic modem".
The university had great respect for him and still
maintains the software link, so what he had is downloadable at:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/modem
...............
What's done:
V34 modulator (sampling rate of 8000 Hz, handle all the symbol
rate, carrier and trellis combinaisons).
V34 demodulator (no echo cancellor yet, and startup phases not
complete).
Algebraic part of V90.
DTMF dialing/receive.
V8 protocol.
V21 modulation & demodulation
V23 modulation & demodulation
sample code to test the protocol.
sample code to test V21, V22, V23, V34 and V90 independently from
the modem.
a basic phone line simulator (with echos & typical line
amplitude/phase distortion).
Finds a Lucent PCI winmodem and reports information on this.
Goes offhook and detects the dial tone.
Dials using pulses or dtmf. Here in the UK the dtmf dialling works, you
can hear the call being answered.
Try "ltmodem -d 011223344" (replace 011223344 with the number of your
favourite ISP) and listen to the modem at the other end answering the call!
Detects the answer tone of the phone at the other end, or busy tone if
it is engaged.
Picks up incomming calls.
Command line mode allows control of modem interactively or via a script
file.
Includes fixes for Pavel's voice stuff, just need some more detailed
instructions on how to use it! This includes turning you computer into
an expensive telephone and full duplex voice transmission.
Reads ROM check sum and does basic I/O for DSP RAM.
Monitors/Sets either data in the PCI registers or at the I/O ports,
monitoring at configured intervals.
...............
Pavel Machek (the Pavel mentioned earlier) is also one of the primary
authors of Gnokii.
SOUND, ETHERNET, ETC: ?
[Ben]
Just saw something related to Mike's earlier question about hardware
compatibility:
Being realistic about Linux hardware compatibility
By: Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
I installed last summer Suse Linux 9.0 with KDE to my laptop(thinkpad 600e,
233mzh pentium 2). I haven't used a linux before, and it seems to work fine
except some points that might be more complicated in laptops than in normal
pc's.
[Ben]
I think that's true for pretty much any OS - the hardware in laptops,
other than perhaps memory and hard drives, is nearly all proprietary
(i.e., you can't run out to your local computer store and buy an, e.g.,
video card for your Toshiba or Dell), and this has obvious results.
In my apartment house they use the already existing phone-cable to access
internet, therefore i needed to buy a pcmcia card(smc 8041tx v.2) and a
HomePNA converter(A-Link HomePNA) to gain access to the internet.
[Ben]
This card is supported under pcmcia-cs, at least according to
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp/SUPPORTED.CARDS . The easiest
thing to do would have been to install the package from
ftp://ftp.suse.com ... unfortunately, you went a different route. The
next easiest thing, in my opinion, would be to reverse what you've
done, then install the package.
Keeping on with trying to install from source is not something I would
recommend for you, particularly because this is a standard package;
what you'll have, if you do manage to succeed, is a system in which the
PCMCIA package is a) not recognized by the packaging system, and is b)
not upgradeable - except through more source-based installation - as a
result. In other words, you'll be creating a permanent headache for
yourself.
I began installing it with these instructions:
...............
SMC Networks, Inc.
SMC 10/100 PC Card (SMC8041 V.2)
Linux Driver Installation
Installation Guide:
1. Please download the pcmcia package (3.1.29 or higher vision)
from the follow url:
ftp://www.sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/pcmcia
2. Install the package:
Copy the pcmcia packagefile into /usr/src/linux/
and uncompress it:
tar zxvf pcmcia-cs-3.1.29.tar.gz
3. Config the pcmcia package
Change the directory into pcmcia
cd pcmcia-cs-3.1.29
then config and install it
make config
make install
4. Edit the /etc/pcmcia/config
Add following to the config file
device "SMC 80412"
class "network" module "pcnet_cs"
and add the following configuration:
card "SMC 80412"
version "SMC" , "8041TX-10/100-PC-Card-V2", "", ""
bind "pcnet_cs"
5. Restart the pcmcia service
/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart
Then the SMC 10/100 PC Card (SMC8041 V.2) adapter will start to work.
...............
As i reached the third point, this happened:
[Ben]
The problem you're having, incidentally, is not a complex one:
dhcppc23:~ # /usr/src/linux/pcmcia-cs-3.1.3/Configure make
Ack! The PCMCIA distribution is incomplete/damaged!
Unpack again -- and try using a Linux filesystem this time.
Configuration failed.
dhcppc23:~ #
[Ben]
The tarball you have may have been damaged, or you may need more
software. The easy way to tell is usually my examining the log file
produced by "make"... but, again, note that this is all theoretical for
the moment: the right thing to do is reverse what you've done so far and
install the actual "pcmcia-cs" package.
I have tried the command "make config" but nothing happens. And as the error
message tells, i tried unpacking the package several times, but the message
repeats. As i completed the instruction points 4 and 5, the light turned on
in the pcmcia card, but there is still no connection.
My questions are; firstly, how to configure the card properly and secondly,
how to tell the firewall to mind the pcmcia card, or does the firewall detect
all interaction from my computer and the rest of the world?
[Ben]
I've addressed the first question already; as to firewalls, they work
with interfaces, not hardware. In other words, a firewall doesn't
really care what kind of hardware you have - what it needs to know about
is rules for, e.g. "eth0".
I know that these
questions might seems somewhat simple or just plain stupid,
[Ben]
Not at all. You've done a fine job of describing what you need, the
environment in which you're working, and the problem you're having.
Answering your question was easy and pleasant as a result.
but this system
is totally new for me, and it seems fun and full of possibilities, but the
internet access is vital for me. As in your instructions you advised to be
funny, but hopefully this email provides you at least some giggles about us
rookies;)
[Ben]
Hey, it's all about making Linux a little more fun.
That's why we're
here!
I managed to get the internet working properly for two days... and the only
inconvenience was getting the suse installation cd from my dad per post. Your
instructions we're precise and helpful. I reversed the driver kit i had begun
installing, got the right kit from ftp.suse.com, and yast installed it all
for me. The only thing that i needed to do was to reboot (i thought this was
only necessary in wondows giggles)..and lights went on!
[Ben]
[chuckle] You didn't really need to reboot - there's almost never a need
to do that in Linux, unless you've recompiled the kernel or something -
but there are times when it may be easier to do that than all the
"modprobe" invocations with mysterious module names.
I even istalled Opera right away, went like a dream, and shockwave as
well..and my laptop purrs like kitten. i only hope i wont overheat it too
much because i've been so much online;) Next project is installing gimp 2 but
that's only a minor glitch..it's fun learning and now it's so much easier
thanks to you and the internet!
Thank you once again for your swift and precise instructions.
[Ben]
Excellent! It's a pleasure to help, particularly some like yourself who
takes the time to let us know the results. Glad we could be of service!
hi howtoopen .tgz or all zip
From ronen
Answered By: Suramya Tomar,
Ben Okopnik
hi
howtoopen .tgz or all zip you now
thanks
ronen
[Suramya]
tar -zxf filename.tgz
or
unzip filename.zip
Next time try to be a bit more clearer in your request. It would make it
easier for us to answer your question.
[Ben]
[ top-posting reversed so that time won't flow backwards. Suramya,
please don't provide bad examples for our readers.
]
Interestingly enough, earlier today Jimmy pointed me to a couple of
sites in Hebrew that looked like translations of some LG articles -
and beziqint.net is an ISP in Israel. Coincidence? Maybe...
In general, our foreign correspondents do a fine job of asking good
questions; ronen, obviously, has missed on that count (I originally
received his email at our "tag-kb" address, which is used for contacting
the KnowledgeBase maintainer.) However, since his question is of broad
interest to new Linux users, we'll let him off with a term in a
chroot(1) jail and a careful reading of "Asking Questions of The Answer
Gang" at http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html for future
reference - and I'll see if we can make this into a useful exchange.
(I'm feeling particularly pedantic today; as a net.friend once said, "it
gets me chicks.")
So, to ask the question that ronen (theoretically) was trying to ask:
...............
Hi there, Answer Gang! I'd like to know how to open .tgz and .zip files
under Linux. The standard documents are confusing, searching the Internet
gives me too many results, and I don't know where else to look. I'd
appreciate your help.
...............
Why, hi there, ronen! Nice of you to ask in such a clear,
understandable, and polite manner and give me a chance to pontificate on
the topic!
There are a number of ways to deal with compressed files in Linux. One
that's probably easiest for the new user is to use Midnight Commander's
"VFS" (Virtual File System) feature - you simply place the highlight on
the name of the compressed file you want and press the 'Enter' key. This
will let you look inside the file and copy out anything you want. The
default VFS setup handles bzip, bzip2, gzip, compress, ar, zip, jar,
xpi, zoo, lha, and arj compressed formats (assuming that you have the
appropriate decompression software installed.) You can run Midnight
Commander by typing "mc" at the command line, either in the console or
in an xterm window if you're running X.
If you want to do it manually, typing the name of the appropriate
decompressor (possibly followed by options) and the name of the file to
decompress at the command line should do it - but beware of "file
scatter", i.e., what happens when the person who created the file did
not use a directory structure to contain all the files. These will now
be scattered all over the directory into which you've decompressed them
- usually the current one. In general, it's a Good Idea to list the
files before decompressing the archive - or look into the file with
Midnight Commander, as mentioned above - just so you know what to expect.
Some examples of listing syntax for various decompressors:
# Gzipped tar file
tar tzf file.tgz
# tar file compressed with bzip2
tar tjf file.tar.bz2
# zipfile
unzip -l file.zip
# ARJ file
unarj l file.arj
Typing the name of the decompression program followed by '-h' or
'--help', just as is suggested at the very top of "Asking Questions of
The Answer Gang" at (http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html),
will show you the option list for that program.
You can also use one of several GUI decompression tools, such as
"guitar" (cute name, eh?) which act somewhat similar to WinZip in
Windows; you may find that environment to be more familiar and
comfortable. Do realize, however, that you'll be missing out on a lot of
the capabilities available at the command line; GUIs are cute, but the
CLI is powerful.
Perl, WWW::Mechanize, and Mailman administration
From Ben Okopnik
Answered By: Jimmy O'Regan
...or, "The Evolution of a script".
This started as a complaint about Mailman's administration interface. Over
the course of 5 days in November, Ben and I bashed out a script to automate
the deletion of mail that was held up by Mailman (spam, in other words),
and Ben taught me some Perl along the way.
-- Jimmy
Yeah, I dislike the damned thing as well. I wonder if Monsieur O'Regan
would be willing to cruft up a screen-scraper that would automate the
procedure?
[Jimmy]
Sure -- I was looking for something I could set WWW::Mechanize on
anyway. Does anyone have a sample setup I can be let loose on, because
Mandrake seem to have done a wonderful job of fucking up everything
related to email.
Awesome! Thanks, Jimmy; that damn thing is a regular pain. I wish
there was a way to tell Mailman to just delete every single one of them,
but I've never found a way to do so. This way, I can maybe cron it up
and forget about it.
See the attached file for a sample. The only things that need to happen
are
a) The "Action to take" needs to be switched to "Discard", and
b) "Submit all data" needs to be triggered.
It's actually something I need to learn about at some point, so I'll be
very interested in what you code up.
All it does is check that a username and password have been passed, and
if so, regurgitate everything the script sent. It seems to work, based
on the HTML in that sample. If it doesn't work, uncomment the two
'print' statments and send me the results.
This is probably not what you want - you'll just get a hashref as a
result. However, just in case it is, for some reason, I'm sending the
output along (but I'll be tweaking the script so that it does produce
something useful from the above.)
[Jimmy]
I forgot to remove that from the original, when I thought I was using
basic authentication; it prints a hashref, but it also prints the HTTP
status code. Not something to rely on, but it worked well enough to let
me see where I was going wrong (I was forgetting to prepend 'Basic ' to
the base64 encoded user/pass pair).
What it looks like is that the script is pulling down the content, but
then it's not doing anything with it.
[Jimmy]
After that form is submitted, is there any sort of 'Are you sure?' step?
Nope. It just shows you a result page that essentially says "there
aren't any new messages".
I only had a few minutes this morning, but - the stuff in the "if"
clause never happens. I put in a print statement above it and inside it,
and the one above prints stuff like
However, it still fails to delete the buggers.
I suspect that the
normal submission process sends something more than just the radio
button values to the CGI, whereas you skip everything else:
next unless $token->return_attr('type') =~ /radio/i;
At least in my limited perception; I don't know the module at all.
Around here, Ben wondered what the PHP script was for
-- Jimmy
Err... sorry, I've lost the context. What is this page, where does it
go, and what do I need to do with it?
[Jimmy]
Sorry, forgot myself. That was there to make sure the script was sending the
right values: '3' for reject.
Oh. I don't have PHP - no way to test that; however, you've seen the
output from Data::Dumper by now, and that gives you everything.
[Jimmy]
Well, you said already that it's not getting inside the if statement, which
is strange. If it was that there was a missing value that needed to be
submitted to the form, that'd be one thing, but as it is, only the default
stuff is getting submitted.
Hang on... the first submit works, but that doesn't use
{name => adminpw, value => "}, it's {adminpw => "}; so maybe I should have
the array made up of {$regex_match => 3}. I'm not so hot with using anything
other than scalars, so you may need to fix the syntax inside the if statement.
# This may need sytax correction
$name->{"$1"} = 3;
...............
Looks OK, although quoting is deprecated unless you need interpolation.
However, it still doesn't work; see the appended output (again, from
Data::Dumper.)
Looking at it, specifically the data that's sent back, I see what looks
like a problem (I've added some newlines to clarify the view):
Well... still doesn't work. Time for me to stop being lazy, then, and
actually look it up myself. :)
...............
while (my $token = $p->get_tag('input'))
{
next unless $token->return_attr('type') =~ /radio/i;
if ($token->return_attr('name') =~ /(senderaction-[^">]*)/)
{
$name->{$1} = 3;
}
}
# Eek! is this \%name or %name?
$mech->submit_form(form_number => 1, fields => \%name);
...............
Neither; you've never defined a %name hash. What you've got is a
reference named $name pointing to an anonymous hash. "fields" does
indeed expect a hashref, though. So,
$name->{$1} = 3;
should be simply
$name{$1} = 3;
and %name should be declared in a "my" somewhere; "fields" should point
to "\%name".
Ahhh... now it works. Very cool!
[Jimmy]
Yeah, I knew there was something I wasn't getting there; thanks for the
explanation. I think I still have a mark on my forehead from when I realised
I was trying to send an array where a hash was expected.
[Jimmy]
Reminds me of something I read once -- something like "a program is
complete when there's nothing left to take away, not when there's nothing
left to add".
Yep, the Rodin school of programming. I'm certainly an adherent.
[Jimmy]
I'll just chalk it up to the perils of cut 'n' paste
programming.
No worries; that's one of the ways to learn. If you're not making
mistakes, you're not learning - right? I have to keep repeating that to
myself, especially since I'm teaching my first full yoga class today. :)
[Jimmy]
...though it beats me why I didn't just change the browser string to pretend
to be Mozilla. I suppose I just like the idea that if someone did change
the UA string, the regex would still work.
[Jimmy]
Heh.
...............
print "Deleting $_\n";
# 'uniq' action happens because hashes possess the Buddha nature
...............
:) 'Tis true, though.
[Jimmy]
Isn't WWW::Mechanize neat?
Yep - I've wondered about how to do this kind of thing in the past, and
it's impressive just how easy WWW::Mechanize makes it.
[Jimmy]
I was wondering how to deal with cookies -- "Wow! Cookies are free!". It
rocks. I still don't trust myself enough to automate my maintenance payments
though.
You could always have it pause and display the setup for final approval
before you actually commit.
[Jimmy]
Heh. It's a bit much for something I only have to do once a fortnight
I later asked Ben if he'd mind me passing this thread for use in TAG
-- Jimmy
Fine by me, Jimmy. I enjoyed the two of us cooperating to make the beast
behave, anyway.
[Jimmy]
So did I. I really enjoyed that "oh no, it's not..." moment when I sent
you the second regex (that was typed with my paternal "I know you're up
to no good" squint).
I already abstracted the password string into a variable def at the top
of the script, and did a little more cleanup before sending it to Rick.
Latest version appended.
[Jimmy]
If you're willing to put yourself through my debugging process again, it
should be easy add an option to grab the content instead of deleting.
Heck, I've read the module docs by now. That's how I finally hammered my
end of it into shape. Actually, it looks like you should be able to do
the whole task with WWW::Mechanize (TokeParser is obviously needed
simply for its regex capabilities) - that might be worth looking at
before we go ahead and pub the results.
[Jimmy]
I was thinking that too. The doubt that was lurking in the back of my mind
came out of hiding: it'd need something extra -- an option to pass message
ids to not delete. (Not a problem, it's just the nagging of the "you're
forgetting something" thought).
Something like this, you mean?
delete_this_id() unless grep /$id/, @keep;
Take a look at the regex-based script version I sent you; it would be
easy enough to tweak.
[Jimmy]
Something like that. Can 'unless' be followed by braces, or would it need
a 'do'?
"do" is pretty special in Perl, and doesn't have anything to do with
conditionals (although it can be used with loops.) Sure, you can have
a statement block after "unless" (it's just syntactic sugar for "!if");
what you can't have is an "elseunless". :)
[Jimmy]
Do widzenia! (there's this cute Polish girl...)
This article is a continuation of a series in Issues 108 and 109
in which I discuss some of my additions to the standard Linux
shell. In my previous article in Issue 109, I promised to cover
dynamically-loadable builtins related to arrays, regex splitting,
plus interfacing to external libraries like SQL databases and an
XML parser.
Regex Match
Modeled after the Awk match() function, I added a new
match builtin for regex(3) matching.
match [-23] string regex [submatch]
It returns success (0) if 'string' contains 'regex' pattern. If
the 'submatch' array variable is specified, then by default, it
will contain all matching substrings corresponding to the entire
'regex' and any parenthesized groups in 'regex'. E.g.
match Aabc123Z '([a-z]+)([0-9]+)' a # a=(abc123 abc 123)
where 'abc123' matches the entire 'regex', 'abc' matches the
first group '([a-z])', and '123' matches the second group
'([0-9]+)'.
For the -2 option, 'submatch' will contain 2 elements,
non-matching preamble and leftover postamble (ie. before and after
the 'regex'). For -3 option, 'submatch' will contain 3
elements, the preamble, the matching string, and the postamble.
E.g.
match -2 Aabc123Z '([a-z]+)([0-9]+)' a # a=(A Z)
match -3 Aabc123Z '([a-z]+)([0-9]+)' a # a=(A abc123 Z)
where 'A' and 'Z' are the string segments before and after the
'regex', respectively.
You now have 3 different ways of doing regex matching:
[[ string =~ regex ]] conditional
test in standard Bash-3.0, which uses BASH_REMATCH as the array
variable,
the new extended 'case' statement,
which uses SUBMATCH as the array variable, and
match builtin command, where you can specify the array
variable and what it should contain.
Stack and Queue
Quite often, you need to implement a "stack" or "queue" data
structure. In shell, you can use positional parameters or an array
to hold the data, e.g.
set -- {a--z}
set -- $@ Z # append to queue
set -- A $@ # push to stack
set -- $2 $1 ${@:3} # swap first 2 items in stack
shift 2 # pop 2 items off the stack
set -- ${@|:-5:} ${@|::-5} # rotate queue to the right by 5
set -- ${@|:5:} ${@|::5} # rotate queue to the left by 5
This is acceptable for a throw-away script, but is very
inefficient because of all the copying of data back and forth.
Here are builtin implementations of stack and queue operations.
They directly manipulate positional parameters or arrays (with
-a option), in-place without copying the data. They are
fast and suitable for general purpose "toolbox" work.
pp_pop [-a array] [n]
Deletes N (default 1) positional parameters or array elements.
Same as 'shift' builtin for positional parameters, except that it
will pop items if possible. It returns error if the parameter or
array is empty.
pp_push [-a array] arg...
Inserts arguments at the beginning of positional parameters or
array. E.g.
set -- 1 2 3
pp_push a b c
echo $* # a b c 1 2 3
pp_append [-a array] arg...
Appends arguments at the end of positional parameters or array.
E.g.
set -- 1 2 3
pp_append a b c
echo $* # 1 2 3 a b c
pp_swap [-a array]
Swaps the first 2 parameters (ie. $1, $2) or array elements. It
returns error if the parameter or array does not have at least 2
items to swap.
pp_set [-a array] arg...
Sets the argument(s) as new positional parameters or array.
Equivalent to
set arg...
set -A array arg... # from Ksh
pp_overwrite [-a array] arg...
Overwrite the parameter(s) in-place. For an array, this is
equivalent to
set +A array arg... # from Ksh
E.g.
set -- 1 2 3 4 5 6
pp_overwrite a b c
echo $* # a b c 4 5 6
pp_rotateleft [-a array] [n]
Rotate N (default 1) positional parameters or array elements to
the left.
pp_rotateright [-a array] [n]
Rotate N (default 1) positional parameters or array elements to
the right.
pp_flip [-a array]
Flip the order of positional parameters or array elements.
E.g.
set -- {a--z}
pp_flip
echo $* # z y x ... a
The above example can be rewritten as,
set -- {a--z}
pp_append Z # append to queue
pp_push A # push to stack
pp_swap # swap first 2 items in stack
pp_pop 2 # pop 2 items off the stack
pp_rotateright 5 # rotate queue to the right by 5
pp_rotateleft 5 # rotate queue to the left by 5
Transpose and Sort
Transpose and sort problems come up a lot when dealing with
tables. Although there are utilities such as awk(1), and sort(1) to
handle these functions, in order to use them you have to pipe the
data (or write a file) to the external program, then read the
program's output back and re-parse it to collect the re-ordered
data. For well-behaved line-oriented text data this is possible,
but it is much better to have a dedicated shell solution, especially
when you have the data already parsed and simply want to re-order
it.
pp_transpose [-a array] n
Transpose positional parameters or array representing matrix
ordered by rows into a sequence that is ordered by columns. N is
the size of row. For example, given a sequence (1 2 3 4 a b c d),
representing 2x4 array with 2 rows (1 2 3 4) and (a b c d),
| 1 2 3 4 | | 1 a |
| a b c d | ==> | 2 b |
| 3 4 |
| 4 d |
the transposed sequence is (1 a 2 b 3 c 4 d), representing 4x2
array with 4 rows (1 a), (2 b), (3 c), and (4 d).
set -- 1 2 3 4 a b c d
pp_transpose 4
echo $* # 1 a 2 b 3 c 4 d
pp_transpose 2 # back to original sequence
An equivalent solution in pure shell would go (very slowly)
like
set -- 1 2 3 4 a b c d
eval set -- $(
for i in `seq 4`; do
for j in `seq $i 4 $#`; do
echo '"${'$j'}"'
done
done
)
echo $* # 1 a 2 b 3 c 4 d
pp_sort [-a array]
Sort positional parameters or array in ascending order. If the
array is integer type, then numerical sorting is done, e.g.
a=( {10..1} )
pp_sort -a a
echo ${a[*]} # 1 10 2 3 ... 9 (string sort)
declare -i a
pp_sort -a a
echo ${a[*]} # 1 2 3 ... 9 10 (integer sort)
Array Operations
Array cat
arraycat [-a array] a [b ...]
Prints array elements, one array at a time. If the -a
option is given, then it appends the data to the 'array' variable
instead. This is similar to
except that you're using variable references like the strcat()
and strcpy() builtins discussed in the previous articles.
Array map
In Python (and some other functional languages), you can apply a
function to each element of array without manually looping through.
If there are 2 or more arrays, then elements are taken from all of
the arrays in parallel. I've added a shell version of the Python
map() function:
arraymap command a [b ...]
Run 'command' with arguments taken from array elements in
parallel. It should take as many positional parameters as there are
arrays. This is equivalent to
where N is the maximum of all indexes. Array elements are
referenced by index, not by the order of storage. So, there can be
empty parameters.
E.g.
unset a b; a=(1 2 3) b=(4 5 6)
func () { echo $1$2; }
arraymap func a b # join in parallel: 14 25 36
func () { echo $(($1 + $2)); }
arraymap func a b # add in parallel: 5 7 9
Array zip and unzip
The names come from the workings of a
zipper. You start with two rows of teeth; and, when
you zip-up, you get one row of interleaved teeth. Consider arrays
x=(x1 x2 x3 ... xn) and y=(y1 y2 y3 ... yn). Zipping produces a
single array xy=(x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 ... xn yn) which consists of
interleaved elements of 'x' and 'y' arrays. Of course, unzipping
does the reverse.
y1 y2 y3 ... yn ==> x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 ... xn yn
x1 x2 x3 ... xn
Here are 2 new builtins to "zip" and "unzip" directly within
Bash shell.
arrayzip [-a array] name ...
Print array elements, one by one, going across the arrays in
parallel. If -a option is given, then append to the array
variable instead. Array elements are referenced by index, not by
the order of storage, so there can be empty parameters. This is
shell version of Python zip() function, and is equivalent to
arraymap 'printf "%s\n"' name ...
arraymap 'pp_append -a array' name ...
arrayunzip -a array name...
Inverse of 'arrayzip'. Sequentially appends items from 'array'
into 'name' array variables, moving across one row at a time.
Output variables are flushed first. If there are not enough input
items, then the null (empty) string is appended to the leftover
variables.
For example,
x=(1 2 3 4) y=(a b c d)
arrayzip -a xy x y
declare -p xy # xy=(1 a 2 b 3 c 4 d)
unset x y
arrayunzip -a xy x y
declare -p x y # back to original
You can also use array commands to extract rows or columns in a
transposition problem. E.g.
row1=(1 2 3 4) row2=(a b c d)
arraycat -a table row{1..2}
arrayunzip -a table col{1..4}
declare -p col{1..4} # (1 a), (2 b), (3 c), (4 d)
Given a list of items on the command-line, this new builtin
appends the selected items into an array variable. It is designed
to be called repeatedly, so you should create or flush the array
variable beforehand. Its many options control how and what items to
select.
Content filtering
The following options are command-line versions of parameter
expansion ${var|...}.
-f filter Append 'arg', only
if 'filter arg' returns success (0). Otherwise, skip to next
'arg'.
-c command Append the stdout
of command substitution `command arg`, only if there is an output.
Otherwise, skip to next 'arg'.
-i a:b Extract Python-style
[a:b] substring from each 'arg', ie. arg[a:b], arg[a:b], ...
-I a:b Complement of
-i, ie. [:a] + [b:]
-n a:b Extract Python-style
[a:b] range from 'arg' sequence, ie. [arg,arg,...][a:b]
-N a:b Complement of
-n, ie. [:a] + [b:]
-g glob Append 'arg'
matching 'glob' pattern.
-r regex Append 'arg'
matching 'regex' pattern.
-G glob Complement of
-g.
-R regex Complement of -r.
There are minor differences between the above mechanism and standard
parameter expansion. -i option extracts a substring from each
item, and the -n option extracts a subrange from the argument
list. Options -I and -N selects the inverse of
-i and -n, respectively, which are not available
in ${var|...}.
String join and split
Joining and splitting strings are very common operations. In
Python, you have string.join() and string.split(). Now, you can do
them in Bash also.
-j sep
Join all 'arg' with 'sep' separator, and append the resulting
string. E.g.
a=() # 'unset a' if 'a' already exists.
array -j '.' a 11 22 33 44
array -j '---' a abc 123
declare -p a # a=(11.22.33.44 abc---123)
-s sep
Split 'arg' by 'sep' separator, and append each segment to the
array. If 'sep' is null, then each char itself becomes an entry.
E.g.
a=()
array -s '.' a 11.22.33.44
array -s '---' a abc---123
declare -p a # a=(11 22 33 44 abc 123)
-p begin
-q end
Extract strings which are enclosed by 'begin' and 'end'
delimiters from 'arg'. Append both matching (excluding the
delimiters) and non-matching string segments to the array
sequentially. If both 'begin' and 'end' are null or if one option
is missing, then splitting is not done. E.g.
a=()
array -p 'abc' -q 'xyz' a abc123xyz789
declare -p a # a=(123 789)
You can call the command repeatedly, and the results are
appended to the end of array variable.
Regex split
Practically, all modern scripting languages can split string on
regex pattern, or replace the matching segment using callback
function. Now, so can Bash, and more.
-e regex
Extract 'regex' patterns from 'arg', and append each matching
string. (think egrep -e) E.g.
unset a; a=()
array -e '[a-z]+' a abc123xyz789
declare -p a # a=(abc xyz)
-v regex
Remove 'regex' patterns from 'arg' strings, and append each
non-matching string. Matching strings are skipped, like IFS
whitespace. (think egrep -v). This option is analogous to Awk
split() or Python re.split(), in that you're left with non-matching
segments. E.g.
array -v '[a-z]+' a abc123xyz789
declare -p a # a=(... 123 789)
-w regex
Similar to -e and -v option, but both matching
and non-matching strings are sequentially added, so that joining
the array with null (empty) string will give back the original
data.
array -w '[a-z]+' a abc123xyz789
declare -p a # a=(... abc 123 xyz 789)
You can specify regex(7) patterns with the -evw options
above. Unlike the -s option, null segments are not
appended, since they are rarely useful in regex splitting. If the
'nocaseglob' shell option is set, then regex matching is
case-insensitive, just like glob matching.
Callback function and substitution
So far, we are chopping up the command-line items and collecting
the pieces. You can also transform the pieces using a
callback command and use the result instead of the
original content, just like ${var|command} or -c command
option. However, if you collect the matching segments and the
non-matching segments separately, you lose the relative order of
those segments. What is needed is to apply the callback command to
each item just before appending the item to the array variable.
-E command
For each matching string, append `command matching [group...]` to
the array. The command line consists of the matching string and all
parenthesized groups (if any). For the -p and -q options,
command substitution `command inside` will be called where 'inside'
is matching segment without the delimiters.
-V command
For each non-matching string, append `command non-matching` to the
array.
The-EV options are independent and take effect only if
-evwpq options are specified. 'command' can be any command
you can type on your command line. This is a generalized form of
regex substitution.
For example, to increment numbers by 1 and capitalize
non-numbers,
If you can embed Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or VisualBasic within
HTML file, then there is no reason why you can't embed shell script
and process the HTML file through shell. In fact, I've done exactly
that. Here is a new builtin to process template strings with
embedded shell script.
basp [-p begin -q end] text...
Extract embedded shell scripts which are enclosed within
'<%...%>' delimiters (non-greedy, non-nesting) from text
arguments. Run the scripts at top level, not as command
substitution, and send the output, along with surrounding texts, to
stdout. If there is error, it returns immediately. If
-p and
-q
options are given, then 'begin' and 'end' are used as
delimiters, instead of '<%' and '%>'.
This is shell's answer to PHP, JSP, ASP, and the likes, so I
named it basp (BAsh Server Pages). It is only 70 lines of
C, and its main advantage is that you don't have to learn another
scripting language and syntax. You can continue to use shell which
has been around for 30 years. E.g.
If you have HTML template in a file, then just read it into a
string like
basp "`< file.html`"
Because they are running at top level, embedded code-blocks share
data and environment with each other and with the main shell session.
If you want to isolate the main session, run it in a subshell.
A more complicated example might be to get a list of items, then
print a table with 10 consecutive items per row. The template
file.html will look like
<table>
<%
set -- {1..40}
for i in `seq 1 10 $#`; do
cat << EOF
<tr> `printf '<td>%s</td> ' ${*:i:10}` </tr>
EOF
done
%>
</table>
You can implement the HTML template using the array builtin
from above. Essentially, you extract the script that is between the
'<%...%>' delimiters and run it through eval, and
print non-script to stdout unchanged. So, it would go something
like
a=()
array -p '<%' -q '%>' -E eval -V echo a "`< file.html`"
arraycat a
But, although it works for the example above, you are limited by
the fact that each command substitution is a separate process and
can't share data with other code-blocks. So, if you put 'set --
{1..50}' in another code-block, then it won't work. Besides,
basp "`< file.html`"
is less typing.
[Editor's Note: The security ramifications of
this are left as an exercise for the reader. Think chroot jail, at
a minimum. -- Dave ]
Expat XML parser
I've added a simple interface to the Expat XML parser, so that you can
register callback functions and interact with the XML parser from
the shell. This new builtin will be enabled only if you have Expat
installed. If you don't, then you will need to download/compile/install
Expat, and recompile Bash shell (starting with
./configure).
xml [-sedicnm command] text...
This is the interface to Expat-1.95.8 (from www.libexpat.org)
library. Arguments are fed to the Expat XML parser sequentially.
It returns 1 immediately on any error. If all arguments are processed
without error, then the builtin returns success (0). The argument must
be a single complete XML document, because Expat can handle only one
XML document per parser process.
The parser will invoke the callback commands or handlers that
you specify, with all required parameters on the command-line. The
callbacks will run at the top level, so if you need to protect your
shell environment, run the 'xml' command in subshell. For the moment,
the following options are recognized:
-s command start element (Usage: command tag att=value ... ).
The attribute name and value strings are concatenated with '=',
so that 'declare' or 'local' can be used to set shell variables with
the same names as attributes, ie.
declare "$2" # set the first attribute name
declare "${@:2}" # set all attribute names
-e command end element
(Usage: command tag )
-d command character data
(Usage: command data )
-i command processing
instruction (Usage: command target data )
-c command comment (Usage:
command text )
-n command namespace start
(Usage: command prefix uri )
-m command namespace end (Usage: command prefix )
For convenience, the name and attributes of start XML elements
are saved in array variable XML_ELEMENT_STACK as a stack, ie.
XML_ELEMENT_STACK[0] = number of
positional parameters (ie. $#)
XML_ELEMENT_STACK[1] = tag (ie.
$1)
XML_ELEMENT_STACK[2] = the first attribute 'key=value' (ie. $2)
...
and the depth of current XML element is stored in shell variable
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH. They will be removed and decreased,
respectively, at the end of XML element. Essentially, this is
equivalent to doing manually
pp_push -a XML_ELEMENT_STACK $# "$@"
((XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH++))
at the start of element, and
pp_pop -a XML_ELEMENT_STACK $((XML_ELEMENT_STACK[0] + 1))
((XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH--))
at the end of element.
Example
To illustrate how it works, consider the following XML
sample:
<root>
<one a="AA" b="BB">
first line
<two x="XX"/>
second line
</one>
</root>
When <root> element is encountered, it will set
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(1 root)
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH=1
and call command registered with -s option with 'root'
as the argument,
command root
On encountering <one> element, it will push '3', 'one',
'a=AA', and 'b=BB' onto XML_ELEMENT_STACK and increment
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH, so that they become
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(3 one a=AA b=BB 1 root)
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH=2
Also, it will call the -s callback with the tag and
attributes, like
command one a=AA b=BB
Similarly, on encountering <two> element, it will push
'2', 'two', 'x=XX' onto XML_ELEMENT_STACK and increment
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH, which become
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(2 two x=XX 3 one a=AA b=BB 1 root)
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH=3
and call the -s callback, like
command two x=XX
Since this tag has implicit </two> element, it will
immediately call command registered with -e option with
'two' as the argument,
command two
Then, it will pop the current tag and attributes off
XML_ELEMENT_STACK and decrement XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH. Now, they return
to the state they were in before entering 'two' element, ie.
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(3 one a=AA b=BB 1 root)
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH=2
On encountering </one> element, it will call -e
callback,
command one
and pop the tag and attributes off XML_ELEMENT_STACK and
decrement XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH, so that they become
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(1 root)
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH=1
Finally, for </root> element, it will call -e
callback,
command root
and pop the current tag off
XML_ELEMENT_STACK and decrement XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH, returning to
their initial state.
For data such as 'first line' and 'second line', the command
registered with -d option will be called with the data as
argument. Multiple calls are made, if data are multi-line, contains
special character encodings, or broken up by another elements. It
is the user's responsibility to collect these data segments. Here,
strcat would come handy.
Because XML_ELEMENT_STACK is a stack holding the command-line
arguments for all nested elements, you can check it to find out
where you are.
In any callback command, the command-line arguments used at the
start of current element are
which consists of $# ${arg[0]}, the tag name
${arg[1]}, and the attribute names and values
${arg[*]:2} (if any). Similarly, the command-line
arguments used for the immediate parent element are
An easier way would be to rotate the stack, assuming
XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH is deep enough to allow rotation, e.g.
n=${XML_ELEMENT_STACK[0]}
pp_rotateleft -a XML_ELEMENT_STACK $((n+1))
arg=( "${XML_ELEMENT_STACK[@]:0:XML_ELEMENT_STACK[0]+1}" )
pp_rotateright -a XML_ELEMENT_STACK $((n+1))
To get a list of all nested tag names, you simply filter out
stack items containing '=' (attribute) or all integers ($#). From
inside of <two> element in the above example,
XML_ELEMENT_STACK=(2 two x=XX 3 one a=AA b=BB 1 root)
echo ${XML_ELEMENT_STACK[*]|~=|^[0-9]+$} # two one root
will give you just the tags. This is equivalent to manually
looping through, like
for i in {1..XML_ELEMENT_DEPTH}; do
echo ${XML_ELEMENT_STACK[1]}
pp_rotateleft -a XML_ELEMENT_STACK $((XML_ELEMENT_STACK[0] + 1))
done
So, Bash equivalent to 'outline' example from Expat distribution
would go like
For some reason, Bash doesn't have a key/value data structure
(called associative array, hash, or dictionary in other scripting
languages.) I've added a wrapper for gdbm(3) with a full set of
operations to create and manipulate disk-based associative
arrays.
gdbm [-euikvr] [-KVW array] file [key | key value ...]
Typical usage would be as follows:
gdbm file print all
key/\t/value pairs, ie. dict.items()
gdbm -k file print all keys,
ie. dict.keys()
gdbm -v file print all
values, ie. dict.values()
gdbm file key print var[key], ie. ${var[key]}
gdbm -r file reorganize database
gdbm -K array file save all
keys into array
gdbm -V array file save all
values into array
gdbm -W array file save all key/value pairs into array
sequentially
gdbm file key value store
key/value, ie. var[key]=value
gdbm -i file key value store
key/value, only if key is new
gdbm -v file key name store value in variable, ie.
name=${var[key]}
gdbm -e file test if file is
GDBM database
gdbm -e file key test if key
exists
gdbm -e file key value test if key exists and value is
var[key]
gdbm -u file key delete key,
ie. unset var[key]
gdbm -u file key value delete key, only if value is
var[key]
More than one key/value pair can be specified on the command
line, and all arguments will be processed even if there
is an error. This speeds up data entry, because each 'gdbm' call opens
and closes the database file. If the last value is missing (ie.
there is an odd number of arguments,) then the last key will be
ignored.
For example,
gdbm file.db a 111 b 222 c 333
gdbm file.db a # 111
gdbm file.db b # 222
gdbm file.db c # 333
gdbm -k file.db # c a b
gdbm -v file.db # 333 111 222
gdbm -v file.db a x b y c z
declare -p x y z # x=111 y=222 z=333
gdbm -e file.db a # does 'a' exist?
gdbm -e file.db a 111 b 222 # is a==111 and b==222 ?
There are many benefits to this approach:
the database is a single file which
can be copied,
the data survives exit and
reboot,
other processes can access the
database,
the shell can now handle a database which is bigger than
memory.
SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
Each database comes with its own command-line client program
(ie. 'sqlite', 'mysql', and 'psql'). Athough it is easy to send SQL
statements to the database manager, it can be difficult to bring query results back into
the shell. You have to use stdout or a file, read the table, and
parse the rows and the columns. This is non-trivial for anything but
simple data.
Msql [-a array] [-h host -p port
-d dbname -u user -P password ] SQL...
Psql [-a array] [-h host -p port -d dbname -u user -P
password ] SQL...
where Lsql is for SQLite, Msql is for MySQL,
and Psql is for PostgreSQL. Of course, if you don't have a
database, then you won't be able to use the corresponding
builtin.
They all work pretty much the same way. They send SQL statements
to the database engine. If there is any query result, they print
to stdout, or (with the -a option) save the data fields into an
array variable, row by row. My intention is not to replace the
client programs, but to make shell script easier to write. For
example, here is the tutorial example in the SQLite documentation:
Lsql -d file.sqlite \
"CREATE TABLE tbl1(one VARCHAR(10), two SMALLINT)" \
"INSERT INTO tbl1 VALUES('hello!',10)" \
"INSERT INTO tbl1 VALUES('goodbye', 20)" # use 'set +H'
creates a simple table and loads in 2 rows of data. To query it,
Lsql -d file.sqlite "SELECT * FROM tbl1" # to stdout
Lsql -a table -d file.sqlite "SELECT * FROM tbl1"
declare -p table # table=(hello! 10 goodbye 20)
The first will print
hello! 10
goodbye 20
and the second will put the data into array variable
'table'.
Summary
This ends this tutorial on my patches to Bash-3.0 shell. Bash
shell is ideal tool for teaching/learning about Linux and
programming, because it is so easy to write C extensions and put
shell handles on them. It is my sincere hope that readers will
stick with shell a little longer before moving on to other
scripting languages. :-)
"How far can free software go? There are no limits, except
when laws such as the patent system prohibit free software
entirely. The ultimate goal is to provide free software to
do all of the jobs computer users want to do--and thus make
proprietary software obsolete."
-- Richard Stallman (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html)
[NOTE: all dialog is culled from email conversations unless otherwise
noted -- AE]
Time to start rethinking things. We "progressives," (leftists,
anarchists, libertarians, liberals, etc. -- wide spectrum of opinion
usually lumped together by mainstream media under the codename "fringe" or
the even scarier "radical" or "free thinker") who fill hundreds of websites
with our words and images may be making a few corporations very rich in
the process. Corporations whose vision of software as "proprietary"
property, something to own, like land, or employees, with all the rules and
regulations about trespassing and fiddling with "personal" corporate
property, intact.
Diebold. Another "questionable" election. This whole computer voting
scam comes down to a test of freedoms. The freedom of citizens of a
Republic to control their own destinies, or the freedom of corporations of
a global marketplace to control everything up to and including the
citizens' illusions that they are citizens of a Republic the future of
which they control. Scam: a corporation using the law to guard their
proprietary software, the public be damned, though this software is being
used by the public, in public, to decide the future of the (Re)public. This
is not just a computer thing - it's a human rights thing.
Let's take me, for instance, or you:
Unless you paid for every piece of software on your proprietary
operating system, or received it as a gift for your personal use only, or
are using it for work under a license purchased by your employer, you are a
criminal. You stole hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars -- it's their
call, they can charge whatever they want and that price becomes the "market
value" -- from some of the richest, most powerful people on earth, and for
this you must pay dearly. Heavy fines. Jail time. A criminal record.
Unless... you're running the GNU/Linux operating system and any
combination of its literally thousands of free software programs and
applications available for free download off hundreds of websites
around the world. Then, there's no problem. You're free. But still...
No matter how radical you think you are, both the activist who writes
his incendiary manifesto as a Word .doc and the cop who files the police
report, cutting and pasting radicals into columns of his Windows Graphical
User Interface (GUI) database, are working for Microsoft.
So before you write your next piece on the PATRIOT ACT or the
incredibly shrinking Bill of Rights (some animals are more equal than
others) or any number of breaches of free speech and free choice our
corporate masters are imposing on the world, think about what kind of
software you're using, or rather, whose. Whose software are you using to
email your work to your editor or newsgroup, or representative, and what
kind of software runs the list, blog or website where it will be posted?
Are you and your editor and colleagues defending free speech on your own
free software, or is the whole thing, the writing, coding, and publication,
both by your "progressive" website and its "reactionary" counterparts all
working together to make more money for a few software giants that own the
means of production and the means of reproduction and distribution?
No matter who wins the "battle," it seems, Microsoft, Adobe, Macintosh,
etc. won the war a long time ago by defining the "personal computer"
and how it's used in public and private, work, play, and education.
GNU Possibilities
It all began... (of course it never really all begins anywhere ever,
but sometimes someone steps up and says "No way," so we'll take that as a
beginning, here) around 1983 with Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto and his
stated goal to create a free operating system.
Yeah, someone's always stating something, but in this case, as millions
of computer users can attest, the guy who stated wasn't just talking.
Stallman, as we shall see, came through. Big Time.
(While GNU/Linux's file system and commands are Unix-like, according
to Stallman, "it is dangerously misleading to say that GNU is 'based
on Unix'. Unix is proprietary software, and we could not use any of it.
We had to start over, from scratch. That's why it is so important
that GNU's *Not* Unix." The name "GNU" -- pronounce the "g" --
is in fact a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix".)
Stallman already had a track record as one of the most inventive
programmers around. In 1975 he created the text editor, Emacs, which
he would re-create, using entirely different code, in 1984, as GNU
Emacs, one of the first major features of the GNU Operating System. GNU
Emacs is the de facto text editor of GNU/Linux as well as many
corporate owned Unixes (it shares proponents and disk space with one of
the original Unix text editors, 'vi' (and it's powerful free upgrade,
VIM). When people say Emacs they mean GNU Emacs, though a popular,
more graphic version, XEmacs, also grew out of GNU Emacs and shares
much of the same code.
"The revolutionary text editor Emacs that I developed in 1975 was not a
version of anything else. It had nothing to do with Unix, which in 1975 was
hardly known," Stallman emailed me regarding the origins of Emacs.
As a staff member of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab from 1971 to
1983, Stallman created and worked on important computer stuff and
established himself as a major hacker.
Mainstream media turned "hacker" into a "bad" word to describe bad
people; hackers are in fact just people who live for programming
computers and are very good at it. They are proud to call themselves
hackers and care as much about the media's opinion of their culture
as they do the media's opinion of the validity of their calling:
zilch. Unlike, say, the Generic Office Worker in the Generic
Labyrinth (third cubicle to the left), they don't hang up their titles
at the end of the day when they get off the train. They are hackers
24/7, or as long as they live and love to program computers. It's who
they are, it's what they do. Hackers. This is important.
There are a lot of name distinctions and language manipulations in this
story, including the distinction between GNU/Linux and what most people
call plain old Linux. They are all important, for most of the names
and terms are or were created by the creators themselves, only to have
them twisted, hyphenated, out-quoted (and out-sourced) by our old
friend, The Corporation, for the sake of corporate ownership and
profit.
These are real people who have done real things and have real beliefs.
These aren't "like, the spaced-out, hacker-snackers on TV, like you
know, dude?" The success of the GNU/Linux model in standing up for
freedom -- real freedom, not the freedom to "say no" to medical
marijuana and live in unnecessary agony or go to jail -- is a
powerful example of community over the Corporation, and something we,
especially we who write about freedom and act for freedom should study
in great detail. Your life will or will not change for the better due
to the real or imposed outcome of the 2004 Presidential election, or
who wins, or imagines they do, in 2008. The only way to change your
life and anyone else's for the better is to help wrest the fate of
humanity from its current corporate ownership (all rights reserved).
Life is fleeting regardless, but must it also be licensed and subject
to review and revocation by those who had zero participation in its
creation and whose only purpose is to excise profit from the
necessities of its maintenance? Corporate ownership of data, of
knowledge, can change your life in a big way, especially if you get
caught using illegal knowledge on your computer or worse, legal
knowledge without a license.
Again, it started like it often does. Paradigmatic. Like the German
writer Kleist's classic, Michael Kohlhaas
(transliterated into the character Colehouse Porter in E.L. Doctorow's
novel, Ragtime), someone saw his community, his
habitat, and everything in it of value to him destroyed by corporate greed
and laws created and imposed to sanctify these actions, make them seem
"right, the natural order of things," and decided to fight back. This is
the story of his fighting and winning, for a time, for we only win for a
time until things change, everything changes, and even the movement we
thought was ours, the movement we started, moves away from us in every
direction.
Linux is big business, or is on the cusp of becoming big business. It
can go the way of the corporate citizen, or the free individual. It
cannot continue the balancing act it has maintained of being both. Or
can it?
The correct name of the operating system is GNU/Linux, but almost
everyone in the world refers to it as "Linux." Ben Okopnik,
Editor-In-Chief of the Linux Gazette (LG) wrote that this is merely a
matter of convenience:
"Note that this distinction, much as RMS (Richard Stallman) and others may
have tried to promote it, did not make it into the common lexicon. Just
as in the case of the 'X Window System', universally known as 'X', a
short simple identifier is what people will use when it's available."
But it also might have much to do with mythology that has grown up
around both the Linux kernel and its chief architect, Linus Torvalds.
Many people believe, and this has been amplified in mainstream media,
that the "Linux Operating System" was created from scratch by Linus
Torvalds in 1991, with some help from hackers around the world
connected via the Internet. This makes for a good story because it
displays the power of the Internet, especially during GNU/Linux's
formative years in the hyped-up 1990s, and GNU/Linux is indeed a
product of collaboration that could only have happened on the Internet.
Also it presents us with an archetypal hero/genius of the Robin Hood
ilk who led his band of merry hackers through the proprietary coded
forests to wreak havoc on the corporate desktop.
Of course it's not so simple.
Linux is the kernel, not the operating system. The kernel is like the
medulla, the "lizard brain" responsible for the automatic functions of
the operating system -- for us: breathing, heartbeat, swallowing; for
computers: background processes, daemons, the ability to read certain
drivers and communicate with the user via the "shell". If the medulla
is the kernel in this analogy, and the cerebrum is what it is, whether
with human bodies or computers, the cerebrum, "us" the conscious
user/programmer, then the rest of the body is the operating system.
Arms, legs, eyes, skin. For computers it's the shell (a program
that serves as the interface between the user and the kernel), and the
rest of the operating system, consisting of various tools, commands,
programs and the libraries that run them.
The Unix and GNU/Linux system libraries are code that allows the
system to recognize and execute various functions, including
communicating with itself and recognizing that "it computes, therefore
it exists." In order to have a complete Unix or GNU/Linux operating
system you need a kernel and a system of programs, tools, and
commands, including the shell. Without the rest of the system, the
kernel isn't very useful. Sort of like a medulla on a plate.
The system of tools that enabled the Linux kernel to merge into a
functional operating system existed at the time of Linux's release in
1991. That operating system was developed by Richard Stallman and other
hackers, many from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and it was called GNU. Its development,
essential but often neglected in importance, was a revolutionary move.
After I mentioned a series of common programs, utilities and
applications, Stallman emailed me, "All programs that run on GNU/Linux
are linked with GNU 'libc'. 'libc' [part of the GNU/Linux library] is the
only way most programs talk to Linux."
Perhaps the only development that rivals the creation of the GNU
operating system, in terms of protecting the freedoms of software
users, programmers and documentation writers are the copyleft licenses,
such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) for software, and the
various others for documentation.
Stallman wrote, "Copyleft is a technique used in unilateral copyright
licenses. The technique is to require modified versions to be under
the same license. One can design the details in many different ways.
For instance the GNU GPL and the GFDL are both copyleft licenses--the
former primarily meant for software, the latter primarily meant for
documentation--and their requirements are quite different."
Since the creation of the GNU GPL there have been many variations to
serve specific needs, but the essence is the same: copyleft ensures
that software code and the documentation of how to use that code
remain, to quote Stallman, "free as air."
When Stallman worked through the seventies at the AI lab at MIT, things
were different. There was no market, hence no marketplace. Programmers
and other computer users routinely shared files and software.
Everything was "open source" simply because there wasn't much around.
They were creating it. Even corporate-owned software, tools, and
systems -- the C language, the Unix System, the Internet, etc. -- had to
be invented before they could be locked away, given away, or shared
according to what could or could not be feasibly controlled and by what
means.
"When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971,
I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many
years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it
is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking...
We did not call our software "free software", because that term did not yet
exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or
a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw
someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always ask
to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or
cannibalize parts of it to make a new program," Stallman wrote on the GNU
web site (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html).
But once the corporate sector figured out how to make money and that
there was money to be made, things changed. The "community" that Stallman
worked with during the seventies, developing the prototypes for what we
take for granted as the modern operating systems of today, was gone by
1981, hired away by corporations arming themselves for the coming computer
market wars, or prohibited, by non-disclosure laws of proprietary systems,
from exercising the kind of freedom that resulted in creativity and
experimentation.
Stallman wrote, "This meant that the first step in using a computer was
to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperating community was
forbidden. The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was,
'If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any
changes, beg us to make them. The idea that the proprietary-software
social system - the system that says you are not allowed to share or
change software - is antisocial, that it is unethical, that it is simply
wrong, may come as a surprise to some readers. But what else could we
say about a system based on dividing the public and keeping users
helpless? Readers who find the idea surprising may have taken
proprietary-software social system as given, or judged it on the terms
suggested by proprietary software businesses. Software publishers have
worked long and hard to convince people that there is only one way to
look at the issue." (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html)
With the development of GNU, as with most revolutionary movements,
there was no middle ground for compromise.
Stallman wrote, "With my community gone, to continue as before was
impossible. Instead, I faced a stark moral choice. The easy choice was to
join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and
promising not to help my fellow hacker. Most likely I would also be
developing software that was released under nondisclosure agreements, thus
adding to the pressure on other people to betray their fellows too. I could
have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I
knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building
walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a
worse place." (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html)
The history of his response to this choice can be found in extensive
detail on the GNU.org site. What Stallman did, in a nutshell, was to write
The GNU Manifesto (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html)
in which he explained to his fellow hackers and the computer using
community at large the issues they faced and his determination to create a
fully functional Unix-like operating system, but written from scratch, with
no proprietary code, and absolutely free. His goal was to make it as good
as or better than Unix -- and in this, many agree, he succeeded; various
GNU tools, programs, applications and components (such as the C library and
compiler, GCC) are faster, more robust, and offer more options than their
proprietary counterparts. But even if he had to fall short of that goal in
order to keep GNU absolutely free, he would have done so.
It is in this spirit that the GNU GPL and other copyleft licenses and
declarations of "non-ownership" are based. The creation of the copyleft
type of license is as radical as the creation of the GNU software itself.
It takes the corporate idea of "ownership" and "copyright" created to
serve a few at the expense of the many, inside out, and upside down. In
order for code to be considered Free Software and therefore useable under
the GNU GPL, it must be accessible to all. Anyone can change it,
customize it, or make improvements on it, so long as the original code and
authorship is included and this new code is also open for others to examine
and modify, whether for personal customization or general improvement.
One misconception is that "free software" means that one cannot charge
money for it. In fact, the opposite is the case. In the early days the FSF
earned the bulk of its funding not through donations, but sales of its
manuals, hard-copy books, and software. Though this is no longer true
today, the FSF still sells software
documentation and books on their website.
"Free as in free speech, not free beer" is the GNU slogan that sums it
up best. One is free to charge for such services as distribution or
redistribution of software, writing documentation or new software based on
the original GPL code, etc., so long as the source remains free, prior
versions and authors are listed, and other rules of the GNU GPL are
followed.
While it is possible to download the Linux kernel, all of GNU's several
thousand programs and applications, and the hundreds of third-party
offerings for GNU/Linux, such as the X Windows GUI and window managers, the
KDE desktop environment (which I'll examine in further detail in Part Two
of this article) and many other components, the easiest and least
time-consuming way to obtain GNU/Linux, especially for those who are new to
to it, is to plunk down roughly $30 for a "distribution" on CD or DVD from
companies such as Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, and others.
These companies make money by gathering all the components of GNU/Linux
under one roof, in addition to adding their own components, such as SuSE's
YaST GUI system manager, or Red Hat's RPM (Red Hat Package Manager)
software bundling application. Nearly all the distributions come with
customized easy-install GUI interfaces for new users.
GNU + Linux = GNU/Linux?
While the popularity of GNU/Linux is exploding, Stallman and others
in the free software community face significant threats from a
Corporate friendly business environment, always ready to lend a legal
hand with restrictive copyright law. Then there's the jealous rage of
Microsoft, who views the FSF and its works as a significant threat
worth spending a lot of money on (and spending lots of money to make
people miserable is what Microsoft does best, second only to charging
lots of money for making people miserable).
But the most serious threat comes from the "Linux" community itself.
Very few people outside of GNU and the FSF refer to GNU/Linux as
anything but "Linux." In addition, as with all successful radical
movements, as we move further in time from the origins of the
necessary development of free software, people tend to associate less
with "free software" and more with "Linux" itself, as if it were a
sports team or some other symbolic source of identification, like
"America."
Thus, many will root for the success of the nominally free "Linux" over
"Microsoft" in winning the bid for a Government/Military computing contract
or the unofficial "support" of governments, such as China or India and
other political entities supporting the development of GNU/Linux as the
"official state Operating System," or what not. Working for the authorities
to help destroy the Gaea and impinge on freedom is supposed to be the job
of proprietary operating systems, not GNU/Linux! But then, as Stallman
himself said, GNU was developed to solve some of the world's problems, not
all of them. Though the success of GNU and GNU/Linux, representing a
victory of a community of individuals (that began with hundreds and has
grown to millions) over a handful of corporate superpowers forces anyone
who values his/her liberty to pause and wonder: what else is possible?
What else can be done to change this mess for the better?
In response to my confusion regarding the free software versus the
"open source" movements, Stallman emailed me this information, put
out by Slackware, a GNU/Linux distribution:
from THE SLACKWARE BOOK:
Open Source and Free Software
Within the Linux community, there are two major ideological movements at
work. The Free Software movement, which we'll get into in a moment, is
working toward the goal of making all software free of intellectual
property restrictions, which it believes hamper technical improvement and
work against the good of the community. The Open Source movement is working
toward most of the same goals, but takes a more pragmatic approach to
them, preferring to base its arguments on the economic and technical merits
of making source code freely available, rather than the moral and ethical
principles that drive the Free Software Movement. The Free Software movement
is headed up by the Free Software Foundation, which is a fund-raising
organization for the GNU project. Free software is more of an ideology.
The oft-used expression is "free speech, not free beer". In essence, free
software is an attempt to guarantee certain rights for both users and
developers. These freedoms include the freedom to run the program for any
reason, the freedom to study and modify the source code, the freedom to
redistribute the source, and the freedom to share any modifications you
make. In order to guarantee these freedoms, the GNU General Public License
(GPL) was created. The GPL, in brief, provides that anyone distributing a
compiled program which is licensed under the GPL must also provide source
code, and is free to make modifications to the program as long as those
modifications are also made available in source code form. This guarantees
that once a program is opened to the community, it cannot be closed
except by consent of every author of every piece of code (even the
modifications) within it. Most Linux programs are licensed under the GPL.
It is important to note that the GPL does not say anything about price. As
odd as it may sound, you can charge for free software. The "free" part is
in the liberties you have with the source code, not in the price you pay
for the software. (However, once someone has sold you, or even given you, a
compiled program licensed under the GPL they are obligated to provide its
source code as well.)
At the forefront of the younger Open Source movement, the Open Source
Initiative is an organization that solely exists to gain support for open
source software. That is, software that has the source code available as
well as the ready-to-run program. They do not offer a specific license, but
instead they support the various types of open source licenses available.
The idea behind the OSI is to get more companies behind open source by
allowing them to write their own open source licenses and have
those licenses certified by the Open Source Initiative. Many companies want
to release source code, but do not want to use the GPL. Since they cannot
radically change the GPL, they are offered the opportunity to provide their
own license and have it certified by this organization.
While the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative work to
help each other, they are not the same thing. The Free Software Foundation
uses a specific license and provides software under that license. The Open
Source Initiative seeks support for all open source licenses, including the
one from the Free Software Foundation. The grounds on which each argues for
making source code freely available sometimes divides the two movements, but
the very fact that two ideologically diverse groups are working toward the
same goal lends credence to the efforts of each.
Thus, Stallman and others in the Free Software movement are opposed to
any compromise that would threaten the initial goal of a free operating
system. For instance, KDE.org, which
develops a full desktop environment that enables the "average user" to use
GNU/Linux as easily as he/she would Windows or Macintosh, with little or no
knowledge of basic Unix or GNU/Linux commands, utilized a proprietary code
called Qt. Rather than accept this breach of the GPL, GNU developed an
alternative desktop environment called GNOME (www.gnome.org). Fortunately,
KDE licensed Qt under the GPL, so now users have two Windows/Mac-like GUI
environments to choose from. But if push came to shove, those dedicated
to the principles of the free software movement would have stuck with GNOME
even if it was behind scheduled release or was qualitatively inferior to
KDE, while those in the "open source" movement, whose primary goal is the
development of "Linux" into an operating system that will compete on a
global scale with Microsoft, might have accepted the proprietary use of Qt.
Ben Okopnik, Editor-in-Chief of the Linux Gazette, wrote, "The
proprietary bits of Qt were a problem. They did a tremendously
intelligent thing by opening it up; KDE, and Qt development in general,
simply exploded as soon as they did."
But even Stallman admits that there will be other threats to an
absolutely free software movement, particularly by "open source,"
espoused by corporations who cannot bear even the word "freedom."
Stallman wrote, "Teaching new users about freedom became more difficult
in 1998, when a part of the community decided to stop using the term "free
software" and say "open source software" instead. Some who favored this
term aimed to avoid the confusion of "free" with "gratis"-- a valid goal.
Others, however, aimed to set aside the spirit of principle that had
motivated the free software movement and the GNU project, and to appeal
instead to executives and business users, many of whom hold an ideology
that places profit above freedom, above community, above principle. Thus,
the rhetoric of "open source" focuses on the potential to make high
quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community, and
principle...The support of business can contribute to the community in many
ways; all else being equal, it is useful. But winning their support by
speaking even less about freedom and principle can be disastrous; it makes
the previous imbalance between outreach and civics education even
worse...."Free software" and "open source" describe the same category of
software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and
about values. The GNU Project continues to use the term "free software", to
express the idea that freedom, not just technology, is important."(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html).
In my email interview with Stallman, I too made the mistake of equating
"free" with "open source."
Stallman wrote, "You mentioned the FSF but not the Free Software
Movement, which leads me to wonder if you have fallen prey to a common
misunderstanding. Did you know that the Open Source Movement is a
right-wing reaction against the Free Software Movement, which came
first? Many people think that I support the Open Source Movement. The
reason they think so is that the people in the Open Source Movement
work hard to give that impression. Since they have the support of
corporations and the main media, they have spread this misunderstanding
quite far. But it's as mistaken to label my work as 'open source' as to
label Nader 'Republican'."
Stallman is a visionary and, like Nader, a people's advocate, only more
so. His advocacy stretches beyond the efficiency of consumer goods and laws
protecting consumer rights and into the discussion of the basis of The Law
itself. Who is The Law serving, computer users and programmers, that is,
citizens of a free society, or mere consumers in a market whose rules are
defined and created by the corporations who, should they have their way,
will not merely monopolize the market, but be the market, the only
alternative for those who wish to write and use computer programs?
Stallman and others like him are the incorruptible, uncompromising
fighters the left has been calling for, all the while we settle for
the lesser of evils or hope the Democratic Party, the political
arena's version of the "open source initiative" will somehow manage
to beat the corporate state while joining it. The struggle to defend
the basic rights of software users and developers inherent in the free
software movement and its creation of the GNU/Linux alternative to
proprietary systems is obvious. This struggle is not merely about
being free at the computer, but living free everywhere. GNU can't
solve all the world's problems, but the values it espouses can be
harnessed in support of any struggle, whether for a clean environment
or a real democracy, rather than the bloated, trash-talking, murderous
Empire we think, like those befuddled by the rhetoric of proprietary
software corporations, we have no choice but to accept as "The Nature
of Things."
Again, Stallman, linking the rhetoric of epic struggle with its
counterpart in modern film, writes of a fight worth fighting for, and
his words resonate, even as we squander lives by the thousands in Iraq:
"Yoda's philosophy ('There is no "try"') sounds neat, but it
doesn't work for me. I have done most of my work while anxious about
whether I could do the job, and unsure that it would be enough to
achieve the goal if I did. But I tried anyway, because there was no one
but me between the enemy and my city. Surprising myself, I have
sometimes succeeded... Sometimes I failed; some of my cities have
fallen. Then I found another threatened city, and got ready for another
battle. Over time, I've learned to look for threats and put myself
between them and my city, calling on other hackers to come and join
me... Nowadays, often I'm not the only one. It is a relief and a joy
when I see a regiment of hackers digging in to hold the line, and I
realize, this city may survive--for now. But the dangers are greater
each year, and now Microsoft has explicitly targeted our community. We
can't take the future of freedom for granted. Don't take it for
granted! If you want to keep your freedom, you must be prepared to
defend it." (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html).
Well, what are we waiting for? Where do we stand?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. It is free to distribute, reproduce or modify with the
author's consent. Read more about licensing software, text and
documentation at http://www.creativecommons.org.
Adam Engel has published poetry, fiction and essays in such magazines and
periodicals as Counter Punch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal,
Strike-the-Root, LewRockwell.com, The New York Art Review, The Concord
Journal, The Middlesex News, Accent, The Littleton Review, Ark, Smart
Shoes, The Beacon, Literal Latte, Artemis, The Lummox Journal, Fearless,
POESY, The Half Moon Review, Art:Mag, Chronogram, Gnome and others.
Adam Engel's first book of poetry, Oil and Water, was
published by Maximum Capacity Press in 2001. His novel,
Topiary, will be published by Dandelion Books in the
Spring of 2005.
He has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, executive speechwriter,
systems administrator, and editorial consultant, and has taught writing at
New York University, Touro College and the Gotham Writer's Workshop in New
York City.
ParallelKnoppix is a Live CD based on Knoppix, which is also a Live CD that
is itself based on the Debian Linux distribution. ParallelKnoppix lets you
create a Linux cluster equipped with parallel programming tools/libraries
such as MPI in just a few minutes. It saves a lot of time that we spend in
configuration of the computing environment. The existing environment is not
disturbed using ParallelKnoppix, since a Live CDs distribution runs without
installation (a directory is created on the Master Node; it can be deleted
after rebooting if desired.)
ParallelKnoppix is a re-master of Knoppix that allows setting up a cluster
of machines for parallel processing using the LAM-MPI and/or MPICH
implementations of MPI. Getting the cluster up and running takes less than
15 minutes, if the machines have PXE network cards.
Background
Clustering is one of the cheapest techniques to achieve parallelism.
Clustering by using Linux is one of the Linux powers. A number of
universities and other organizations mimic supercomputing by connecting PCs
via Ethernet cards under Linux. Linux has been widely adopted by the
scientific community to do their research work since it is loaded with a
number of scientific tools such as LAM, MPI, PVM, and many more, so Linux is
well suited for parallel computing. But the problem is that scientists and
programmers have to do a lot of pre-configuration of the Linux environment.
This makes their task slow and complex.
Now, the Linux gurus have solved this problem by developing Live CDs.
Now the researcher can choose a Live CD to do parallel programming without
the need for long configuration and the cluster is ready within a few
minutes.
One of the Live CDs for parallel programming is ParallelKnoppix.
Other Live CDs, such as BCCD and ClusterKnoppix, are also
available.
Description
Just like its predecessor Knoppix, ParallelKnoppix will detect all
the hardware and peripherals automatically. I have tested it on a D865GBF
Intel P-IV board as well as an Intel 810C (P-III), and ParallelKnoppix
configured all the hardware automatically - nothing else needed to be done.
The computers that are configured using ParallelKnoppix share a common
directory, which is created on master node via NFS (the Network File System).
The Master node is booted using the CD and the slaves are booted using the
network (the Master node runs a DHCP server.) The slaves have PXE-enabled BIOSes
with PXE-compliant NICs.
Each and every service needed for LAM/MPI is configured automatically.
DHCP, NFS, SSH (with passwordless logins) are all set up and running - and
you are ready to experiment with MPI programs and other parallel
applications.
As set up, ParallelKnoppix is not very secure - the Live CD password
for both the regular user and the super user (root) are publicly known.
Anyone with even a little knowledge of ParallelKnoppix can easily access the
ParallelKnoppix cluster. In this case, the ease of setup is obtained by
compromising some security as a trade-off.
[ As a general rule of thumb, your ParallelKnoppix
network should be isolated from the Internet, and usually even your
intranet, if security is at all a concern. -- Ben ]
What is PXE boot?
PXE is an acronym for the Preboot Execution Environment, a technology that
is used to boot a PC remotely through a network. PXE must be supported by
the system BIOS, and the network interface card needs to be PXE compliant.
What do I do if my NIC is not PXE-compliant?
You'll need to either install a ROM chip with an Etherboot image on your NIC, or burn a
CD using the image; ROM-o-matic.net
dynamically generates Etherboot ROM images.
Downloading ParrallelKnoppix
The ISO file is available at the following locations:
After downloading the ISO images, check the MD5 checksums against the
ISO images to ensure that your download was successful. Do this by running
the md5sum program from a shell prompt and comparing the
values returned:
md5sum isofilename
In the above command, replace isofilename with the correct
file name.
If you are for some reason not using Linux, you can use md5Summer for Windows. An MD5 summer
for DOS is also available.
If the MD5 sums match, burn the ISO images to CDRs or CDRWs.
Note: writing the ISOs to CD requires a program such as
cdrecord.
How does it work?
There is a nice Parallel Knoppix tutorial full of step-by-step
instructions, screen shots of the configuration process, etc., available
here
in HTML format or here
in PDF. If you exported your CD-ROM to the nodes, it will easily
accommodate 50 nodes, but more than that have not been tested. I actually
tested only 5 nodes myself.
What do I do if multiple DHCP servers are running?
If using this at a university (like I do), you're likely to run afoul of
the "official" DHCP server, and possibly another PXE server. When you try
to boot the nodes using the terminal server, the nodes will often boot from
the pre-existing PXE server, and they will often get their IP addresses
from the official server, not the DHCP server running on the computer that
was booted from the ParallelKnoppix CD. The solution I have so far is to
physically disconnect the computers to be used as nodes from the
pre-existing PXE and/or DHCP servers, or to get help from the
administrators to temporarily disable those servers. If anyone knows a more
elegant solution, I'd like to hear about it. I think it involves messing
around with miniroot.gz, and using Rom-o-Matic to create the
PXE boot ROM. Too horrible for further contemplation... at least for me.
How it works (Summary)
The ParallelKnoppix Live CD is used to boot a master node. Once the master
node is up, a script is executed which sets up a DHCP server, shares a
common working directory to all nodes using NFS, generates the public keys
for SSH to work properly (passwordless logins), etc. After DHCP on the
master node is running, the clients (slaves) are booted using PXE boot.
After the successful booting the sample directory is copied to the NFS
shared common directory and programs begin executing in parallel on
multiple PCs.
My experience
I am an undergraduate student of computer science and I was given a project
to solve a mathematical problem using MPI in the parallel computing lab. I
chooses ParallelKnoppix as an alternative to demonstrate my MPI program in
the Linux environment. When the master node is booted using the
ParallelKnoppix CD, at some point during the boot it will ask you the
resolution; just enter '6', because it is the maximum resolution mode
supported. After my Master Node booted, I ran the setup script
(K -> ParallelKnopix -> Setup
ParallelKnoppix, per the above tutorial). When the script
had created the DHCP server, I turned on my slave nodes and let them boot
using PXE. All the nodes booted successfully.
I then copied my program to parallel_knoppix_working, and
ran my MPI program in parallel. It was literally that simple.
For compilation, I use
mpicc myprogram.c -o myprogram.bin
For execution, I use
mpirun C myprogram.bin
Conclusion
"The ParallelKnoppix CD provides a very simple and rapid means of setting up
a cluster of heterogeneous PCs of the IA-32 architecture. It is not
intended to provide a stable cluster for multiple users, rather it is a tool
for rapid creation of a cluster for individual use. The CD itself is
customizable, and the configuration and working files can be re-used over
time, so it can provide a long-term solution for an individual user."
-- From the ParallelKnoppix Tutorial By Michael Creel
Majid Hameed is an undergraduate student at Department of Computer Science
at the University of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Primary interests are Artificial
Intelligence, Operating Systems, Networking, Programming and Computer
Graphics.
I am a Linux enthusiast. I am using Linux as an operating system for the
last 3.5 years. Used and tried these distros: Red Hat Linux 9, 8, 7.3,
7.2, Slackware Linux 10, 9.1, Slax, Mandrake Move 2, Knoppix 3.4, Vector
Linux 4.3, and some more.
A Knight's Tour on OCaml (when a Python fails to digest it)
The story begins1
when my daughter's teacher, who is then busy grading the
end-term examination papers, wanted to give the class
some busy work. So the teacher asked the children to find a ``Knight's
tour''---make a knight jump around on a chess board starting and ending at
the same square and landing on each other square exactly once. Naturally,
this problem landed on my doorstep at the end of the school day---the
teacher happens to know that I do mathematics!
I have heard that this problem has a solution but don't know one---typical
Mathematician---stops at the point where ``solution exists''. So why not
write a program to solve the problem? While the going is good, I could
also use this opportunity to learn to use another programming language.
The quick and the dirty
Let's start by writing a program in a scripting language like
Python---it is fun writing a program in
a new language when you are reasonably sure that the code will not
be longer than about a 100 lines!
The key pseudo-code can be stated as follows:
extension of a partial solution =
if (Length of the partial solution is 64) then
if (the solution closes on itself) then
return the solution
else
return false since this is not a solution
else
for each position in available moves
that has not already been occupied
try extension of the new partial solution
obtained by extending the current solution
by this move
We then start with any position on the chess-board and find an extension of
it by 63 more moves.
This is programmed in Python quite easily. We use the Python ``workhorse''
data structure---the list. A partial solution is a list of positions which
we think of as the sequence of moves.
def extend(soln):
if len(soln) == 64:
if soln[-1] in moves(soln[0]):
return soln
else:
return False
else:
for newpos in moves(soln[0]):
if newpos in soln:
continue
sol=extend([newpos]+soln)
if not sol:
continue
else:
return sol
return False
There is a nasty tail to this Python program fragment (the tail consists of 63
returns) but that should not be serious if we have enough stack space.
For us quicky-types ``optimization'' is a dirty word.
We also need to write routines that will generate the list of all possible
moves at a given position.
If we represent positions on the board as pairs then the moves that a
knight can make are given by
knightsmoves = [(-1,-2), (-2,-1), (1,-2), (-2,1), \
(-1,2), (2,-1), (1,2), (2,1)]
def add(pos1,pos2):
return (pos1[0] + pos2[0], pos1[1] + pos2[1])
def onboard(pos):
return (pos[0] >= 0) and
(pos[0] < 8) and
(pos[1] >= 0) and
(pos[1] < 8)
def moves(pos):
return [newpos for newpos in
[add(pos,move) for move in knightsmoves]
if onboard(newpos)]
Unfortunately, as it stands this program has no hope of producing an
answer in reasonable time. The reason is that we are trying all
possible moves in succession whereas we should be first going to
the square which cannot be easily reached from elsewhere. This means that
we need some new functions.
def filmoves(pos,soln):
return [newpos for newpos in moves(pos)
if not (newpos in soln)]
def compval(pos1,pos2,soln):
return len(filmoves(pos1,soln)) - len(filmoves(pos2,soln))
def sortedmoves(soln):
list = filmoves(soln[0],soln[1:])
list.sort(lambda x,y: compval(x,y,soln))
return list
The first function filters out moves already ``used up''.
The second uses this to compare two squares based on number of moves
currently available. The last function uses this comparison to sort the
moves. Note that we must also make a minor change to the extend function
to make it use sortedmoves (Warning: Only use sortedmoves
in the second call!).
According to
authoritative sources
(authoritative at least
according to Google!) this particular algorithm was proposed by Warnsdorff
in 1823. The above program is simple enough that we can ``see'' that it is
correct and do not need any fancy verification procedure. Why then does
is fail to give an answer when we start at the corner (0,0)? Surely a
modern computer can beat a man born in 1823 in calculating things! What's
wrong?!
If you don't believe me or believe that your computer is faster then
just copy the code or type it in yourself and give it a whirl!
$ python
Python 2.3.4 (#2, Sep 24 2004, 08:39:09)
[GCC 3.3.4 (Debian 1:3.3.4-12)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for
more information.
>>> from knights import *
>>> extend([(0,0)])
The program now appears to go sleep...!
Perhaps the reason is that Python is interpreted byte-code. A
compiled language would be better. So we can set about downloading and
installing psyco---a just-in-time
native code compiler for Python.
Meanwhile, we could try a ``real'' functional language---perhaps its
implementation of lists is better. Maybe we can fit in time for a few
functional programming tricks and see if tail-recursion is possible.
(If you want a preview of the real answer, then jump to
the Denouement.)
A humpy ride on OCaml
(I do happen to know that there is a more famous camel that appears more
often in the pages of the Linux Gazette.) A nice candidate for our next
choice of language is OCaml (this is
also talked about in an article in an
earlier Gazette). It is claimed that the optimizing native-code compiler
for OCaml can beat even C in certain tasks. I have actually used the DVI
previewer advi, the LATEX to HTML converter
hevea2 and the file
synchronizer unison; all these are written in OCaml and are quick
and do the job well. Secondly, it would be a pain to sit and
implement all the data structure management for lists in C just for this.
So the knight must try to tour again---this time atop OCaml3.
Just to clarify some of the differences
let plays the role of def and lists are constructed in
the form [a;b;c;d]. The syntax is also a little more arcane
but should be clear from the programs below.
While we are at it we can also introduce a tweak that avoids computing the
length of a list all the time. Here is extend written in OCaml
(the rec indicates a recursive definition):
let rec extend1 start len soln =
if (len == 64)
then
if List.mem start (moves (List.hd l))
then soln
else []
else
do_until (fun b -> extend1 start (len+1) (b::soln))
(sortedmoves soln);;
let extend start = extend1 start 1 [start];;
where do_until applies a function to a list until it produces an answer
or is empty:
let rec do_until f = function
| [] -> []
| h::t -> match f h with
| [] -> do_until f t
| answer -> answer;;
The | is used to introduce a pattern to match.
As before we need to define the functions that will produce the list
of available moves.
let knightsmoves = [(-1,-2); (-2,-1); (1,-2); (-2,1);
(-1,2); (2,-1); (1,2); (2,1)];;
let add (a,b) (c,d) = (a+c,b+d);;
let onboard (a,b) =
(a >= 0) && (a < 8) &&
(b >= 0) && (b < 8);;
let moves pos =
List.filter (onboard)
(List.map (add pos) knightsmoves);;
let filmoves pos soln =
List.filter (fun b -> not (List.mem b soln)) (moves pos);;
let compval soln pos1 pos2 =
(List.length (filmoves pos1 soln)) -
(List.length (filmoves pos2 soln));;
let sortedmoves soln =
List.sort (compval soln)
(filmoves (List.hd soln) (List.tl soln));;
As you can see the ``pattern matching''-way of defining things in OCaml
really simplifies definitions.
We can string all these together - with the caveat that one
must define a term before using it. So the later definitions have
to come before the earlier ones. Programming languages which require
declarations to come in order are best programmed ``bottom-up'' unless one
can sort out all the details in one's head before putting a finger to the
keyboard.
Now one can run the program by entering the interpreted mode of OCaml
$ ocaml
Objective Caml version 3.08.2
# #use "knights.ml";;
val knightsmoves : (int * int) list =
[(-1, -2); (-2, -1); (1, -2); (-2, 1); (-1, 2); (2, -1); (1, 2);
(2, 1)]
val add : int * int -> int * int -> int * int = <fun>
val onboard : int * int -> bool = <fun>
val moves : int * int -> (int * int) list = <fun>
val filmoves : int * int -> (int * int) list -> (int * int) list
= <fun>
val compval : (int * int) list -> int * int -> int * int -> int =
<fun>
val sortedmoves : (int * int) list -> (int * int) list = <fun>
val do_until : ('a -> 'b list) -> 'a list -> 'b list = <fun>
val extend1 : int * int -> int -> (int * int) list -> (int * int)
list = <fun>
val extend : int * int -> (int * int) list = <fun>
# extend (0,0)
But then the system goes to sleep as before .... The whole reason
for trying OCaml was to compile the code in the hope of a faster
response! So we need to run the native code compiler.
Before we do that however we need to have some way to do input and
output, so a little more programming is involved. Our program
produces output as a list of moves in order, what we want to output
is the position of each square in this list. Since output happens
only once we don't need to be particularly efficient.
let rec indexadd n pos soln =
match (List.hd soln) with
| pos -> n
| _ -> indexadd (n-1) pos (List.tl soln);;
let index pos soln = indexadd 64 pos soln;;
let printsoln soln =
(* Print the top line *)
for i = 1 to 8 do
Printf.printf "-----";
done;
Printf.printf "-\n";
for i = 0 to 7 do
for j = 0 to 7 do
Printf.printf "| %2i " (index (i,j) soln);
done;
Printf.printf "|\n";
(* Print a line below *)
for j = 1 to 8 do
Printf.printf "-----";
done;
Printf.printf "-\n";
done;;
Finally, the input procedure. For some strange reason OCaml uses !pointer to reference the contents - so the ! sign below is not
a ``not''.
if (!Sys.interactive)
then
(* If we are loaded in the interpreter do nothing *)
()
else
if (Array.length Sys.argv) > 2
then
print_soln
(extend
(int_of_string Sys.argv.(1), int_of_string Sys.argv.(2))
)
else
Printf.printf "Usage: %s x y\n" (Sys.argv.(0));;
Now we are all set. The compilation
$ ocamlopt -o knights knights.ml
produces a standalone program knights. So here goes
$ ./knights 0 0
...and nothing happens!
Again, if you don't believe me, or you believe your computer is faster,
you can download the OCaml source, compile
it, and try it for yourself!
Denouement
Home for the day and I don't have OCaml on my home machine so I
wrote the program afresh in Python. This time I felt too lazy to
type in the knights moves again so I added:
knightsmoves = [((-1)**y*(1+x), (-1)**z*(2-x)) \
for x in [0,1] \
for y in [0,1] \
for z in [0,1]]
At this point, a bell somewhere had gone ``dung''... and I wasn't sure
it was OCaml that did it---perhaps it was the prunes!
Then my daughter came over and said she had followed the
algorithm by hand and come up with a solution. Her solution
started at the square (4,4) so I tried that with the knights
program compiled with OCaml.
I decided then to check the authoritative source via Google once
more. What it really says is that Warnsdorff's algorithm is for a
Hamiltonian path---a path that takes a knight through each
square exactly once---it is not necessary to return to the starting
square.
What my experience with these programs shows is that Warnsdorff's
algorithm is can find a Hamiltonian circuit reasonably
quickly in some cases.
Perhaps unsurprisingly it's success depends on the order in
which one looks at the moves of the knights. For example, the above
Python code to generate knightsmoves actually gives
Perhaps a little more surprising (since the final solution is circular)
is the fact that the running time depends on the starting point. Indeed
I got running times of a few milliseconds, a few seconds and a few hours
(one process has been running for more than a couple of days!) for
different inputs to the same program!
This may be rather typical of ``hard'' problems. There are a number
of ``cheap'' instances and a number of truly ``hard'' instances but
this distinction depends on where one starts---pure dumb luck decides
whether one can solve the problem or not. (Actually it appears that the
knights tour is not really a ``hard'' problem as one increases the
size of the board (see Exercise 4, just below).)
Exercises
Here are some things that suggest themselves:
Try to find some real way to prove that the Python is
better than OCaml or vice versa. Or more generally
settle the great wars between functional and
procedural programming!
Try to randomize the choice from amongst the lowest
valency vertices if there is more than one. This
may result in shorter average times for all starting
points.
Try to add an extra weight to ensure that vertices
further away from the start are taken up sooner than
other vertices of the same valency. Perhaps this will
be more efficient.
There is apparently a better algorithm than
Warnsdorff's for the Hamiltonian circuit. Find it and
implement it.
Afterword
What does this article have to do with Linux or the Gazette? In a way, it
is only due to the emergence of GNU and Linux that we have an
opportunity to program in a wonderful plethora of languages. At the
same the time the article above could be fit into one of the
``Foolish Things We do With Our Computers'' series or even in a new
series called ``Nasty Things Our Computers Do To Us''!
Kapil Hari Paranjape has been a ``hack''-er since his punch-card days.
Specifically, this means that he has never written a ``real'' program.
He has merely tinkered with programs written by others. After playing
with Minix in 1990-91 he thought of writing his first program---a
``genuine'' *nix kernel for the x86 class of machines. Luckily for him a
certain L. Torvalds got there first---thereby saving him the trouble
(once again) of actually writing code. In eternal gratitude he has spent
a lot of time tinkering with and promoting Linux and GNU since those
days---much to the dismay of many around him who think he should
concentrate on mathematical research---which is his paying job. The
interplay between actual running programs, what can be computed in
principle and what can be shown to exist continues to fascinate him.
Preparing For My Interviews Part 2: MySQL and Python
This article is actually a lie. I am not preparing for interviews anymore.
I started this article at the end of October, but then I got a 2 month
contract right after that. Still, it's the thought that counts.
This article is to help you setup MySQL Master/Slave/Cluster
combinations on one computer. Why would that be useful? Well, for
starters, there isn't an abundance of Master/Slave/Cluster documentation.
The Cluster technology is really new. Second, MySQL is a very very very hot
database. There aren't too many good MySQL DBAs out there. If you want to
secure your job in the future, learn MySQL. The Master/Slave and Cluster
technologies are a must. If you don't know anything about the Master/Slave
or Clusters, you can pretty much forget getting hired. In every MySQL
interview (I had like 10 companies interviewing me in a six week period and
half of them used MySQL for something) the Master/Slave questions popped up
and topics of the Clustering technology came up as well. Third, it is a
pain to setup Master/Slave or Cluster environments by hand. If my script
works on one of your computers, copy over the software, copy over the
config files, make slight changes to the config files, and you can get a
real multi-computer environment setup in minutes.
The second purpose of this article is to show you how to use Python to
write a simple application (compiling and installing MySQL). I tried to
include a lot of stuff in the Python code which is common to most Python
scripts/modules. Also, I am thinking about turning the Python code into a
package in the Vaults of
Parnassus - just for kicks, and so I can say that I have some sort of
Python code published.
So, why did I use the programming language Python to execute all the commands? I
love Python, it is object oriented (from the ground up), has good exception
handling, has been compilable for a long time, it is hard to write ugly
Python code, it is easy to understand other people's code, there is only one
way to do things (usually), it's easy to manipulate, and it is a general tool
from web programming to Unix scripting to database programming to GUI
programming to mathematical programming (my favorite). There are so many
reasons to love Python if you are a true object-oriented programmer. The
other reason why I try to use Python for all personal projects is to
convince people where I work (or will work) that Python rocks and should be
used wherever appropriate. The sad thing is, most managers don't want to
use Python because of the lack of people who can write good Python code, so
it is my duty to convince them otherwise. Update: I got hired at Google,
which uses a lot of Python so now I am a happy camper!
Why compile MySQL? Why not just use the RPMs? I don't think clustering
is built into some of the RPMs. Also, I always like to compile and install
software myself. If you can't compile it, odds are, there might be other
problems. If you do decide to use RPMs, and you decide to use an RPM
server, please use YUM and do not use
commercial RPM servers. All the commercial RPM servers I have seen (just
one, you know who) are way overpriced and are geared towards the executive
staff or people who want to buy support so that they can blame someone if
something goes wrong. The sales staff are really good at making you believe
you can jump to the moon, when really, the software they present only
manages the installation of RPMs. Any 1st year programmer could write a web
interface to do the same thing. By using YUM (it is easy, simple, and free
of restrictions), you empower yourself and you will help bring down the
costs of the the overpriced commercial RPM services. If the commercial RPM
services weren't so overpriced (they should be like $25 per computer max)
and didn't have so many stupid restrictions (like installing
thebind RPM requires a more expensive license), I wouldn't
mind, but they are getting away with doing so little, it is ridiculous.
Politics and the suits have gotten in the way of good technology at some of
these companies.
One more thing, I bought a 2-gig RAM 64 bit AMD CPU with Serial ATA
hard drives. I bought this hardware configuration for the simple purpose of
using a 64 bit operating system. Why? Because many companies are using 64
bit AMD cpus for their databases and other things. Just at work the other
day, I mentioned I got a MySQL cluster to work on my home computer, so I as
asked to setup a test cluster at work. See how valuable it is to stay ahead
of the market?
The nice thing about the 64 bit AMD CPU is that is will also support
the 32bit operating systems. Thus, I was able to take the safe route by
installing a 32 bit Linux OS before I risked using the 64 bit versions
(which had a lot of problems in the past). Plus, don't kill me for saying
it, but I still wanted to play some Windows games that weren't available
for Linux yet. I am close to the point where I never need to use Windows
again. If gaming companies would always make Linux versions of their
products, I would never have use Windows for anything. That would really be
nice.
Mysql Master/Slave and Clusters
What is
MySQL? Well, if you mean the MySQL database server, it
is an SQL database server available from mysql.com. It is comparable to PostgreSQL and Oracle in most ways.
MySQL is one of the two most popular Open Source database servers out there
(PostgreSQL being the other).
What are MySQL
Master/Slaves? The Master MySQL server lets people read and write data
to it. It copies all of its data to the MySQL slave computers. Thus, you
end up with many database servers with the same data. This can be useful
for load-balancing your webservers against many database servers or
performing a failover in case the Master dies (you shutoff the Master and
make one of the Slaves the new Master). Normally, the Slave computers are
read-only. Since most websites have a 4-to-1 ratio of reads to writes,
having many read-only MySQL slaves can be very useful. How it is useful?
Your website can handle more data and use more database connections spread
over multiple servers. All the writes still have to be done to the Master,
but the website can choose which Slave it wants to read data from.
Separating the write connections from the read connections can speed up
your website a lot.
What is MySQL
Clustering? MySQL Clustering lets you put multiple computers together
which are all the same and have all the same data. You can connect to any
computer in the cluster and perform read/write operations which are
immediately available to the other mirrors. The main different between
Clustering and Master/Slaves is that each computer in a Cluster can be
written to while in a Master/Slave configuration you are only suppose to
write to the Master. Also, in Clustering, when you write data to one
machine, the computer will not respond back with an "OK" status until the
data has been copied to all the other computers. With the Master/Slave
configuration, the data is not necessarily copied to the Slaves
immediately. Effectively, you can view the cluster as one single
entity/database. The nice thing is, if one computer is the cluster
crashes, it doesn't affect the other computers or the data in the cluster.
This behavior doesn't exist in the Master/Slave replication. If the Master
goes down, the replication stops.
Clustering is a little more complicated, but it has huge advantages and
will most likely be used a lot by many companies. It is fairly new
technology, so in my opinion, it is good time to start testing it. For
small websites which love to be on the bleeding edge of technology and you
don't mind being risky, go ahead and use MySQL Clustering. I am a little
cautious about using it for heavy performance database needs, but I am
anxious to at least try! You should be warned that there are a lot of
limitations with MySQL Clustering. For example, your database can only be
as big as the free RAM you have. Also, I have had a lot of problems getting
more than just a two storage node cluster working.
The Python script and Python Module MySQL.py
The Python Script "Compile_MySQL.py" is meant to access the MySQL.py
module to install, configure, and get MySQL running. I tried to make
it as simple as possible so that a lot the options you want can be
specified at the command line.
The MySQL.py module currently only has one class called "Installer"
which is mostly finished. It has other classes I am working on, but
nothing worth talking about yet. I included a lot of stuff in the module
like:
I broke down the main modules to approximate the steps you would
use to install MySQL. In addition, I separated out the compiling from
the configuring because I wanted you to be able to skip the compiling
if you already installed MySQL once.
Use of the try/except statements.
The first string of the method(s) is used for automatic documentation
extraction.
The concept of classes.
The init and del methods which are executed at creation and destruction
of an object.
Other internal methods to handle printing an object or when you try
to compare this object against other objects.
Escaping to shell to execute code, get its return status, and output
data.
Regular expressions and using them repeatedly. It's only necessary to
create a regular expression once, so that you don't waste resources
recreating regular expressions.
Storing variables in an object.
Line command arguments are passed.
The script only creates one set of MySQL binaries. It uses different
directories and ports for each instance of the MySQL server.
Personally, I think the module could use a lot of work. I see repetitive
code that could be converted into methods, there need to be more
command line options, and there needs to be a place to save the configuration
for later runs (using xml) if we want to use this as an admin tool.
Here is sample script to use my MySQL module. Note, if you already ran
this script and got mysql working, and you want to reconfigure it, then
comment out "M_Obj.Execute_Compile_Script()" to reconfigure mysql. I tried
to comment each below in the script.
#!/usr/bin/python
### Just a bunch of standard modules I load.
import urllib2, urllib, string, re, os, struct
import base64, string, gzip, sys, time, commands
import getopt
### The module I created.
import MySQL
## Initialize our installation object.
M_Obj = MySQL.Installer()
#--------------------------------------------------------
### Build and install the mysql binaries. These binaries will be common
### with all the mysql services.
M_Obj.Write_Compile_Script() ### This creates out bash compile script.
M_Obj.Execute_Compile_Script() ### This executes our bash script.
### This creates one set of binaries for
### all mysql instances.
M_Obj.Stop_Instances() ### In case there are any running.
M_Obj.Setup_Instances() ### Setup and initialize the databases.
M_Obj.Start_Instances() ### Start the databases.
Config files. Save all the config
files in this directory (or grab this tarball containing all of them) into a
directory called "Config" where you execute Compile_MySQL.py.
Then execute this command:
python Compile_MySQL.py
This will download and install MySQL. It will make a log file called
"/tmp/mysql_install.log". If it doesn't download MySQL, download
mysql-4.1.7.tar.gz manually from mysql.com and save it in the directory
"/usr/local/src/mysql_compile".
NOTE: If you want to specify another database server,
then execute this, substituting the appropriate URL:
So, now we got the database server installed. Let us do some stuff
to verify the Master/Slaves are working as well as the MySQL Cluster.
I made things really easy for you (assuming the installation was good).
I have made a bunch of scripts for you.
Here are a bunch of scripts in the home directory where mysql got
installed.
Script
Usage
Purpose
bash_aliases
source bash_aliases
This setups aliases to connect to each service. The aliases connect to
the master service, slave services, ndb_mgm, and each cluster mysqld
service.
Start
./Start
Starts the master, slaves, and
cluster.
Stop
./Stop
Stops the master, slaves, and cluster.
The scripts listed below are created in the "scripts" directory
where mysql got installed.
If you did a "source bash_aliases", these commands will be in the bash
path. You can execute these scripts as many times as you like.
Script
Purpose
Master_Status.bash
Gets the status of the master service.
Slave_Status.bash
Gets the status of the slave services.
Master_Slave_Status.bash
Gets the status of the master and slaves.
Master_Slave_Test.bash
Inserts data and then the master and slaves perform the same
sql query which should show the same results.
Cluster_Status.bash
Gets the status of the cluster
Cluster_Test.bash
Inserts data into the cluster. It shuts down each storage node
and sees if each mysqld server can still access the data.
Try to learn what the scripts do step by step. If you can fully understand
what those scripts are doing, then you know at least the basics about how to
manage the mysql services.
Follow these steps:
cd /usr/local/mysql-cluster ### Change to the mysql directory.
source bash_aliases ### Load some aliases into the bash shell.
./Start ### Start mysql master, slaves, cluster.
Cluster_Status.bash ### Get the status of the cluster
Master_Status.bash ### Get the status of the master service.
Slave_Status.bash ### Get the status of the slave service.
Master_Slave_Test.bash ### Test the master/slave services.
Cluster_Test.bash ### Test the cluster.
Next Month
I am probably going to use MySQL 5.0 at home from now on. So, I am probably
not going to test MySQL 4.1.x anymore. Saying that, possible next months topics
include:
MySQL failover for Master/Slave cluster. The master has gone bad and
we want to make a slave the new master.
There are lots of issue to consider when
doing this, like data corruption.
Stored procedures.
More cluster configurations.
Scripts to check if your MySQL Master/Slave/Cluster computers
are running smoothly.
Maybe check out all the new tools you can download from MySQL?
Conclusion
The Python module was sort of an overkill. However, I wanted to make it
really easy to compile and install MySQL every time there is an upgrade.
I am going to use Python for everything I do and I plan on using it
for all SysAdmin needs in the future (if I can help it). Every time
there is a new version of Python, I am so impressed because it just gets
easier, simpler, and more powerful. In Python 2.4 (which just came out),
sets are really cool for intersection and union calculations.
MySQL is coming along nicely. With all the new features being put into
MySQL, it can compete against some of the larger database companies. It is
important to learn MySQL because new job opportunities are emerging and
MySQL will be a hot item over the next few years (before the masses learn
it). The Python module and the script I wrote make it really easy to get a
fairly complicated set of MySQL instances installed on your computer. To
use it in production, just copy over the binaries and the config files and
make a few changes to the config files and you are done! Once you see how
Master/Slave/Cluster configurations work, it really becomes simple to
understand how it all works.
Afterword: Get your certifications.
In the last few months, I believe the MySQL Professional Certification
paid off. Most employers don't want just a DBA anymore. PostgreSQL and
MySQL make database servers easy to use for most people. No longer do you
have to worship the DBA from hell because he/she knows all the little
tricks. All the docs and examples are online and you can fool around with
the source code yourself. This is going to put pressure on DBAs to be more
than just DBAs. I believe the MySQL jobs I applied for really liked my
programming and Sys Admin skills. I know for a fact that one company used
my MySQL Professional Certification as leverage to interview me because
they could claim "he is certified". They really wanted a programmer, but
because of politics, they couldn't directly get a programmer, so my
certification let me slip in. Cool, huh? A lot of certifications really
don't tell you whether someone is good or not. However, the LPI and MySQL
Certifications have two things going for them. First, they are actually
reasonable certifications. Most certifications are meant to just make money
for the company, but LPI and MySQL don't seem to be like that; they really
want you to be qualified. Second, managers and HR like certifications
because it protects them. I know most techies hate certifications, but
because of politics, you really need to get certified to fight against the
machine. LPI and MySQL Certifications are fairly inexpensive, unlike a lot
of the other stupid certifications, so it really isn't that bad.
Mark Nielsen was enjoying his work at cnet.com as a MySQL DBA, but
is moving to Google as a MySQL DBA.
During his spare time, he uses Python heavily for mathematical and web
projects.
Flickr is a photo-sharing service: it
allows you to share your photos with friends, family, or the public in
general. Flickr caters to "moblogging": photo blogging from mobile phones,
which is a great part of the appeal to me. It also comes with an API so
you don't have to take apart its pages to scrape it, which is nice.
Flickr::API,
which was written by one of Flickr's developers, provides a way to interface
to Flickr from Perl. (Flickr's API documentation is available here). There is also
Flickr::Upload,
which does exactly as the name suggests.
Getting started
The first step is to get an API key. Flickr is still a relatively new
service, and want to know who is writing software to access their service
and why, and having people register for an API key is a common requirement
of web services anyway. To register for an API key, follow the steps
outlined on this
page (at the time of writing, this simply involved emailing Cal Henderson,
the author of Flickr::API).
API key at the ready, you can now start using Flickr. Flickr provides
a test method flickr.test.echo to allow you to check that
everything is working, and this is used in the example given in
Flickr::API's POD. I've expanded on it slightly to give some
output using the Data::Dumper module:
use Flickr::API;
use Data::Dumper;
my $api = new Flickr::API({'key' => ''});
my $response = $api->execute_method('flickr.test.echo', {
'foo' => 'bar',
'baz' => 'quux',
});
print "Success: $response->{success}\n";
print "Error code: $response->{error_code}\n";
print Dumper ($response);
The output from this should be
Success: 1
Error code: 0
followed by a lot of output from Data::Dumper. The part of
this output that we're interested should look something like this:
Once everything is up and running, we're ready to start doing something
of interest. I'm only really interested in using my own photos, so I first
need to get my user id.
There are two ways of doing this: you can call
flickr.urls.lookupUser with the URL of a user's photo or user
page, or if you know the user's username, with
flickr.people.findByUsername. Here's an example that uses both:
use Flickr::API;
use Data::Dumper;
use warnings;
use strict;
my $api = new Flickr::API({'key' => ''});
my $user = shift;
my $response;
if ($user =~ m!http://!i)
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.urls.lookupUser', {
'url' => $user,
});
}
else
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.urls.findByUsername', {
'username' => $user,
});
}
my $debug = 1;
if ($debug)
{
print "Success: $response->{success}\n";
print "Error code: $response->{error_code}\n";
print Dumper ($response);
}
Cleaning it up to provide useful output is left as an exercise for
the reader (don't worry, I'll get to that later). When called with either
a URL or username, it should have (among the usual Data::Dumper
output) something that looks like this:
So... I mentioned that I was going to do something useful. What I'm
looking to build is a little script that gives me a montage of the last
few photos I posted, and a script that takes the coordinates of a photo
note and generates an image map (at some point, I'd like to change that
to be RDF, so I can use it in FOAF or what have you, but for now, an
image map is easier).
Generating an Image Map
First, let's take a look at how we get the information, and what it
looks like:
use Flickr::API;
use Data::Dumper;
use warnings;
use strict;
# Test photo: http://flickr.com/photos/jimregan/120856/
# Photo url: http://photos1.flickr.com/120856_01b51464c0.jpg
# http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.getInfo.html
my $api = new Flickr::API({'key' => ''});
my $response;
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.photos.getInfo', {
'photo_id' => '120856',
'secret' => '01b51464c0'
});
my $debug = 1;
if ($debug)
{
print "Success: $response->{success}\n";
print "Error code: $response->{error_code}\n";
print Dumper ($response);
}
So, how do we turn that rather useless code example into something that
will generate a simple HTML page with an image map? I could have tried
accessing $response->tree directly, but life's too short for
that. The author of Flickr::API and
XML::Parser::Lite::Tree seems to have thought the same, because
he also wrote XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath, which allows some
simple XPath expressions to be used on XML::Parser::Lite::Tree's
output.
With a look at the XML above, we want the contents of the
<note> tags: /photo/notes/note
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Flickr::API;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath;
use warnings;
use strict;
# Test photo: http://flickr.com/photos/jimregan/120856/
my $photo = "http://photos1.flickr.com/120856_01b51464c0.jpg";
# http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.getInfo.html
my $api = new Flickr::API({'key' => ''});
my $response;
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.photos.getInfo', {
'photo_id' => '120856',
'secret' => '01b51464c0'
});
my $xpath = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
my @notes = $xpath->select_nodes('/photo/notes/note');
print "<html>\n<head>\n<title>Flickr Photo</title>\n</head>\n";
print "<img src=\"$photo\" alt=\"Flickr photo\" usemap=\"#genmap\">\n";
print "<map name=\"genmap\">\n";
foreach (@notes)
{
print "<area shape=\"rect\" coords=\"";
print "$_->{attributes}->{x}, ";
print "$_->{attributes}->{y}, ";
print $_->{attributes}->{x} + $_->{attributes}->{w} .", ";
print $_->{attributes}->{y} + $_->{attributes}->{h} ."\" ";
print "alt=\"$_->{children}[0]->{content}\" ";
print "title=\"$_->{children}[0]->{content}\" nohref>\n";
}
print "</map>\n</html>\n";
Now we're getting somewhere. The output is pretty shoddy HTML, but it works:
<html>
<head>
<title>Flickr Photo</title>
</head>
<img src="http://photos1.flickr.com/120856_01b51464c0.jpg" alt="Flickr photo" usemap="#genmap">
<map name="genmap">
<area shape="rect" coords="96, 103, 134, 127" alt="Look - missing his front teeth
at the bottom!" title="Look - missing his front teeth
at the bottom!" nohref>
</map>
</html>
Let's go one better, and show what it looks like:
Here's an improved version of that script that takes one or two
parameters from the command line (photo ID, and secret if available) and
creates a web page with more information (text version):
Taken: 2004-12-12 01:09:16, Uploaded: Sun Dec 12 01:09:16 2004
I had a script earlier that did the basics of finding a userid, and said
that I was going to leave making it useful as an exercise for the reader.
Well, the bulk of this article was written on Christmas Day, so Merry
Christmas: (text version)
use Flickr::API;
use XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath;
use warnings;
use strict;
my $theuser = shift;
sub finduser
{
my $fuser = shift;
my ($xpath, @username, $userid);
if ($fuser =~ m!http://!i)
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.urls.lookupUser', {
'url' => $fuser,
});
$xpath = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
@username = $xpath->select_nodes('/user');
$userid = $username[0]->{attributes}->{id};
}
else
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.people.findByUsername', {
'username' => $fuser,
});
$xpath = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
@username = $xpath->select_nodes('/user');
$userid = $username[0]->{attributes}->{nsid};
}
return $userid;
}
print finduser ($theuser);
Flickr::Upload
So how do we upload images? We use Flickr::Upload. There
isn't much to using this module: the following script is based on the example
from the POD, but with two minor differences.
First, the script takes the location of the image as a parameter, so it can
be used more than once; second, it tells Mozilla to open a page so the uploader
can edit the details of the photo (as the POD and Flickr's API documentation
say it should). (text version)
use LWP::UserAgent;
use Flickr::Upload qw(upload);
my $image = shift;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $photoid = upload ($ua,
'photo' => $image,
'email' => '',
'password' => '',
'tags' => 'mobile',
'is_public' => 1,
'is_friend' => 1,
'is_family' => 1
) or die "Failed to upload $image";
`mozilla -remote \"openURL(http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_edit.gne?ids=$photoid)\"`;
The only required parameters are $ua, email,
and password. These last two are left blank, for obvious
reasons.
Creating a montage from Flickr
Here it is, the pièste de résistance: a script to generate a
montage from Flickr. (text version)
use Flickr::API;
use XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath;
use Getopt::Long;
use Data::Dumper;
use Image::Magick;
use LWP::Simple;
use warnings;
use strict;
# Getopt vars. All arguments with default values.
# You probably want to set this a bit lower
my $count = 24;
my $theuser = "http://flickr.com/photos/jimregan";
my $type = 'photos';
my $email = '';
my $pass = '';
my $xpath;
my $result = GetOptions ("user=s" => \$theuser,
"type=s" => \$type,
"count=i" => \$count,
"password=s" => \$pass,
"email=s" => \$email);
# For some reason Image::Magick doesn't read the
# last image on the list. <shrug>
$count++;
my $api = new Flickr::API({'key' => ''});
my $response;
my $debug = 1;
my $user = finduser ($theuser);
if ($type eq 'photos')
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.people.getPublicPhotos', {
'user_id' => $user,
'per_page' => $count,
'page' => 1});
}
elsif ($type eq 'favourites'||$type eq 'favorites')
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.favorites.getList', {
'user_id' => $user,
'per_page' => $count,
'email' => $email,
'password' => $pass,
'page' => 1});
}
elsif ($type eq 'contacts')
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.photos.getContactsPhotos', {
'count' => $count,
'email' => $email,
'password' => $pass,});
}
else
{
die "--type must be 'photos', 'contacts' or 'favo[u]rites'\n";
}
if ($response->{success} == 0)
{
die "Error $response->{error_code}: $response->{error_message}"
. "\nDid you remember to pass --email and --password?\n";
}
my $photolist = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
my @bphoto = $photolist->select_nodes('/photos/photo');
my ($photo, $photofile, @photofiles);
# Set up the image for our montage
my $image=Image::Magick->new;
foreach (@bphoto)
{
$photo = "http://photos"
. $_->{attributes}->{server}
. ".flickr.com/"
. $_->{attributes}->{id} . "_"
. $_->{attributes}->{secret} . ".jpg";
$photofile = "tmp-$_->{attributes}->{id}.jpg";
push @photofiles, $photofile;
open (FILE, ">$photofile");
my $g = get($photo);
print FILE $g;
}
foreach (@photofiles)
{
$image->Read($_);
}
if ($debug)
{
warn "$image\n" if "$image";
print 0+$image;
print "\n";
}
print Dumper ($image);
my $montage = $image->Montage;
$montage->Write ('output.jpg');
foreach (@photofiles)
{
unlink $_;
}
sub finduser
{
my $fuser = shift;
my ($xpath, @username, $userid);
if ($fuser =~ m!http://!i)
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.urls.lookupUser', {
'url' => $fuser,
});
$xpath = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
@username = $xpath->select_nodes('/user');
$userid = $username[0]->{attributes}->{id};
}
else
{
$response = $api->execute_method ('flickr.people.findByUsername', {
'username' => $fuser,
});
$xpath = new XML::Parser::Lite::Tree::XPath($response->{tree});
@username = $xpath->select_nodes('/user');
$userid = $username[0]->{attributes}->{nsid};
}
return $userid;
}
This does quite a bit more than the other scripts, and is a bit more neat too.
Note that, because Flickr requires authentication, you need to pass your email
and password if you are looking for a montage of images from your Favourites or
Contacts.
I'll leave you with the default output of that script (though shrunk a bit):
Jimmy is a single father of one, who enjoys long walks... Oh, right.
Jimmy has been using computers from the tender age of seven, when his father
inherited an Amstrad PCW8256. After a few brief flirtations with an Atari ST
and numerous versions of DOS and Windows, Jimmy was introduced to Linux in 1998
and hasn't looked back.
In his spare time, Jimmy likes to play guitar and read: not at the same time,
but the picks make handy bookmarks.
I recently made the move from Mandrake to Ubuntu, and while I was
unpacking in my new $HOME (sorry, I couldn't resist), I came across a
little del.icio.us clone I wrote in
PHP to test out the RDF generating script I wrote (well, adapted) to
go with my article about outliners.
I decided to use PHP, basically because it's the only language
I've used for web programming (aside from a misguided moment in my
first year in college when I wrote something in Pascal). I decided to
use SQLite for the database because I didn't feel like installing
MySQL: PHP's SQLite functions are pretty similar to the MySQL equivalent
anyway, so it's no big deal.
Please note that what I am presenting in this article does very
little: I needed to test a script, and only cloned the parts I needed to
do that. I did go a little further, but forgot about it until now.
Doing something useful is for a future article!
Because I only needed it to give me simple XML output, I managed
to get all I needed from a single script. First, I set up a sample
database:
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE bookmarks (url TEXT, title TEXT, desc TEXT, keywords TEXT,
date TEXT, id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES('http://sqlite.org/datatype3.html',
'Datatypes In SQLite Version 3','','sqlite programming','2004-10-16T20:23:49Z',1);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES('http://sqlite.org/lang.html',
'Query Language Understood By SQLite','','sqlite programming','2004-10-16T20:25:36Z',2);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES('http://www.team-teso.net/releases.php',
'releases of teso','','computing 404','2003-07-15T22:29:38Z',3);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES('http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html',
'The AOLer Translator','','humour','2003-11-18T00:45:35Z',4);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES('http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm',
'Online Conversion - Unix time conversion','','misc','2004-10-16T20:43:44Z',5);
COMMIT;
Then, I wrote a script to give me the output:
<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8"?'.'>' ?>
<!-- http://ie.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.php#41654 -->
<posts tag="" user="">
<?php
if (!extension_loaded("sqlite"))
{
dl("sqlite.so");
}
if ($db = sqlite_open("/tmp/bookmarks.sqlite", 0666, $err))
{
$result = sqlite_query ($db, "SELECT * FROM bookmarks");
while (sqlite_has_more($result))
{
$post = sqlite_fetch_array ($result);
$url = 'href="'.htmlentities($post['url']).'"';
$title = 'description="'.htmlentities($post['title']).'"';
if ($post['desc'] != "")
{
$desc = 'extended="'.htmlentities($post['desc']).'"';
}
else
{
$desc = "";
}
$date = 'time="'.$post['date'].'"';
# Don't know if this is how it's done, but it's close enough
$hash = 'hash="'.md5($url).'"';
$tags = 'tag="'.$post['keywords'].'"';
print " <post $url $title $desc $hash $tags $date />";
printf ("\n");
}
}
?>
</posts>
Running this with the sample database gave me this output:
Which is pretty close to the output given by
http://del.icio.us/api/posts/get?.
It did what I wanted, it didn't take long to write, and I had fun doing
it. So I thought I might try to make it do a bit more.
Next, I decided to tackle the page that returns the list of tags,
to run delicious_mind on it:
<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8"?'.'>' ?>
<tags>
<?php
//error_reporting(E_ALL);
//Error reporting? I have no errors! ... erm... not now, at least.
if (!extension_loaded("sqlite"))
{
dl("sqlite.so");
}
// I really should do something with $err
if ($db = sqlite_open("/tmp/bookmarks.sqlite", 0666, $err))
{
$tags = array();
$prevtags = array();
$result = sqlite_query ($db, "SELECT keywords FROM bookmarks");
while (sqlite_has_more($result))
{
$foo = sqlite_fetch_array ($result);
$thistag = split(" ", $foo['keywords']);
// print_r(array) is worth remembering.
$prevtags = array_merge($tags);
$tags = array_merge($prevtags, $thistag);
}
natcasesort($tags);
$uniq=array_unique($tags);
$count=array_count_values($tags);
foreach ($uniq as $tag)
{
$c = $count[$tag];
print "<tag count='$c' tag='$tag' />";
printf("\n");
}
}
?>
</tags>
According to del.icio.us's API
documentation the posts URL accepts two parameters: tag
and date, which allow you to filter the results you receive.
The next step was to make the first script do that:
<?php
echo '<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8"?'.'>';
if (!extension_loaded("sqlite"))
{
dl("sqlite.so");
}
if ($_GET['tag'] != "")
{
$tag = $_GET['tag'];
}
if ($_GET['dt'] != "")
{
$dt = $_GET['dt'];
}
printf ("<posts ");
if ($dt)
{
printf ("dt='$dt' ");
$query = "SELECT * FROM bookmarks where date like '%$dt%'";
}
if ($tag)
{
printf ("tag='$tag'");
$query = "SELECT * FROM bookmarks where keywords like '%$tag%'";
// The problem with this is that it matches too much.
// Using my example, if I search for 'sql' I should get nothing,
// but instead it matches 'sqlite'
// Close enough for my purposes, though I should use the stuff I
// have for extracting the tags.
}
else
{
printf ("tag=''");
}
printf (" user=''>\n");
if ($tag && $dt)
{
$query = "SELECT * FROM bookmarks where date like '%$dt%' and keywords like '%$tag%'";
}
if (!$tag && !$dt)
{
$query = "SELECT * FROM bookmarks";
}
if ($debug) echo "<!-- '$query' -->";
if ($db = sqlite_open("/tmp/bookmarks.sqlite", 0666, $err))
{
$result = sqlite_query ($db, $query);
while (sqlite_has_more($result))
{
$post = sqlite_fetch_array ($result);
$url = 'href="'.htmlentities($post['url']).'"';
$title = 'description="'.htmlentities($post['title']).'"';
if ($post['desc'] != "")
{
$desc = 'extended="'.htmlentities($post['desc']).'"';
}
else
{
$desc = "";
}
$date = 'time="'.$post['date'].'"';
// Used the wrong variable in the first example
$hash = 'hash="'.md5($post['url']).'"';
$tags = 'tag="'.$post['keywords'].'"';
print " <post $url $title $desc $hash $tags $date />";
printf ("\n");
}
}
?>
</posts>
As noted in the comments, the tags matched too much: if I specified
'sql' as the tag to filter for, it would match 'sqlite', if that was the
last tag in the list. I wrote a simple search script while thinking about
what I was going to do next:
<?php
if (!extension_loaded("sqlite"))
{
dl("sqlite.so");
}
if (!$_GET['search'])
{
echo "<form method='GET'>";
echo "<input name='search' value='' type='text' size='80'>";
echo "<input type='submit'>";
echo "</form>";
}
else
{
$search = $_GET['search'];
if ($db = sqlite_open("/tmp/bookmarks.sqlite", 0666, $err))
{
echo "<form method='GET'>";
echo "<input name='search' value='$search' type='text' size='80'>";
echo "<input type='submit'>";
echo "</form>";
$query = "SELECT * FROM bookmarks WHERE url LIKE '%$search%' OR title LIKE '%$search%'";
$result = sqlite_query ($db, $query);
while (sqlite_has_more($result))
{
$post = sqlite_fetch_array ($result);
$url = $post['url'];
echo "<p><a href='$url'>";
echo $post['title'];
echo "</a>";
// keywords, edit
}
}
}
In the end I decided to simply pad each tag out with spaces, because it
was easier that way, leaving me with new versions of the posts and tags
scripts:
<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8"?'.'>' ?>
<tags>
<?php
//error_reporting(E_ALL);
//Error reporting? I have no errors! ... erm... not now, at least.
if (!extension_loaded("sqlite"))
{
dl("sqlite.so");
}
// I really should do something with $err
if ($db = sqlite_open("/tmp/bookmarks.sqlite", 0666, $err))
{
$tags = array();
$prevtags = array();
$result = sqlite_query ($db, "SELECT keywords FROM bookmarks");
while (sqlite_has_more($result))
{
$foo = sqlite_fetch_array ($result);
$thistag = split(" ", $foo['keywords']);
// print_r(array) is worth remembering.
$prevtags = array_merge($tags);
$tags = array_merge($prevtags, $thistag);
}
natcasesort($tags);
$uniq=array_unique($tags);
$count=array_count_values($tags);
foreach ($uniq as $tag)
{
if ($tag != '')
{
$c = $count[$tag];
print "<tag count='$c' tag='".trim($tag)."' />";
printf("\n");
}
}
}
?>
</tags>
I needed the database changed to work with these scripts, so I added a
new script to generate the SQL. I should have written it to add the data to
the database directly, but never got around to doing that.
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/scripting-plugins.html',
'Scripting Plugins with Mozilla', '', ' mozilla javascript ', '2003-08-09T20:58:38Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.mozilla.org/docs/xul/xulnotes/xulnote_xpconnect.html',
'Fun With XBL and XPConnect', '', ' mozilla xbl ', '2003-08-06T04:20:33Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xbl/xbl.html',
'XBL (Extensible Binding Language) 1.0', '', ' mozilla xbl ', '2003-08-06T04:20:18Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://layeremu.mozdev.org/files/usage.html',
'mozdev.org - layeremu: files/usage', '', ' mozilla ', '2003-08-06T00:31:43Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES
('http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/~checkout~/gnusto/src/gnusto/content/gnusto-lib.js?rev=1.97&content-type=text/plain',
'http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/~checkout~/gnusto/src/gnusto/content/gnusto-lib.js?rev=1.97&content-type=text/plain',
'', ' mozilla ', '2003-08-17T03:31:59Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/dom_el_ref31.html#1028304',
'addEventListener', '', ' mozilla javascript ', '2003-10-12T22:17:33Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/dom_el_ref47.html#1028897',
'insertBefore', '', ' mozilla javascript ', '2003-10-12T22:17:34Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?coll=0650&db=man&pth=/cat1',
'SGI TPL Browse Man Pages (User Commands (1))', '', ' unix manpages ', '2003-07-14T09:48:03Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://docsrv.caldera.com/',
'SCOhelp', '', ' unix manpages ', '2003-07-14T09:48:03Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://docs.hp.com/hpux/os/man%5Fpages.html',
'hp-ux reference (manpages)', '', ' unix manpages ', '2003-07-14T09:48:03Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://sun.doit.wisc.edu/',
'DoIT/POST SUN Home Page', '', ' unix manpages ', '2003-07-14T09:48:03Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://publib16.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ds_form?lang=en_US&viewset=AIX/',
'AIX Documentation', '', ' unix manpages ', '2003-07-14T09:48:03Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.toccionline.com/creations/ctrla/how.html',
'CTRL+A Images - Make Your Own', '', ' computing ', '2003-07-19T13:37:06Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/',
'SCO | Developers | GABI', '', ' computing ', '2003-07-17T00:56:32Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://openpalm.sourceforge.net/faq.html',
'FAQ of the OpenPalm Project', '', ' computing ', '2003-07-14T10:19:25Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://www.improvisation.ws/mb/tpcs1.php',
'Improv Message Boards - True Porn Clerk Stories', '', ' misc ', '2003-06-10T23:59:11Z', NULL);
INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES ('http://singsmart.com/freesingingarticles.html',
'Sing Smart, Not Hard with Vocal Coach Yvonne DeBandi', '', ' misc ', '2003-06-09T23:22:34Z', NULL);
Now that I've made my terrible PHP code public, I guess I'll have to
finish off the job. Coming in part 2:
HTML output!
Adding bookmarks
Deleting bookmarks
Manipulating tags
More modular code
A Perl script to take Netscape bookmarks and post them to the real
del.icio.us
Jimmy is a single father of one, who enjoys long walks... Oh, right.
Jimmy has been using computers from the tender age of seven, when his father
inherited an Amstrad PCW8256. After a few brief flirtations with an Atari ST
and numerous versions of DOS and Windows, Jimmy was introduced to Linux in 1998
and hasn't looked back.
In his spare time, Jimmy likes to play guitar and read: not at the same time,
but the picks make handy bookmarks.
This article will illustrate the use of my extended 'case' and
'read' Bash shell builtins (See my other articles
in issues 108, 109 and 110) to
delete Spam on my ISP's POP3 mail server before it gets downloaded
into my local mail system. The example scripts use these extended
functions, so they require that you have my shell extensions
installed.
On average, I get 1 MB of spam per hour on my Yahoo account. The
most troublesome of these, both in size and number, are Microsoft
Swen and Netsky worms. Fortunately, they are easy
to identify, and can be deleted right on the POP3 server.
Swen worms are usually 150kB in size and use all lowercase
letters (with optional '-' prefix) as the MIME boundary pattern,
ie.
boundary="-*[a-z]+"
Netsky worms are about 42kB in size and use 3 different patterns
for MIME boundary pattern, namely
In order to understand the shell script, you should first log in
to your POP3 server using Telnet, because a shell script only automates
what you type on the command line. So, let's do that:
telnet pop.your.isp 110
user username
pass password
will connect to remote POP3 server (port 110), and log in using
your 'username' and 'password'.
stat
top 1 10
Here, stat returns the number of messages and total size, and
top 1 10 prints the header of the 1st email plus the top 10 lines
of the body. For our purpose, we are only interested in the header,
specifically the 'boundary' parameter; so, top 1 0 is what
we need for our script. Note that a single '.' (dot) on a line by itself signals the
end of output.
dele 1
quit
dele 1 marks the 1st message to be deleted, and
quit ends the POP3 session upon which the server removes
all messages marked for deletion.
For this to work, you have to read (read -D) and send (echo
-D) DOS lines, since the POP3 protocol specification (RFC1939)
requires CRLF (\r\n) line termination. The POP3 protocol is extremely
simple, in that there are only 2 possible responses from the remote
server:
+OK (with optional text), if there is no error
-ERR (with optional text), if there was an error
check () # Usage: check server username password
{
local ok n size i
exec 3<>/dev/tcp/$1/pop3 || exit 1
read3
send3 user $2
send3 pass $3
send3 stat # +OK 11 1504321
read ok n size <<< "$REPLY"
for ((i = 1; i <= n; i++)); do
send3 top $i 0
case `until read3; [ "$REPLY" = . ]; do echo "${REPLY#.}"; done` in
'boundary="-*[a-z]+"' ))
echo swen.0 ;;
'boundary="(----=_NextPart_000_0016){2}"' ))
echo netsky.1 ;;
'boundary="----=_NextPart_000_001B_01C0CA8(0\.6|1\.7)B015D10"'
))
echo netsky.2 ;;
esac then
send3 dele $i
fi
done
send3 quit
}
This is the main program loop. It logs in and checks for the above
boundary patterns using regex(7). If there is match, then it deletes
that message from the POP3 server. The type of spam is also printed to
stdout. You'll notice that the exit condition of the extended 'case'
statement is used here.
Usage
You can source the 3 functions and run
check pop.your.isp username password
from the command line or in a script. However, if you use Fetchmail to
download emails (like I do), then you already have servers,
usernames, and passwords in ~/.fetchmailrc. You can
extract these data using fetchmail --configdump directly:
(
fetchmail --configdump
cat << EOF
for server in fetchmailrc['servers']:
if server['protocol'] == 'POP3':
for user in server['users']:
print server['pollname'], user['remote'], user['password']
EOF
) | python | while read server user pass; do
# use (...) to prevent 'exit' terminating entire script
check "$server" "$user" "$pass"
done
The entire script is available from popcheck.bash, and
should be run just before Fetchmail,
popcheck.bash && fetchmail
usually from crontab.
Summary
Although the script deals with Microsoft Swen/Netsky worms, you can
add your own patterns. For example,
I learned Unix using the original Bourne shell. And, after my
journey through language wilderness, I have come full-circle
back to shell. Recently, I've been patching features into Bash,
giving other scripting languages a run for their money.
Slackware has been my primary distribution since the beginning,
because I can type. In my toolbox, I have Vim, Bash, Mutt, Tin,
TeX/LaTeX, Python, Awk, Sed. Even my shell command line is in
Vi-mode.
Now that we've talked about some of the basics of design, let's use
some. In this issue, we'll use those design principles to create a simple
opening web page for a fictitious company. (That will keep the lawsuits to
a minimum, rather than reworking something like, say, the www.microsoft.com
site.)
The first thing is to name the company. There are firms out there that
do nothing else; I once worked with a genius (his company is at http://www.namelab.com) who's still at
it, thirty years later. Since this is the January issue, we'll do something
appropriately winterish.
How about a winter sports equipment company? Skis, sleds, that sort of
thing. We want to give a vaguely European feel to the company, so we'll use
'alpine' rather than 'mountain'. We want to imply more than just sporting
goods (we might decide to sell clothing and climbing videos and tents, as
well), so we'll use 'gear' rather than 'equipment'.
So, our company is called Alpine Gear. Except we're very hip and
internet, aren't we? So we'll use the serial-capital version of the name,
like any good computer company: AlpineGear.
A domain search did turn up a link to an existing company
(http://www.alpinegear.com), but it's called Old Style Log Works, Inc., out
of Kalispell, Montana. They build custom log cabins. If you're more curious
than me, you can ask their web designer (http://www.snowdogweb.com) why
they have their client linked to that particular URL. But, since they don't
use Alpine or Gear or AlpineGear anywhere on their site, I'm sure they
won't mind our borrowing the name for this project. Yet it's a good lesson;
domain names are getting more scarce, and finding a good name that's also
an unused domain is getting harder.
Now we have to create a logo for the company. Or, in this case, a
logotype.
What's the difference? A logo is an icon, a picture, a 'bug' that
communicates the image (and hopefully the name) of the company without any
additional words. Think of the Shell Oil
Company logo, the Apple Computer
logo, and the International Business Machines
Company logo. (I'd bet many of you didn't even know that IBM stood for
International Business Machines.) A logotype is just the name used in a
particular typography that, hopefully, also communicates the image of the
company. Recent examples are the eBay
logotype, the Google logotype, and the
Yahoo! logotype, complete with its own
punctuation.
Why use a logotype rather than a logo? Mere personal preference, some of
the time; either your own or that of the CEO of the company. But you'll
notice a pattern in the companies selected above: the ones that have a
product (something that needs an immediately recognizable sign on a
building or on a box on a shelf) use logos, and the ones that are service
providers use logotypes. It's not a perfect system, however; Ace Hardware
(definitely a product company) uses a logotype and many banks (definitely
service companies) use a logo. Since our company is going to sell many
products, most of them produced by other companies, we'll go with a
logotype.
We want to emphasize the 'European' quality of the company, so we'll
pick the only font typically recognized by Americans as 'Euro', one usually
referred to as either Old English or German Black Letter, for the
'European' half of the name:
This is a font called Berliner. The image was created in Photoshop, but
the letterspacing was hand-tightened because the standard spacing looked
too 'open', and the capital A didn't look much like an A, except to a
19th-century German. (Logotypes must be grasped as images, rather than
'read' as words, and if the letters are farther apart it tends to invite
letter-by-letter 'reading' by the viewer.)
For the 'equipment' half of the name, we'll use something that's not too
technical looking, something comfortable, that suggests our stuff is fun
and easy to use:
This is ITC Garamond Book Condensed, also with tightened letterspacing.
It also had to be scaled, because letter proportions are not the same in
all fonts; at 72 points, the capital G was much larger in this font than in
the Berliner. We picked Book Condensed because it gave us a similar
width-to-height ration for the lower case letters. Not perfectly, but
optically. You'll find a lot of things that 'look' right never measure
'right'...
Now we have our logotype:
It needs to appear in color, in most usages, so we'll need to pick them.
We might as well come up with a 'color way' for our site at the same time.
A 'color way' (the industry term for a series of colors to be used
together) is merely the list of colors (whether PMS numbers for printing
inks or hex values for the Web) that will reinforce the image we wish to
show our customers.
We want to look precise (like the Swiss), but fun-loving (like the
Italians). Yet we don't necessarily want to use particularly 'national'
colors, with their flags (red and white for the Swiss and green, white, and
red for the Italians) providing the most recognizable colors for each
country. We do want to look high-tech, and definitely ready for the
mountains. We don't want to look like rocks or dirt (brown), because that's
what you fall on. So we'll rely on the standard mountain-evoking colors of
blue (mountain air and streams) and white (snow), along with old reliable
high-tech gray:
Note that we've chosen several different related blues and a couple of
grays, using our favorite VisiBone
swatch set; you'll eventually need to present information in varying
levels, whether in a brochure or a website, and having a preset color way
will help you organize it faster.
Let's see what happens when we apply our color way to our logotype:
We'll also want to use it on colored backgrounds, so we need at least
one more variant:
Now let's look at the basic landing page for the company. (Click the small
white box at the top of the page to return here; it's not part of our
design. These pages have also been optimized for an 800x600 display, so set
your browser to display that size if your resolution is higher.) To the
basic page, we'll now add the logo. And then
some simple navigation. We'll put in some page links. Finally, we'll display one of
the links, an internal directory page, which
points to further specific pages on the topic of High-Altitude Gear.
Note that we've used, to a modest extent, our color way to help guide
the viewer. Other than using bold to show navigation, we've
deliberately left out font specifics on the sample pages, but if you wanted
to use particular fonts you could render the text as PNGs. (The gradient,
of course, would require making the images with transparent backgrounds.)
We've also set up a simple yet flexible navigation system, which would
allow for potentially hundreds of pages in this on-line catalog.
The product pages for this site will require better definition of the
use of the color way, along with setting the style of the illustrations
and/or photographs and the text required to describe the objects in the
catalog. Next month we'll cover some of those aspects.
I hope this has given you some things to think about in your own design
work. As ever, if there are specific topics you'd like covered in future
columns, don't hesitate to email me.
I started doing graphic design in junior high school, when it was still
the Dark Ages of technology. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both eleven
years old, and the state of the art was typing copy on Gestetner masters.
I've worked on every new technology since, but I still own an X-acto knife
and know how to use it.
I've been a freelancer, and worked in advertising agencies, printing
companies, publishing houses, and marketing organizations in major
corporations. I also did a dozen years [1985-1997] at Apple Computer; my
first Macintosh was a Lisa with an astounding 1MB of memory, and my current
one is a Cube with a flat screen.
I've had a website up since 1997, and created my latest one in 2004. I'm
still, painfully, learning how web design is different from, but not
necessarily better than, print.
The Ecol comic strip is written for escomposlinux.org (ECOL), the web site that
supports es.comp.os.linux, the Spanish USENET newsgroup for Linux. The
strips are drawn in Spanish and then translated to English by the author.
These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.
To see a panel in all its clarity, click on it.
These cartoons are copyright Javier Malonda. They may be copied,
linked or distributed by any means. However, you may not distribute
modifications. If you link to a cartoon, please notify Javier, who would appreciate
hearing from you.
[Ben]
I love that blurb under the picture. "With teletype interface and the
Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use."
Yeah. As soon as I saw that, I knew I had to send it on.
Just to be seasonable, "Merry Christmas" in 4 languages (C, Pascal,
FORTRAN, and PHP), courtesy of GNU:
const a = '\"; void b()/*'; var b:string;{
c */ { /*
c document.fgColor='#ffffff'";
cos(1);print "Merry Christmas" ?>
17 format('Merry Christmas')
write(6, 15)
stop
end
c */
char *a = "}begin b:='{"; } int main () { /*'; writeln{*/
char cbuf[64]; sprintf(cbuf, "}('Merry Christmas') end. {");
cbuf[29] = '\0'; printf(cbuf+3); return 0; }
[Ben]
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
-- Popular Mechanics (1949)
[John]
They were describing my laptop!
[Ben]
Oh yeah - I used to wonder why the military was screwing around with
depleted uranium, osmium, and other crap like that for their
armor-penetrating rounds, since even a tiny chunk of my old AST laptop
would have instantly crushed any armor division that it fell on.
On the other hand, since accelerating that kind of mass to anything
above pedestrian velocities would require a nuclear explosion, and since
any violent state change stands a chance of precipitating gravitic
collapse and black hole formation, perhaps it's just as well...
(Maybe I shouldn't have bought the model with the Deep Thought CPU, but
it came with a bonus Hotblack Desiato CD, and I just couldn't miss
out.)
LG #109
From Mark W. Tomlinson
I had just settled in of a Saturday evening with a wee dram of Irish
whiskey, a good Henry Clay cigar and Linux Gazette #109. I had worked
my way to "Return of the Linux Laundrette" and reached the section "Re:
[LG 87] help wanted #4". This piece caused me to drop my cigar (due to
uncontrollable grinning, giggling and guffawing), setting my sweatpants
on fire.
I'm fine, thanks - I extinguished the blaze by spilling my libation in
my lap - followed, of course, by the water chaser. Be advised that I
will be taking legal advice re: financial recovery for the loss of the
whiskey...
I don't know how you people manage to produce such an outstanding
combination of useful Linux information, non sequiturs and a, ah, rather
<veering> approach to humor (my kind!) - but I certainly hope you keep
doing it for a long time to come.
[Jimmy]
Well, I'll be compiling it for a while to come: it's a lot of fun to go
back over the offtopic threads every month, especially since there are
so many of them:
Dec 01 08:44:05 <editorgal> lucky sucker, the recent gang must be a
treasure trove for laundrette bits.
Dec 01 08:45:29 <jimregan> I felt kind of duty bound to take over
the laundrette... cos most of the time all I do is perpetuate those threads
Dec 01 08:45:39 <editorgal> lol
[though I should have said 'perpetrate'
]
Sincerely,
Mark W. Tomlinson
[Jimmy]
Thanks for writing,
Jimmy
Profanity Adventures
From Jimmy O'Regan
A nostalgic look at what used to happen when you tried typing swear
words into text adventures:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric S. Raymond, | Ginger beer. Ideally, the dark Jamaican style.
Open source advocate | With lime in it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure that if I search long enough, "apt-get" will show a
dependency between ginger beer and Linux...
[Jimmy]
Heh. While we're somewhere close to the topic, what's everyone's drink of
choice, on the off chance I might bump into any of you? (Most people are
good at rembering names or faces, I'm good at remembering drinks
Ooh, what a good idea - a TAG favorite potables list! I probably won't
remember any of it, but just in case...
[Jimmy]
Ben, yours is a Sam Adams, right?
Er, well, unless I can get something better.
Among American
mass-produced beers, yeah - that's about as good as it gets. Right on
par with Anchor Steam Porter, and I won't shy away from a Henry
Weinhardt's, either. For my all-around favorite - well, it varies a
bit, but I wouldn't turn down a Young's Luxury Double-Chocolate Stout
(unless I've already had dinner. Either one of those or a large prime
rib, and I'm filled up for the night.) Any of the Scottish Oatmeal
Stouts are sure to find a welcome as well.
I'm also quite a fan of a few English hard ciders, but since I can't get
any here, I'l just shut up and suffer in silence before the pain becomes
intolerable.
))
On the stronger side, there's Lagavulin Single Islay malt, with its load
of peat and iodine (as somebody once said, "full of that 'exhumed body'
flavor.") People assure me there are other scotches that are very
similar, but I don't drink a whole lot, so the research is slow.
I've
been slowly losing my taste for sweet liqueurs over time, but
a shot of Nassau Royale will still find a warm welcome.
In the realm of unleaded beverages, I've become highly partial to the
Sikh /chai/ teas - they add date powder with cinnamon, ginger, and
cardamom oils, and the traditional addition of milk (or soy milk) makes
it even yummier. And, of course, there's always good ginger beer.
So, what would I get you in exchange when we're drinking at the
Cross-Time Saloon? [1]
[Jimmy]
If it's beer, I'll drink it[1].
From the coctails menu, my favourite is a Frozen Irish[2] Mint (vodka, creme de menthe, Baileys and chocolate milkshake), closely followed by a Tequila Sunrise.
Erm... I'll drink pretty much anything except whiskey (too many bad/absent memories).
There's something about whiskey and vodka that produces that effect in
many people, yes.
[Jimmy]
And tequila. But I've had my worst moments after drinking whiskey, so I steer clear these days.
[Jimmy]
[1] Budweiser and its ilk are therefore excluded
See, I knew you were all right. Budweiser isn't really a beer - it's
a true/false intelligence test...
[Jimmy]
I prefer to think of it as the bar tender's placebo.
If you ever get curious about the ingredients and send to a lab for
analysis, the verdict is likely to be "your moose is pregnant".
[Sluggo]
I think I mentioned the scooter rally in Ireland where I counted the
empty beer cans on one of the picnic tables, and half were Guinness
and the other half were Budwiser.
BTW, I thought Thomas was English. Or is he only living in England?
[Thomas]
Both.
[Jimmy]
Eh? Is this because of the 'Irish' comment I made in reply to Thomas? That was because he quoted a friend of his on IRC, who said something like 'if Jimmy didn't keep reminding us every few sentences that he's Irish, I'd probably have guessed from his photo'. I'm still trying to work out if that means I look drunk
(I wasn't. Honest!)
[Jimmy] Erm... that's lower down the page. These threads can be quite confusing to layout.
[Jimmy]
[2] I've only seen this in an English bar in Spain
Hey, since you know the ingredients, any decent bartender should be able
to mix it for you. It'll make a good test to see if a given bar is
worthy of our combined presence.
[Jimmy]
I have yet to find a bar that keeps chocolate milkshake around here
(Although I think I might try my hand at throwing a few together during the holidays).
[1] Spider Robinson's creation. Quite the place; anything we'd care to
drink would be behind the bar, and Mike Callahan (the bartender) would
know just how to mix it... all we need now is a local gateway apiece,
and we could hang out and swap stories till the morning [some version of
it] comes.
[Thomas]
There is perhaps more of a chance that you and I will "bump" into each
other. Should that ever happen, mine is coffee[1] -- of any kind, just
as long as it is not instant.
[1] Although, really, it should be I that pays for them.
[Jimmy]
Why's that? Are you afraid that requesting a non-alcoholic beverage might
offend my sense of Irishness[1] or something?
[1] Got a quota to meet
[Neil]
English beers:
Morlands Old Speckled Hen
Youngs Special
Greene King Abbot Ale
Greene King IPA
Broughton Ales Border Gold
Charles Wells Bombardier
[Thomas]
My father is rather fond of a Northern beer known as "Old Perculiar".
It's very black, rather like the colour of peat, although I couldn't say
what it tastes like...
[Neil]
Theakston's Old Peculier, with a peculiar spelling
Theakston's were taken over by Scottish and Newcastle a while back, with one
of the family starting up a new brewery and brewing Black Sheep ale.
http://www.blacksheepbrewery.com
It seems that Theakston's are now an independent company again.
I should also have included Marston's Pedigree and Black Sheep on that list.
[Neil]
European Beers:
Leffe (Belgian not Dutch)
American Beers:
Sam Adams
Dixie Black Voodoo
[Jimmy]
Trying your damnedest to defeat my drinks memory, eh? Damn you!
[Sluggo]
I hereby nominate Jimmy for TAG Bartender.
[Jimmy]
Erm... I'd have to discuss that with Heather, who currently takes care of
TAG refreshments. We'll have to see if there's room for a bar in the TAG
lounge
[Sluggo]
People who remember I like cider rather than beer get my instant respect.
Pear cider is the best. The best apple cider I've found is Cider Jack;
it's dry and not too sweet.
My favorite tea is earl green. Second is plain green. Keep all coffee and
anything mocha flavored away from me.
[Jimmy]
I remembered that from the time you posted the link to your pho (sp?) recipe.
You were quite specific about it not being 'Earl Grey'.
[Sluggo]
I'm not against earl gray,
[Jimmy]
It's Earl Grey. Not a British vs. American thing, it was named after the second Earl Grey.
[Sluggo]
it's just that green tea tastes better than
black, as well as having more antioxidants and less caffeine. Jasmine
black is OK. But plain black tea I have to put sugar in. I don't know
why it got so popular.
Heh heh, in 2000 I was in restaurant in Toronto and asked
for tea. Too late I remembered to ask, "Wait! What kinds do you have?"
but the waitress was already out of earshot. My friends immediately
pounced on me, "There's only one kind of tea here! Multiflavored tea is
a west coast thing." I doubt it was literally true, but it was funny.
[Brian]
Here in the Greater Metro DC area (and south of the Mason-Dixon line),
there are two kinds, sweet and unsweet, at least in iced teas. The
chinese restaurants uniformly serve hot black pekoe. You can stand a
spoon up in "sweet" and they both taste powdered, and of the same brand,
at least in all the restaurants I've been in. I only got sweet once, and
that before I knew what I was in for. The funny thing was, I didn't know
what "sweet" was, and added sugar before I tasted it... yerch!
Yeah, there's also Starbucks and clones with tens of teas, but generally...
[Jimmy]
Heh. Tea with milk, or without. Choice is yours.
[Sluggo]
In Blackpool I stayed at a hotel that had a complementary packet of
"white tea", which was really black tea with powdered milk. I wonder
what they would call real white tea
http://coffeetea.about.com/od/typesoftea/a/whitetea.htm
[Jimmy]
'forn white tea'?
[Sluggo]
I drink humungous amounts of water. I can't eat a meal without drinking
water. The water thins the food; otherwise it feels too thick and I can't
eat more.
I started drinking alcohol and tea when I was in Russia. The vodka
part was because people kept saying, "You won't drink with me, you're not my
friend?" I certainly didn't want to put a barrier between myself and
potential contacts since I was thinking about moving there for a while.
People who knew only two words of English would say "Russian Tradition!"
[Jimmy]
I nearly had a c|n>k there - I've been hearing 'Polish tradition' in the same
way a lot recently
I've been pressganged into taking a trip there some
time in the new year by my friend Pawel to try some Polskie piwo.
We have the same sort of 'you won't drink with me?' thing here. It's probably
because there's very little physical contact between sober males - it's OK
when you're drunk, or already very good friends with someone, so drinking
together is an essential part of the friendship process.
[Sluggo]
whenever they they filled my glass. But when I got home, I quickly grew
tired of paying $5 for vodka or beer when I didn't like them much.
[Jimmy]
Thanks for that Mike. I'm glad to see that there's somewhere else in the
world where prices are as overinflated as they are here. I've been getting
sick of hearing that a pint of beer is 30 cents in the Philipines, or a
litre of vodka is 5 euros in Poland
My friend Trev was telling me that Joon, one of the maintenance guys where I work, told him "Come to the Philipines. Bring 50,000, buy a mansion. I'll bring the women."
[Sluggo]
The most interesting vodka brand was "Russkaya Ruletka" (Russian roulette),
[Jimmy]
'Russian roulette' is the name of one of the Polish traditions that keeps cropping up. You're given three shot glasses, one filled with water, one with vodka, and one with... 'spirits'; swap them around, slam two.
[Sluggo]
which had billboards all over the place. Strangely, however, I never saw
that brand at the kiosks. I surmised it was only drunk by rich expatriates,
who bought it... um... wherever it is that rich expatriates congregate.
The tea thing happened indirectly. You can't drink the water in Russia
unless you boil it first. Russians did not generally keep fresh water
around, but you were never far from a teapot. And tea is boiled water
-- how convenient! The babushkas were surprised when I kept coming back
for tea, and were amazed when after a few cups I'd say, "Just let me
have some hot water, please" until I was ready for more tea. So I came
home and never stopped drinking tea.
The thing I missed most in Russia was ice water. I love ice water,
especially with hot food. You can refrigerate boiled water, but you
can't make ice cubes without ice cube trays. I guess ice is not a
Russian tradition; I did not see a single ice cube tray my whole time
there. I decided if I ever go back to Russia, I'm gonna make sure to
pack a couple ice cube trays.
[Brian]
Coca-Cola or Mountain Dew, in the handy 2 liter single serving size.
I enjoy assorted beers, but I find that in an earlier era I enjoyed
assorted beers, etc., far too much. So now I enjoy them in absentia.
[Ben]
Ah, virtual beer! All the attributes of it except its presence and its
effect. Easier on the wallet as well, and you can have the best brands
without ever chasing out to the store... Smart guy, that Brian.
[Brian]
My new motto:
_______________________________________
/ For me, mad cow disease could only be \
\ an improvement. /
---------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/
||----w |
|| ||
For some reason, it distresses both my lovely wife and my mother when I
utter such things...
[Ben]
I'd be quite distressed if you were to udder such things in my presence,
too. Mooved to tears, most likely.
(Is anyone else going to milk this opportunity, or will you all simply
cowtow to public opinion and simply write about it in your dairies?)
Even more ginger beer!
From Jimmy
We have the same sort of 'you won't drink with me?' thing here. It's probably
because there's very little physical contact between sober males - it's OK
when you're drunk, or already very good friends with someone, so drinking
together is an essential part of the friendship process.
[Sluggo]
Not that I saw. People in Ireland drank if they wanted to, but they
didn't get all out of sorts if you didn't. And if you stuck to one
beer a day they didn't mind. It wasn't this one after another "you
must have more" thing.
[Jimmy]
Well, it's more that if you continually decline invitations to the pub,
people get really annoyed. And you're right, no one minds if you don't
drink. They will tease you for it, though.
[Ben]
Heh. Ya gotta unn'erstan', Mike... despite the overt simplicity, there's
a lot to that custom. In many ways, it's like the Jewish "eat, eat!"
thing. First off, there is the obvious - "hey, aren't we friends? Why
do you want to insult me?" But there's also an undertone of "just how
much will you let me force you to drink?", with the sure knowledge that
if you agree once, it becomes much easier after that. Then there's the
cultural imperative of "you must be drunk to talk about serious
things", which is What Men Do (i.e., big-time male bonding ritual.)
[Jimmy]
Another "What Men Do" thing, at least around here, is insulting your
best friends. It's like a private joke: if the implicit "I love you
really, man" is ever made explicit, the bond is... cheapened (that is,
unless you're +/- two drinks from throwing up); if someone else joins
in, serious in their insults, they find their mouth has been shut for
them really quickly.
[Ben]
In Russia, that was considered more or less juvenile (i.e., college
students, etc. would do it, but not most "adult men".) If you're good
drinking buddies with each other, and you've "talked about the deep
things", there's an implied deep level of trust. There are sayings and
jokes about "knowing who you're drinking with", somewhat parallel to "I
(would|wouldn't) go with you to scout enemy positions" (WWII expression
that's stuck around, particularly among the older set.)
Russians don't much like superficiality, and it's taken for granted that
you don't have to put on airs with somebody you've dragged home out of a
mud puddle.
[Jimmy]
I had been aware of this to a degree before; my former immediate
supervisor is incapable of giving a compliment - the more he insults
you, the better a friend he considers you.
His most used term of endearment is 'bitch', so all of the guys I work
or worked with call each other that as a piss-take. I talking to a
Polish coworker, Beata, in the pub last week. She started to get
offended when a friend (who was put working with my former supervisor
when I changed shifts) called me a bitch, and started to say something
about how she knew what those words meant. At the time I thought she was
offended by his language, but afterwards I realised she only knows one
meaning of bitch, and it never occurred to her that he was talking about
me, let alone that she's completely unaware of our little custom.
[Ben]
Navigating those rocks and shoals is a little challenging, but here it
is: a Real Man is one who stands up to the bullying by being relatively
polite but totally firm about refusing... and then proceeds to get
righteously fried with you anyway. [grin] Foreigners don't thread that
particular needle well, usually. For that matter, there aren't that many
Russians who do, either. I guess you could call it a fairly tough test.
[Jimmy]
Something like this?:
"Are you going to the pub"
"No way. I only got 3 hours sleep last night, and have to work tomorrow"
<Half an hour of 'oh, go on'>
"Alright so. I'll see you next weekend"
<Later that night>
"Thought you weren't going out"
"Ah, I haven't been hungover at work for a while"
[Ben]
Cool - the Irish version! No, more like:
[Friendly but somewhat overbearing (and a little threatening) attitude]
"You're not drinking - you don't want me to be your friend?"
[Face him squarely, take him by the shoulders, give him a shake]
"Vasya, what the hell kind of a question is this? I'm simply not
drinking tonight. Can't do it; the wife and the children are waiting
with dinner."
(Several rounds of similar, until Vasya gives up; *then*: )
"Listen, just to calm you down - just a couple of drops for the road."
Here comes that mud puddle...
[Sluggo]
Yeah, but it's just fucking ridiculous. Sorry for the cultural
insensitivity, but I have a big issue with forcing alcohol on people,
or letting it intrude into these areas of personal relationships that
it really has nothing to do with. It is possible to be buddies and
talk about deep stuff without alcohol.
[Ben]
Did you ever hear anybody say that cultural practices are supposed to
make sense? Or that the average man actually enjoys them? Complaining
about them is like saying that you didn't enjoy your Basic Training in a
country that practices the draft.
I don't like the idea of force being used between people - we've talked
about how I switch modes when anyone initiates it - but that doesn't
mean I'm going to get torqued about 99% of human history, or ignore how
people interact. I'm also able to distance myself enough to see that it
can work for others, and even find amusement, interest - and most of
all, compassion - for those involved. For myself, I just need to know
the basics for surviving whatever it is; coming out on top and with
style is a plus, if available.
[Jimmy]
What, without being able to play the 'Wow, I talk an awful load of shite when I'm drunk!' card?
[Ben]
Heh. Some people would just die if you took that one away. At least
their careers would.
[Jimmy]
I'm open to the point where I consider nothing about myself private, but that's only because of a
lot of drunken conversations that I had to face up to (the post-drinking 'what the fuck is wrong
with you?' conversations
I'd had 'deep conversations' before, but they always came from my public persona.
[Ben]
I did it as a conscious choice, one that took a lot of struggle to make.
I do have things I consider private (mostly because other people are
involved), but nothing secret or hidden; I just refuse to do that to
myself anymore.
Cider/Hangovers
From Jimmy
[Jimmy] As it happens, I'm editing this while suffering the consequences of
a work Christmas party
Pear cider? Must try that. Remembering cider isn't too difficult for me -
several of my friends and one of my brothers are cider drinkers. I'm not
normally a fan of cider (I get horrible indigestion from it), but add a
Pernod and some blackcurrant...
[Neil]
I believe "Pear Cider" should be called Perry. just don't mention Babycham
[Sluggo]
Never heard of Perry. All the pear ciders I've seen say "pear cider" on
the bottle.
[Neil]
Googling for pear cider throws up mostly merkin sites, perry gets you mostly
English sites. I guess we're just 2 nations divided by a common language.
[Sluggo]
I meant the source of "eh", not the source of "merkin".
[Breen]
> Googling for pear cider throws up mostly merkin sites, perry gets you mostly
^^^^^^
I do not think that word means what you think it means....
I told my brother what it meant once, and it became his favourite insult for a while.
[Ben]
All right! Another literate word-spotter! Well done, Breen.
(I knew people at SCA who talked about making some. For authenticity.
Brrr...)
[Neil]
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor
less.
[Breen]
Thank you, Mr. Dumpty.
Ah, right.
I've asked Heather:
"I like ginger beer, RC cola, eggnog when made from real eggs, mocha extra dark w/
whipcream, and tea at a rate faster than most programmers drink coffee. coffee only
if it's real - not that fastfood style coffee sold at 24 hr restaurants and capable of rusting your
innards."
Righto, the TAG bar is open in #tag-chat
While we're on the topic - what's everyone's favourite hangover cure? Mine's plenty of water before
sleeping, with a long walk home and next morning.
[Ben]
Mine is to be a couple of days away from the event - in either
direction.
Kinda like the guaranteed cure for sea-sickness (sitting
under an oak tree...)
Seriously, I only recall (dimly, yeah) being hung-over once from
drinking - and that may well have been a mild case of food poisoning.
I've even done those things you're never supposed to do, alcohol-wise -
drinking wine right after vodka, ditto with champagne... no problem.
However, back in those long-ago days when Bill and I didn't inhale, I
spent a number of mornings feeling muzzy and low on energy. Go figure...
I remember my first hangover - day after my first time getting drunk,
after celebrating the birth of my son. I was sick as a dog, because I was
drinking with her family, who I didn't really feel all that comfortable
around at that particular moment
Y'know, I don't think I've ever /not/ mixed drinks... Worst was
snakebite with added shots of vodka, tequila, sambucca and jaegermeister,
followed by 50% cider, 50% jaeg. I was still hungover two days later.
[Sluggo]
> eggnog when made from real eggs,
Ahh, another story. I was in a floating bar in Deptford (that is, a
bar on a boat that was permanently moored on the Thames) with two friends,
one English and one Scottish. The second guy offered to get us drinks and
I said lemonade. Then, remembering "lemonade" in England means some
horrible piss-colored soda like Mountain Dew, I said, "Wait! I mean with
real lemons." He looked at me with a "what the hell are you talking about"
expression. The other guy, who had lived in the States, understood what I
meant and said, "He means like a hootch without the alcohol." Somehow the
bartender managed to find such a beast.
Swedish Chef
From Heather
Dec 08 17:35:47 <editorgal_zzz> 09:02 <@popeywork> fork() fork() fork() !
Dec 08 17:35:47 <editorgal_zzz> 09:02 <@popeywork> (swedish chef with a cold)
Album of the month
From Sluggo
Here's my vote for Laundrette album of the month:
[Jimmy]
Huh? It's open to a vote now? Wait, there's an album of the month now?
/me shrugs
No need for a vote. A vote would just show our individual prejudices
more than it would be any meaningful measure. We can just publish the
lists like we've done before. But our past list
http://linuxgazette.net/102/lg_backpage3.html
was our all-time favorites, and this time I'm aiming for music most of us
haven't heard.
[Jimmy]
Another good source of free music on the 'net is the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/audio though the categories are a bit more
'loose' than on Magnatune. It has a few categories: open source audio,
live recordings, and 'netlabels'.
There's also quite a few choral recordings available from MIT:
Dr Kuch, Analog Disease http://magnatune.com/artists/dr_kuch (MP3 online)
It has a techno base but occasionally mixes in reggae or big band
horns. The occasional lyrics are in a myriad of languages, some
French and some I don't recognize.
[Jimmy]
Kinda reminds me of Enigma. I preferred Falling You though.
Anybody got any other nominations. Extra karma if they're
lesser-known artists, if at least part of the album is on the web
(without requiring Windows or Mac software), and if you can say
something about why the music is original or unique.
[Jimmy]
I don't think I've listened to a whole album this month. My mental state
generally tends to have two gears - up and down - and each has had its
own playlist:
Down
The Cure - Burn
The Cure - Fascination Street
Smashing Pumpkins - Soma
Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm
DJ Shadow - High Noon
Nine Inch Nails - The Frail
Nine Inch Nails - The Wretched
Nine Inch Nails - A Warm Place
Pantera - Floods
Pantera - Suicide Note Part 1
Therapy? - Moment of Clarity
Slipknot - Vermilion Part 2
Audioslave - Like a Stone
Up
Slayer - War Ensemble
Slayer - Dead Skin Mask
Slayer - Blood Red
Slayer - Spirit in Black
Slayer - Bloodlines
Carcass - Embodiment
Carcass - No Love Lost
The Cure - Friday I'm in Love
The Cure - Just Like Heaven
The Cure - Close To You
Sikth - Scent of the Obscene
Machine Head - None But My Own
Helmet - Milktoast
Helmet - Unsung
Therapy? - Unbeliever
Therapy? - Misery
(though lyrically most of my up list would be on most others' down lists
I finally took the plunge to soundcard-driven music. Actually it was
forced by a receiver and CD player that are intermittently failing. I
either had to replace them or get a bookshelf system or switch to the
computer, and I wanted to do it for less than $100. But I don't like
the current generation of components (way overkill). The used
components in the shops are, um, worse than I already have. I don't
like the bookshelf systems (no phono input). But my computer has crappy
speakers. So do I get good computer speakers or connect my PC to my
stereo? I looked into the $50 and $100 amplified computer speakers,
but was afraid to get something that still didn't sound as good as my
stereo. So I opted for two 25-foot patchcords and an adapter instead,
for the princely sum of $15. The sound is a bit quieter than it should
be and seems "compressed", but it's OK. I'm not sure if a better
soundcard or shorter patchcords would make a difference, but I can't
do anything about the patchcords. The soundcard is... something that
uses the Ensoniq 1371 driver. So, now I can avoid the failing CD
player. The receiver is holding up better than it did with CDs. And
when it does eventually fail, I can replace it with anything that
amplifies. The only radio station I listen to regularly has
webcasting so I don't really need a receiver per se, except for
records and tapes.
[Jimmy]
My brother used the same sort of setup. Switch to FLAC instead of MP3
and you'll get some improvement, but there'll always be a difference
because the majority of soundcards are rubbish. The volume difference is
down to the cables - most guitar leads run to about that length and
standard practise is to add a pre-amp to compensate.
[Chris G]
I think that my album of the month is:
Plasticman - Sheet One
[Thomas]
Since the subject of music comes up a lot, I have just completed
categorising the music that I own [1]. Have a look through it, and see
what you think.
[Jimmy]
Looking through that list, I see several albums that I /should/ have
that seem to have mysteriously disappeared. I suspect my brother Joe got
at them with a hammer.
[Jimmy]
On a related note, I've been trying out Audioscrobbler with XMMS: Audioscrobbler
makes your listening choices public, and, once it knows enough about your
listening choices, recommends other music to you.
[Jimmy] I've since found that audioscrobbler is only really useful if your tastes are restricted to
a single genre: it can't handle that I like Slayer, Carcass, The Cure, and Jeff Buckley
Alice in Wonderland
From Sluggo
Just what you never wanted. A site full of Java and Javascript games
based on scenes from Alice in Wonderland . Curiouser and curiouser!
----------------------------------------------------
ben@Fenrir:~$ metar KDEN
INPUT: 2004/12/05 17:53
KDEN 051753Z 31007KT 10SM FEW060 SCT100 SCT140 BKN200 01/M04 A2962 RMK AO2 SLP034 ACSL DSNT SW-NW OMTNS T00111044 10022 21033 50006
METAR Report
============
Airport-Id: KDEN
Report time: 2004/12/5 17:53 UTC
Visibility: 16.1 km 10 US-miles
Wind: from the NW (310°) at 13 km/h 7 kt = 8.1 mph = 3.6 m/s
Temperature: 1°C 33.8°F
Dewpoint: -4°C 24.8°F
Rel. Humidity: 69%
Pressure: 1003 hPa 29.62 in. Hg
Sky condition: few clouds at 6000 ft 1830 m
scattered clouds at 10000 ft 3050 m
scattered clouds at 14000 ft 4270 m
broken clouds at 20000 ft 6100 m
----------------------------------------------------
And that's in the middle of the day.
It's just wrong for humans to live anywhere that temperatures get a
'-' prefix. I'm going because people are throwing money at me, but...
I'm just sayin'. If we were meant to deal with cold, we'd have thicker
skin and lots more hair.
BRRRR!
I'm sitting at the Jacksonville airport, with palm trees waving outside.
In just a couple of hours, I'll probably be seeing polar bears and most
likely have to smear seal blubber on my face while gazing out over the
lakes of frozen CO2... It's been a while since I've been north of the
Mason-Dixon line in the winter and my memory may be a bit faulty, but it
seems like a reasonable interpolation. Particularly since the
temperatures here are in the sixties, and I'm already bundled up and
still cold.
[Jimmy]
Heh. In the sixties? Is that like ~18°C? That's a warm spring day over
here. It's gone to the second t-shirt time of year, but last week I was
too warm at work, and started cleaning out the freezer (-36°C) to cool
down
-36°C? That sounds cold enough to make lawyers put their hands in their
own pockets. How do you get it that low, anyway? Ask one of the Bush
twins for a date and duck behind the condenser, or what?
[Jimmy]
I've been wondering about that since I wrote it. I think the temperature
gauge is busted. It's definitely lower than -3.6, but there's no way in
hell I walked into -36 and walked out again, let alone spent a few hours
cheerfully chipping away at the ice blocks.
[William Park]
Bunch of sissies. Have you been to Arctic Circle yet, up here in
Canada?
Why, no. I haven't stuck my tongue across a 110v outlet, either, or
spent any time pounding my head against the wall... although I
understand there are people that enjoy those kinds of things - including
the visit that you mention.
I probably will cross one of the Circles' latitudes at some point, just
to do it, but it's likely to be followed by several years' stay
somewhere near the equator in order to defrost and deal with the
psychological damage (dark rum will play a major role in the
recuperation process.) A man's got to have his standards, after all.
Regarding Paddington Bear and the box room, I was even more shocked
when it said he was using a torch in the room. In American English,
torch means something with an open flame like the ancient Romans used.
Not a good thing to have in box rooms with modern wallboard. I guess
the book meant he had a flashlight.
[Jimmy]
Yeah, torch == flashlight in this case.
Of course, flashlights don't usually flash, but that's another thing.
Flashbulbs flash, but nobody uses them any more.
That reminds me of the book Crazy English . I transcribed some
quotes from it a few years ago. It's in LaTeX format, unfortunately.
English is the most widely spoken language in the history of our
planet, used in some way by at least one out of every seven human beings
around the globe. Half of the world's books are written in English, and
the majority of international telephone calls are made in English.
English is the language of over sixty percent of the world's radio
programs, many of them beamed, ironically, to the Russians, who know
that to win friends and influence nations, they're best off using
English. More than seventy percent of international mail is written and
addressed in English, and eighty percent of all computer text is stored
in English. English has acquired tha largest vocabulary of all the
world's languages, perhaps as many as two million words, and has
generated one of the noblest bodies of literature in the annals of the
human race.
Nonetheless, it is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy
language.
In the crazy English language, the blackbird hen is brown, blackboards
can be blue or green, and blackberries are green and then red before
they are ripe. Even if balckberries were really black and blueberries
really blue, what are strawberries, cranberries, and gooseberries
supposed to look like?
To add to the insanity, there is no butter in buttermilk, no egg in
eggplant, neither worms nor wood in wormwood, neither pine nor apple in
pineapple, and no ham in a hamburger. (In fact, if somebody invented a
sandwich consisting of a ham patty in a bun, we would have a hard time
finding a name for it.) To make matters worse, English muffins weren't
invented in England, nor french fries in France, nor Danis pastries in
Denmark. Sweetmeat is made from fruit, while sweetbread, which isn't
sweet, is made from meat.
Greyhounds aren't always grey (or gray), ladybugs and fireflies are
beetles, a panda bear is a raccoon, and a guinea pig is neither a pig nor
from Guinea.
####
Quite a lot snipped
#####
[Jimmy]
I've been flicking through "Eats, Shites and Leaves" recently, which is
another collection of english oddities, and I recently had a
conversation about this with Marcin "Nedman" Niedziela, founder of LG PL:
(See Marcin? This sort of thing comes up on TAG /all the time/
>>> If it makes you feel better, English is the second hardest language
>>> to read and write.
>>
>> You think so..? Then try to pronounce this:
>> "konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka" (one word) or
[Pawel, one of my Polish coworkers, wouldn't even /try/ to pronounce that]
[Jimmy] Marcin later explained that it means 'a woman from Constantinople'
>
> Hmm... the English-ish syllables, IIRC, would be
> cone stan tin owe pole ee tan chick owe vyan etch ka
> (Does that mean something like 'someone who comes from
> Constantinople?')
>
>> "W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzczinie" ;)
[Pawel pronounced that easily, but couldn't explain it]
[Jimmy] Another co-worker, Beata, said that it's a tongue-twister
(well, she agreed that it was like "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers")
This page (http://help.berberber.com/showthread.php?p=7819#post7819) seems to agree.
> Aha. Got me there. I haven't heard '?' pronounced, so I don't know how
> to say it :-P (I think I could manage the rest, if I said them
> *really* slowly)
>
> English is harder to read and write because there are so many
> different rules from so many different parent languages.
>
> In English, we have things like:
> rough (ruff)
> dough (doh)
> thought (thawt)
> plough (plow)
> through (throo)
> Scarborough (Scarburrah)
That's Scar-burrow over here.
"Are you going to Scar-burrow fair..."
[Breen]
Well, if we're going to play at that:
There was a young curate from Salisbury
Whose manners were all halisbury-scalisbury
He went down to Hampshire
Without any Pampshire
And the people there told him to walisbury.
[Jimmy]
> cough (coff)
> hiccough (hiccup)
[Ben]
Robert Heinlein noted that particular problem, and had a sentence to
illustrate it: "though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through".
hiccough?? I don't think I've ever seen hiccup spelled that way.
[Jimmy]
That's the correct spelling in BE, though little used these days.
[Jimmy] While trying to learn Polish grammar, I found this page:
However, it is comforting for Poles when you compare all that with the
English language, where it can seem that no rules of pronunciation and
spelling are obeyed. So, in the words even - meet - speak - key - ceiling
- people - machine - piece - quay - Caius - Caesar - Phoenix, the bold-marked
characters or sequences of characters have the same pronunciation (all the
examples here and below are British). And the other way round, a given
grapheme (character) can be read in different ways: the o in each of the
words polish, Polish, move (oo), Home (yoo, a surname), love, one, woman,
women (i), store, word, correct, reason (-) is pronounced differently.
I guess people write less about hiccupping than about finalising
encyclopaedia centres painted in grey colours while coughing down
draughts at the pub and watching the football lads on the telly pound
the pitch as the supporters on the terraces engage in fisticuffs in the
pissing English rain.
(As opposed to finalizing encyclopedia centers painted in gray colors
while coughing down drafts at the bar and watching the football (ahem)
boys on TV pound the field as the fans in the stands sit and watch
quietly while it's raining cats and dogs.)
[Jimmy]
'watch quietly'? At an event that takes place in a stadium?
It was amusing attending a US-Canadian soccer game last year. It was
the Seattle Sounders vs the Vancouver Whitecaps, who are traditional
rivals. Some Sounders fans were trying to promote a "loud section" --
an area where people were encouraged to stand and make noise like the
Europeans do -- and were passing out flyers trying to convince people to
get tickets for that section. But the section was pretty empty. The
Canadians meanwhile had brought their maple leaves in force and were
shouting and blowing noisemakers the whole time. The Sounders fans
couldn't be bothered to bestir themselves, and just sat watching and
quietly thinking, "Canadians are weird". Of course, everybody goes
"Ooooh!" when there's a score, but that only lasts ten seconds and
then it's over, it's not the continual rumblings.
[Jimmy]
Yeah, but Americans don't really get soccer yet,
Yet??? You're assuming they will someday?
[Jimmy]
Sure. All those kids of the soccer moms will grow up someday.
[Jimmy]
so it's hard to imagine
there'd be too many people who are really into it. (It's not just a
European thing either: the South Americans are a lot louder from what
I've seen).
Whenever Brazil wins the world cup, there are horns a-honking all over town,
and crowds in front of Brazilian restaurants playing bongo drums for hours.
This even in cities without large Brazilian populations. The first time
it happened in Vancouver I didn't even recognize it. "Ah, it's just a
bunch of sports fans." Only after I saw it again and again whenever Brazil
or Mexico won a match did I notice the trend.
[Kapil]
As an honorary Mexican I feel compelled to object!
There have been so many funny US-Mexico cartoons. One was in Calvin and
Hobbes. Calvin did something bad (news flash!) so he has to vamoose pronto.
[Jimmy]
vamos?
Vamos means "we go" or "let's go" in Spanish. Vamoose (va-MOOSE) is an
English corruption that's more urgent (disappear, scram, get lost,
hightail it outta here). Likewise, pronto in Spanish means "soon" but
in English it means "right away or else". Or as a Valley Girl might
say, "like, instantaneously".
[Jimmy]
Just wondering if I had the Spanish right. I know all about 'vamoose':
my Dad's a fan of cowboy movies.
Did you see the Inspector in the Pink Panther cartoons? He was a French
guy with a Spanish sidekick. Every time he gave an order, the sidekick
would say, "si". The inspector kept chiding him, "Don' say 'si', say
'oui'." Once they were on a pirate ship battling this evil clam
captain. They escaped the ship in a dinghy. The sidekick commented,
"We're sinking into the oui!" The Inspector glubbed in his last breath,
"Don' say 'oui', say 'sea'."
[Jimmy]
(IIRC, there's also a 'si' in French that also means 'yes', but for
answering questions where 'oui' would be ambiguous)
He practices his Spanish: "Que pasa, senorita? I am el fugitivo."
But the funniest one was a political cartoon where an American is
driving into Mexico and his companion calls after him, "Don't drink the
water!" Meanwhile a Mexican is driving into California and his
companion calls after him, "Don't breathe the air!"
[Offer Kaye]
Why? That makes you an honorary Central American, not South American...
[Jimmy]
Honourary Mexican? How so? And more importantly, Dnde Está mi tequila?
[Kapil]
Because when I was in Mexico, many did exactly what you did---spoke to
me in Spanish---even to the point of asking me directions. Clearly I was
taken for a "native"---and I took that as an honour.
[Jimmy]
Heh. That's about the extent of my Spanish: Cmo está, Buenos noches,
por favor, gracias, esta una bar aqui, and dos cervezas por favor. Bare
necessities only
Hasta la sagne.
[K.-H.]
Does this meen the same as "Hast a Lasagne" ?
No, hasta means "until". Sagne doesn't exist AFAIK. I just
made it up based on "hasta la taco", which you sometimes hear.
They're all derived from "hasta la vista" (till we meet again,
or literally "till the seeing"; compare "auf wiedersehen").
[Jimmy]
Or 'au revoir' in French or 'do widzenia' in Polish
This is what happens to you if you grow up in California. My mom used
to say "pronto" and "hamburguesa con queso, por favor". Not to order a
hamburger with cheese, mind you. She just said it at random moments.
(Yes, hamburguesa can also mean a girl from Hamburg.)
[Jimmy]
...p. 13 in the cannibal's cookbook.
"Hasta la vista... baby!"
[Jimmy]
/me resists the temptation to say... erm... the /other/ line from that movie
[K.-H.]
relevant dictionary entries:
Hast = South German dialect for "do you have"
a = " " " "an"
Lasagne = famous Italian Pasta dish in layers
[Jimmy]
So you're just omitting the 'du'?
[K.-H.]
Well -- properly pronounced the "a" would shift to a darkish "o" sound.
Spelling is not fixed for Bavarian like it's for "High german".
Gramatically there is more in there -- The Bavarian "hast" actually
includes the "du". "Haben sie" = "hams", "hat er" = "hod a" (putting the
o sound in writing here).
[Jimmy]
(Rammstein taught me the ambiguity of 'Du hast': it means both 'you
have' and 'you hate', right?)
[K.-H.]
Pronounciation is indeed very similar -- spelling is different so.
Du hast (you have)
Du hasst (you hate) -- the double "s" comes along with a somewhat
sharpenend "s" sound and a strong emphasis on the
"a"
[Kapil]
Ah! The USA is a bundle of contradictions:
1. The most popular country in the world. (look at immigration stats)
The immigration stats that went way down this year?
[Kapil]
2. The least popular government in the world. (ask people around the
world who enemy number 1 is)
3. The country with the greatest number of great sports people. (see who
has been winning the most gold medals over a longish period of time)
... a large percentage of whom are foreign born.
[Kapil]
4. The country with the least participation in the worlds most popular
game. (soccer)
... the list goes on.
We make trends, we don't follow them.
If the world doesn't understand
the innate superiority of American football, baseball, and basketball over
soccer, that's the world's problem. (Tongue firmly in cheek.)
A friend pointed out that organized team sports didn't exist until the
Industrial Revolution, before that it was all individual sports. There
were soccer-like games but not persistent teams and rankings. He said
that was not just a coincidence but a conscious campaign by the business
owners to instill corporate values in the workers (i.e., being a "team
player"). Thus why so many teams were founded and sponsored by companies.
(Hmm, this sounds a bit, er, Stalinistic....)
Contradictions "R" Us.
Speaking of soccer, I just got this spam:
Subject: David Beckham wears Rolex
Do you want Watch?
http://example.com/rep/sales/
Hey Stranger
From Sluggo
On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 08:46:24AM -0300, [email protected] wrote:
> Hey You, I am Britany
> My friend gave me your email, and warned me that you're exciting..
>
> I can not stand him anymore, this marriage is unhappy, He didn't touch me in
> months
What's the deal with "my husband isn't home" spams? They suddenly increased
dramatically a couple weeks ago.
[Thomas]
Well, if their husbands are out playing the proverbial milkman, the
least they could do is try and do the same from the other angle, no?
[Ben]
They're all out chasing Britany; that's why they're not at home. At
least until their wives learn to start sending these emails that say,
"Hey You, I'm <Name>. My friend gave me your email..." Eventually, the
Brownian motion in the total population of the husband/wife set will
settle to its minimum-disturbance level as the individual units
recombine into stable pairs (which implies a drop to minimum temperature
- take that as you will), and the spams will stop, or at least
decrease greatly.
Marriage dynamics just ain't what they used to be, and it's these dang
computers that are at fault.
Misc IRC stuff
From Jimmy
Misc stuff from IRC that touches on just about everything else in the laundrette: English,
drinking (including the grand opening of the TAG lounge's bar)
Heather mentioned on IRC that she used to write for a 'Dear Abby' type
advice column for the linuxlorn, so...
"Dear Heather, I'm writing to you because I have a problem.
I put a lot of time and effort into 'The Rules', but I'm worried that
now, noone can see the services behind my firewall
Should I try to show that I have more to offer?
That, behind the firewall, I have a warm sense of ftp?"
[Ben]
[LOL] Jimmy, you... you... you rock.
"Young, single, beige client ISO an experienced server who is open to
a new connection. If you're still running in promiscuous mode, look
elsewhere..." This could really go places. Bad ones.
[Sluggo]
As has been pointed out, Unix is the only operating system where you can
fork without protection and then kill your children.
Hur hur hur. "After one spawns a child process, how long should one wait before fork()ing again?"
[Sluggo]
Number five -- alive.
[Ben]
I have no idea what that refers to, although I've heard it used once
or twice before. Enlighten those of us who don't?
[Brian]
Short Circuit, a movie with Ally Sheedy and some robots ... numbered.
I'm not convinced they have the right order of definition there: as far
as I was aware, the other two usages derive from langer as a synonym for
penis (and, if you think about it, it makes more sense that way anyway).
So, according to Collins, langer is now an official word, and may be
used in Scrabble (score of 7).
Just a bit o'Irish...
From Benjamin A. Okopnik
And then, o'course, there's this bit of (Australian-)Irish that I just
got from a poetry list... just a little something to balance Jimmy's
ever-cheerful ways.
[Jimmy]
Complaints about the weather: check
"ing" changed to "in'": check
Dipthongs replaced with initial monopthong: check
passes enough Irishness tests for me, and several more besides.
'Said Hanrahan'
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.
The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.
"It's looking crook," said Daniel Croke;
"Bedad, it's cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad."
"It's dry, all right," said young O'Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.
And so around the chorus ran
"It's keepin' dry, no doubt."
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."
"The crops are done; ye'll have your work
To save one bag of grain;
From here way out to Back-o'-Bourke
They're singin' out for rain.
"They're singin' out for rain," he said,
"And all the tanks are dry."
The congregation scratched its head,
And gazed around the sky.
"There won't be grass, in any case,
Enough to feed an ass;
There's not a blade on Casey's place
As I came down to Mass."
"If rain don't come this month," said Dan,
And cleared his throat to speak --
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"If rain don't come this week."
A heavy silence seemed to steal
On all at this remark;
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed a piece of bark.
"We want an inch of rain, we do,"
O'Neil observed at last;
But Croke "maintained" we wanted two
To put the danger past.
"If we don't get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."
In God's good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.
And through the night it pattered still,
And lightsome, gladsome elves
On dripping spout and window-sill
Kept talking to themselves.
It pelted, pelted all day long,
A-singing at its work,
Till every heart took up the song
Way out to Back-o'-Bourke.
And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"If this rain doesn't stop."
And stop it did, in God's good time;
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o'er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.
And days went by on dancing feet,
With harvest-hopes immense,
And laughing eyes beheld the wheat
Nid-nodding o'er the fence.
And, oh, the smiles on every face,
As happy lad and lass
Through grass knee-deep on Casey's place
Went riding down to Mass.
While round the church in clothes genteel
Discoursed the men of mark,
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed his piece of bark.
"There'll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."
-- John O'Brien
Oh, a man of excellent taste. Will wonders never cease?
I knew Martin for a few years before he even started the list, through
an froup we were both in. Later, I ran into the Wandering Minstrels via
a web search for some piece of poetry, and was pleasantly surprised to
see his name there. As large as the Net is, it's still a small world.
It all boils down to whether (or is that wheather (or wedder)) your
amplifier will do the DAC for you.
[Jimmy]
Got it right first time: whether
[Sluggo]
I was wondering if the second was a tip of the hat to our Editor Gal.
I couldn't figure out the third. I didn't see how you could change
"Jim Dennis" to "wedder", and I can't think of anybody named Ed on staff.
[Ben]
It's all about the music, dude. It obviously (since we're going to go
off the bugf*ck end of the guessing spectrum) refers to the 15th century
ballad "Captain Wedderburn" - capably redone by Great Big Sea.
A nobleman's fair daughter
Came down a narrow lane
Met with Captain Wedderburn
Keeper of the game.
"Now my young, fair miss
If it wasn't for the law,
Then you and I in a bed might lie,
Roll-me-over-next-to-the-wall,
Roll-me-over-next-to-the-wall."
(If you've never heard it, it's a standard "do these N*3 tasks and
you'll get (paid|laid|rewarded)" stories. But it's a pretty tune, and
well told.)
New Disease
From Sluggo
[Jimmy] From Bob Eastey, via Sluggo
The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of a sexually transmitted disease.
This disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim (pronounced "gonna re-elect him").
Many victims have contracted it after having been screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken measures to protect themselves from this especially virulent disease.
Cognitive sequelae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to:
Antisocial personality disorder traits; delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor; chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia; inability to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; ignorance of geography and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a strong propensity for categorical, all-or nothing behavior.
The disease is sweeping Washington. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant disease originated only a few years ago in a Texas Bush.
News today
From Sluggo
From the "what will those yanks do next" department...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002104208_utahguns30.html
The Utah state legislature challenges a University of Utah ban against
concealed firearms on campus, saying the university does not have the
authority to restrict guns further than the state does. Opponents raise
the prospect of disgruntled students shooting professors or chilling free
speech. Proponents argue said professors (and women, and janitors) have
a right to protect themselves.
[Jimmy]
That's pretty fucked up. Could've really improved my grades if I went
there, though...
This doesn't have anything to do with getting a degree in shooterology!
Question
From Peter Rinaldi
[Jimmy] OK, so this turned out to be a legitimate question, but I couldn't
see how, really, and Heather had recently reminded me of the cardboard
boxes messages....
We're not the only Linux-related group to have gotten questions like this:
Debian got frequent requests for the sheet music to "Dueling Banjos"
around the time I was trying to become a package developer, which
only ended when someone finally posted the sheet music.
I was reading your article on Bluetooth and Mobile phones.
Is it possible to write a program in the computer which captures the
digits being dialled from the (Nokia or whatever) mobile phone and
also preferably the ID of the phone and send that information to a
file on the computer in as close to real time as possible.
I would really appreciate your help. There may even be a dollar or so
in it for an enterprising person.
[William Park]
Such phone interception is illegal in many countries. But, doable,
since every intelligence agencies in every country are doing it.
Go away, spammer.
[Jimmy]
Yes and no, depending on what you mean.
If you mean that you want to grab this information from any phone within range, even if they are not yours, then no, it's not possible:
"To use most of the services on a mobile (or most Bluetooth devices, as far as I can tell), the mobile and the computer must first be paired. Basically, this involves both having the same PIN code entered -- just imagine how horrible it would be if anyone could browse around the files on your phone, or use your computer as an Internet gateway."
That would be a new horrible idea that had not occurred to me, but fortunately the creators of bluetooth were prepared for it.
If, on the other hand, you mean that you have a number of phones that you use for different purposes, then yes, it is possible to find out which phone numbers have been dialled, or from which numbers calls have been received, and to log them.
Kind Regards
Peter F. Rinaldi
Instant Response Marketing
[Jimmy]
Now, with this statement, and the mention of 'Marketing' you have helped me to categorise your question better - we answer questions for a much larger audience than just the individual querent, which is why you have received so much help from me so far.
I would like to warn our readers that it is possible to be subjected to spam via bluetooth by simply walking within range of a device. There is a bit of a trend where people send strangers random messages in the form of empty vcards, where the name field is used to carry the message.
I doubt this is of any particular interest to our friend in marketing, however, as this kind of abuse was foreseen by the makers of mobile phones: file transfers of any nature are turned off by default, and must be authorised in any event. It is only when a phone is paired with a computer - i.e., that you have specifically told it to trust a computer - that you can have any degree of automation.
The range of bluetooth devices (10 metres) is too low for this to be a realistic marketing vehicle. The only real use I can imagine, if it were possible to snoop unauthorised on the numbers being dialled on a phone, is that of the jealous spouse who wishes to spy on their loved one.
Because we are the answer gang, I'll go beyond our 'Linux questions only' charter for this case.
If this is your intended use, you should first be aware that this kind of jealousy is usually self-fulfilling: it starts out without basis, but the accused eventually decides to commit the crime for which they are being punished. It is, quite honestly, difficult for me to imagine this kind of mindset, as there are so few who have as much to offer as I do, so my advice to a person with these inclinations would be to improve yourself and your outlook on life to the point where you, like me, have so few competitors that jealousy is simply unfathomable.
Don't just have a nice day, make yourself have one. It's best to start with a smile, I think.
----- Forwarded message from Randi Simpson <[email protected]> -----
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 21:40:56 +0300
From: "Randi Simpson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: read this - abOut the GrReenCard
US GrRrReen CarrRd Lottery 2o05
create a better future for your children!
Get it while it lasts: http://gladiator.gcthree.info
you are blacklisted
Jeffery Ybarra
Herder
Theralase Inc., Markham, Ontario, L3R 0E7, Canada
Phone: 244-221-1158
Mobile: 813-417-8154
Email: [email protected]
This is a confirmation message
This software is a 46 hour trial product
NOTES:
The contents of this e-mail is for understanding and should not be blunder sophoclean
paramilitary eocene retrovision
Time: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 20:46:56 +0200
----- End forwarded message -----
LWN:
"This Intent To Package posting was guaranteed to raise a bit of a
fuss. The program involved is hot-babe, a graphical CPU utilization
monitor. It works by displaying a typical Bruno Bellamy drawing of a
minimally-clad, maximally-endowed woman. As the CPU gets busier
("hotter"), the woman undresses to compensate. Your editor, whose
journalistic ethics required that he investigate this utility, found it
to be an amusing addition to the desktop - for about five minutes, or
until the children walk in, whichever comes first."
[Ben]
"Your editor, whose journalistic ethics required that he investigate
this utility, [ ... ]"
Dang. I don't remember writing that, but since I said I'm required, I
guess I've got no choice...
[clickety-click]
I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but that was written by
Jon Corbett, LWN's editor.
The article is mainly about Debian's dilemma whether to package this
program.
[Ben]
Yes, Mike, I was being facetious. I don't know of anyone who could
seriously say that their ethics require them to examine pictures of
naked women. Aesthetics, certainly; lots of other reasons - including
some feverishly-invented ones in case of need - but not ethics.
[Jimmy]
Pathologists, gynaecologists, etc.?
[Ben]
Their work may require them to do so. Ethics, though?
[John]
I think that was Corbet's idea as well - tongue planted firmly in cheek - but that's just my assumption.
what's an opensource project do when the swedish chef doesn't agree with its current progress?
Dec 18 13:09:32 <editorgal>
fork fork fork
Dec 18 13:09:33 <editorgal>
;P
Dec 18 13:10:08 <jimregan>
Who's the Swedish chef's favourite singer?
Dec 18 13:10:10 <jimregan>
Bjork Bjork Bjork
Dec 18 13:10:45 <jimregan>
How was newborn Swedish Chef delivered?
Dec 18 13:10:46 <jimregan>
Stork stork stork
Dec 18 13:11:14 <jimregan>
What's the Swedish Chef's favourite food?
Dec 18 13:11:15 <jimregan>
Pork pork pork
Dec 18 13:11:42 <editorgal>
and if he's tired of swedish meatballs, he has for dinner...
Dec 18 13:11:48 <editorgal>
pork pork pork
Dec 18 13:12:05 <jimregan>
If he built a boat, what would he use?
Dec 18 13:12:06 <jimregan>
Cork cork cork
Dec 18 13:12:10 * editorgal likes mine
Dec 18 13:12:31 * jimregan wishes he had googled
Dec 18 13:12:43 <jimregan>
There must be many of them about the place
Dec 18 13:12:53 <editorgal>
oh no his machine's unhappy - it's horked horked horked
Dec 18 13:13:04 <jimregan>
fghgfs
Dec 18 13:13:14 <jimregan>
Translation: "Groan"
Dec 18 13:13:28 * editorgal chuckles wickedly
Dec 18 13:13:37 <editorgal>
pass another gingerbeer then :)
Dec 18 13:13:55 * jimregan passes another ginger beer from behind the bar
Dec 18 13:14:01 <editorgal>
and you know his fave text adventure game
Dec 18 13:14:04 <editorgal>
zork zork zork
Dec 18 13:14:18 * editorgal glugs a nice tangy one
Dec 18 13:14:24 <jimregan>
Favourite place in Britain?
Dec 18 13:14:24 <jimregan>
York York York
Dec 18 13:15:31 <jimregan>
Least favourite insult?
Dec 18 13:15:32 <jimregan>
dork dork dork
Dec 18 13:17:33 <editorgal>
opens his jars with a torque torque torque
Dec 18 13:18:22 <editorgal>
goes on vacation, visits rork rork rork
Dec 18 13:18:45 <editorgal>
...and per george carlin, travels *in* the plane, not on it.
Dec 18 13:21:00 <editorgal>
and he warned of goblins crying "ork ork ork!"
Dec 18 13:26:08 <editorgal>
the chef doesn't scuba, he goes snork snork snork.
Since we've been discussing alcohol...
From Ben Okopnik
Here's one Mike will appreciate. As for anyone here who has "been there
and done that", don't bother telling us; we'll just nod in
commiseration^Wamusement.
Hello everybody just wanted to wish everybody happy xmas and wish ye the best for 2005.
p.s.
FOR ANYONE WHO WONDERED WHERE THIS TRADITION STARTED - TRUE STORY SANTA TOLD ME SO
One particular Christmas a long time ago, Santa was getting ready for his
annual trip, but there were problems everywhere. Four of his elves got sick, and the trainee elves did not produce the toys as fast as the regular ones, so Santa was beginning to feel the pressure of being behind schedule. Then, Mrs. Claus told him that her Mum was coming to visit.This stressed Santa even more. Then when he went to harness the reindeer, he found three of them were about to give birth and two had jumped the fence and were out heaven knows where.
Then when he began to load the sleigh one of the boards cracked and the
toy bag fell to the ground and scattered the toys everywhere. So, frustrated Santa went back into the house for a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered that someone had drank all of his liquor and there was nothing left to drink. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the coffee pot and it broke into a thousand pieces. Santa went to get the broom and found that the mice had eaten the straw from which it was made.
Just then the doorbell rang and Santa cussed his way to the door. He opened the door and there was a little angel with a great big Christmas tree. The angel said cheerfully, "Merry Christmas Santa. Isn't it just a wonderful day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?"
Thus began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.
Userfriendly Christmas cartoons
From Jimmy O'Regan
Userfriendly is carrying a Christmas theme this week:
but I wanted a new bicycle this year...with Linux on it so I don't crash
15:49 <@blueGremlin>
lol!
15:50 * editorgal should have thought of that when I was learning to bicycle
15:51 <@editorgal>
hm, linux didn't exist back then. come to think windoze didn't either..
15:51 < [T]hunder>
me too...I would have never forgotten the concept of braking when I saw that bush coming my way...:(
15:52 * blueGremlin imagines [T]hunder on a bike, stationary in the middle of a road with a bush coming towards him
15:52 <@editorgal>
I saw bush coming my way, best I could do was vote against..
15:52 < [T]hunder>
ha ha ha
15:53 < [T]hunder>
hmm...I think i'd have voted against that bush coming my way...but I was too young
15:57 <@editorgal>
heard of several cars attacked by drunk lampposts
16:03 < [T]hunder>
...that's quite a technological breakthrough...finally some pay-back for all those ppl who like to drink and drive. GO LAMPPOSTS
16:04 <@blueGremlin>
lol
16:04 <@blueGremlin>
I see +c doesn't stop people using bold
16:24 <@editorgal>
[T]hunder: can I steal your line about the bicycle for the LG laundrette?
16:25 < [T]hunder>
Go ahead...it's all GPL'd
Chumpbot
From Jimmy O'Regan
I'm thinking of using Chumpbot (http://usefulinc.com/chump) on TAG's IRC hangout
(because I'm too lazy to go sifting through the logs every month
Here's a sample file (I'll be generating HTML from it, obviously, but there's nothing
in this that really merits inclusion for any purpose other than to serve as an
example).
Interesting turn here. Given that US law is based on precedent, I wonder
where this will take us...
----- Forwarded message from RISKS List Owner <[email protected]> -----
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:47:08 -0700
From: "NewsScan" <[email protected]>
Subject: Judge slams spammers with $1-billion judgment
A federal judge in Iowa has awarded a small ISP more than $1 billion in
damages in what's believed to be the largest judgment ever against
spammers. The case was brought by Robert Kramer, whose company provides
e-mail service to about 5,000 customers, and who filed suit after his
inbound mail servers were jammed with as many as 10 million spam-mails a day
in 2000. Citing federal racketeering laws (RICO) and the Iowa Ongoing
Criminal Conduct Act, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Wolle ordered AMP
Dollar Savings of Mesa, Ariz., to pay $720 million; Cash Link Systems of
Miami, Fla., $360 million; and TEI Marketing Group, also of Florida,
$140,000. "It's definitely a victory for all of us that open up our e-mail
and find lewd and malicious and fraudulent e-mail in our boxes every day,"
said Kramer, who is unlikely to ever collect on the judgments. [AP/*Wall
Street Journal*, 20 Dec 2004; NewsScan Daily, 20 Dec 2004]
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110349923676804327,00.html (sub req'd)
----- End forwarded message -----
Hmm... Among the list, I remember I, or one of my siblings, had:
Transformers, Buckaroo, Guess Who?, Walkie Talkies, Connect 4,
Tomytronic 3D (I had Space Attack, my brother Joe had Racers),
Viewmaster, Kerplunk, Vertibird, Downfall, Tonka trucks (everybody had
those, didn't they?), A la carte Kitchen (that was my sister Angela, not
me
, Stretch Armstrong, Mr. Frosty, Operation, Game and Watch (Donkey
Kong!), Spirograph, Screwball Scramble, Subbuteo, "A computer" (my uncle
had bought me a Spectrum just before he died, but someone nicked it) and
"A bike".
I am a little annoyed that He-Man and Thundercats toys didn't make the
list though.
Not here
From Jimmy O'Regan
--- You are now known as jimregan_almost_here
<editorgal> 3lol
* editorgal passes jimmy some almost eggnog
<editorgal> and that was the last cup too
<okopnik> Hey, jimregan_almost_here! Are you still almost here, or are you gone?
<okopnik> Hmph. I guess you're jimregan_mostly_gone....
[jimregan_on_his_way_to_the_pub exceeded the nick limit]
--- You are now known as jimregan_hungover_again
(More proof, as if any were needed, that friends don't let friends drink and
IRC).
Christmas messages
From Jimmy O'Regan
<editorgal>
Merry Xmas :D :D :D
<jimregan>
Many happy returns
<jimregan>
Heh
<jimregan>
My phone has a "Send to Many" feature, so I tapped out a Merry Christmas message, and am sending it to everyone :)
<editorgal>
hehe
<jimregan>
And now I'm being inundated with messages :)
<editorgal>
c/~ xmas bells are ring...ing :D
<jimregan>
Heh
<jimregan>
"Likewise and dont abuse the spirits having a Happy New Year"
- my friend Martin
<jimregan>
"Tink i'll just send a generic text 2 all of baahumbug now and have done with it 2! I'm sure I'll c ya over the wkend anyway 4 xmas pints and all!" - Lorraine
<editorgal>
*grin*
<jimregan>
She's the only one who saw through my little scheme.
<jimregan>
Heh. SMS spam.
More Christmas messages
From Jimmy O'Regan
<jimregan>
Heh. Marina's given me a nickname: "Senor Tequila"
<editorgal>
haha
<jimregan>
I sent her a slightly different message: last night while I was still sentient she got a message "Ooh! Somebody loves me", so I got her number and sent her a message saying "Someone else loves you too"
<editorgal>
awwwww
<jimregan>
So the message had a someone loves you in it, and she sent back "someone loves you too"
<jimregan>
"Aw. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside"
<jimregan>
"That'd be the Christmas spirit. I'm full of it"
<jimregan>
"Yeah, that and every other spirit they'd sell you"
<editorgal>
lol
<jimregan>
Then my sister told me to give out to her for being drunk "Santa will be bringing you coal"
<jimregan>
That's when she called me Senor Tequila.
<editorgal>
I imagine a contest where they have parents write how their kid was the worst - without being hauled away to jail or child protective services - to win their heating bills covered for the winter.
<jimregan>
heh
<editorgal>
it's that rider that'd make the tales interesting
<jimregan>
Heh. The exchange continues: "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, except for Marina, who was getting plastered"
<jimregan>
"No, I'm not stirring. I'm lying down 'cos I can't get up"
<editorgal>
shaken not stirred?
<editorgal>
some quote about not being really drunk unless you need to cling to the floor to hang on to the spinning planet
<jimregan>
Actually, my friend Trev had his balance centres damaged two years ago, and went through that while sober
<editorgal>
by which token I've never been drunk.
<editorgal>
:(
<jimregan>
"So you're getting a massive hangover for Christmas?"
<editorgal>
did they heal, or is he on therapy or something now?
<jimregan>
Oh, he's well healed.
<jimregan>
He managed to pin it on the noise levels at work, so now ear protectors are mandatory in certain areas.
<jimregan>
Not in mine, though they probably should be.
<editorgal>
well at least something good came of it :/
<jimregan>
I've noticed a drastic reduction in hearing range a few mornings
<jimregan>
We were comparing our safety policies :)
<editorgal>
I doubt anyone stops you from wearing extra earplugs
<jimregan>
We reckon that between the two of us, we're responsible for every safety policy in the past few years
<editorgal>
anyways it sounds like a just awful feeling :(
<jimregan>
Heh. Marina's reply: "It's what I've wanted all year! I must be on Santa's nice list!"
Clamscan finds HTML phishing scams...
From Brian Bilbrey
So that's probably not news. What amused me was this:
vimes:/tmp/quar# clamscan laundrette-108.txt
laundrette-108.txt: HTML.Phishing.Bank-1 FOUND
I expected to find some virii around, as I keep a few for testing
purposes. But this startled me. Grin.
[Jimmy]
Not my fault! Someone else sent the spam, honest!
Happy Days of Holly, y'all.
[Jimmy]
Nollaig Shona duit.
[Sluggo]
Please, don't call me Shona.
[Jimmy]
OK... Beannachtai na Nollag duit.
Given that you replied to the list rather than just me, don't you mean
Nollaig Shona Daoibh? Either way, Nollaig Mhaith Chugat.
[Jimmy]
Dang, caught. I couldn't remember whether it was 'daoibh' or 'dhaoibh' (which is silly, because it's the same for 'duit' vs. 'dhuit').
Sláinte agus beannachtaí dhaoibh go léir gach lá den bliain
Hmmm. Being of black Irish descent doesn't help me when the phrasing
gets complex and Google's not nearly as much help this time. Um...:
"Greetings and blessings to you (plural) until (account/graphic/desc
mmm?) (something) year (vintage).
[Jimmy]
"Good health and blessings to you all, each day of the year."
I think where you're getting 'greetings' is that the Irish for goodbye is 'slán' (actually, 'slán leat': may you be healthy).
'Beannachtaí' literally means 'blessings', but in common usage it's usually taken to mean 'be well'. (A Latin loan word, fact fans).
Mmmm, I'd want to suggest something about a new year, except that it
appears that new year would be either "an bhliain úr" or "an athbhliain".
[Jimmy]
'Áth' is a word I can't translate off the top of my head. It means 'superior' or 'higher'. Town is 'baile', city is 'baile átha'. ('Baile' is also a Latin loan word, I think. It might not look it at first glance, because Irish has no direct 'v' sound, but the accusative form 'an bhaile' sounds too close to 'villa' to be a coincidence).
But the implication that as a standalone word, "year" has the undertone
of vintage I find least surprising. Grin. Altavista's Babelfish doesn't
do Gaelic, I'd bet good sheckles that Arthur Dent's does, though. I
mean, it translates Vogon poetry, doesn't it?
[Jimmy]
Heh. It wouldn't have helped out at the last Christmas party I was at. An old guy (with no teeth) decided to tell me a story, and I had to watch him closely to have any idea of what he was saying.
Best of an extended Saturnalia to all here,
[Jimmy]
Erm... allow me to respond with 'Many happy returns'. Works well in all situations, I think.
[Ben]
Especially the day after New Year's, when you go trooping back to the
store with the embarassing tie you got from Aunt Emily...
Happy holidays - Sol Invictus, Xmas, Hanukkah, Beginning of The
Fellowship's Quest, Weihnachtstag, or whatever your favorite flavor of
celebration happens to be - to everyone. Best wishes, and may the coming
year bring you health, joy, and love in plenty.
Thanks, Ben. And to you and everyone.
[Heather]
Merrrrrrrrrrrrrry Sir Isaac Newton's birthday, in honor of which xsnow falls downward
Spam jokes
From Jimmy O'Regan
O'Leary showed up at Mass one Sunday and the priest almost fell down
when he saw him. O'Leary had never been seen in church in his life.
After Mass, the priest caught O'Leary and said "O'Leary, I am so glad
you decided to come to Mass, what made you come?" O'Leary said, "I got
to be honest with you Father, a while back, I misplaced my hat and I
really, really love that hat. I know that Shaunassy had one just like
mine and I knew that Shaunassy came to church every Sunday. I also knew
that Shaunassy had to take off his hat during Mass, and I figured he
would leave it in the back of church. So, I was going to leave after
Communion and steal Shaunassy's hat." The priest said, "Well, O'Leary, I
notice that you didn't steal Shaunassy's hat. What changed your mind?"
O'Leary said "Well, after I heard your sermon on the 10 commandments, I
decided that I didn't need to steal Shaunassy's hat." The priest gave
O'Leary a big smile and said "After I talked about Thou Shalt Not Steal,
you decided you would rather do without your hat than burn in Hell,
right?" O'Leary shook his head and said "No, Father, after you talked
about Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, I remembered where I left my
hat!"
Three Lutheran ministers are having dinner at a restaurant when the
Archangel Gabrial approaches and points to one of them. "I HAVE A GIFT
FOR YOU," the angel says. "BUT YOU MUST CHOOSE: INFINITE WISDOM OR A
MILLION DOLLARS?" Being amongst Lutheran ministers, the man chooses
wisdom, and Gabrial dissapears in a puff. "So?" one of the ministers
asks with awe in his voice, "what do you know now that you didn't know
before?" He answers: "I should have taken the money."
A man, while playing on the front nine of a complicated golf course,
became confused as to where he was on the course. Looking around, he saw
a lady playing ahead of him. He walked up to her, explained his
confusion and asked her if she knew what hole he was playing. "I'm on
the 7th hole," she replied, "and you are a hole behind me. So you must
be on the 6th hole." He thanked her and went back to his golf. On the
back nine, the same thing happened and he approached her again with the
same request. "I'm on number 14, and you're still a hole behind, so you
must be on the 13th hole." Once again he thanked her and returned to his
play. He finished his round and went to the clubhouse where he saw the
same lady sitting at the end of the bar. He asked the bartender if he
knew the lady. The bartender said that she was a sales lady and played
the course often. He approached her and said, "Let me buy you a drink in
appreciation for your help. I understand that you're in the sales
profession. I'm in sales also. What do you sell?" "I'll tell you, but
you're going to laugh," she replied. "No, I won't." "Well, if you must
know," she answered, "I work for Tampax." With that, he laughed so hard
he almost fell off the bar stool. "See," she said. "I knew you'd laugh!"
"That's not what I'm laughing at," he replied, "I'm a salesman for
Preparation H, so I'm still a hole behind you."
I guess as an extension to the theme regarding our favorite drinks, this
danish initiative for an open source beer could be interesting - free as in
free beer?
I have yet to taste it, I would think it was sold out at the release event.
Python conferences in the US and Europe
From Jimmy O'Regan
(I only noticed this during mail processing, and really should have
razzed Sluggo earlier for this, but hey! I'll just send the link to
TAG when LG comes out)
Sluggo wrote:
> [Sending to the Seattle Python group and the Linux Gazette Answer Gang.
> Replies may be published in Linux Gazette (linuxgazette.com).
^^^^
I can't say anything. You know your mistake. I'll just set up the stocks,
shall I?
![[BIO]](../gx/2002/note.png)
Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning
English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator
for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal
computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other
pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most
everywhere today...
Linux boots from RAMdisk,
Firewall
[Jimmy] This is a follow-up to 
HTML page selector
Greetings from Heather Stern
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/engel.jpg)
Adam Engel has published poetry, fiction and essays in such magazines and
periodicals as Counter Punch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal,
Strike-the-Root, LewRockwell.com, The New York Art Review, The Concord
Journal, The Middlesex News, Accent, The Littleton Review, Ark, Smart
Shoes, The Beacon, Literal Latte, Artemis, The Lummox Journal, Fearless,
POESY, The Half Moon Review, Art:Mag, Chronogram, Gnome and others.
ParallelKnoppix is a Live CD based on Knoppix, which is also a Live CD that
is itself based on the Debian Linux distribution. ParallelKnoppix lets you
create a Linux cluster equipped with parallel programming tools/libraries
such as MPI in just a few minutes. It saves a lot of time that we spend in
configuration of the computing environment. The existing environment is not
disturbed using ParallelKnoppix, since a Live CDs distribution runs without
installation (a directory is created on the Master Node; it can be deleted
after rebooting if desired.)
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/hameed.jpg)
Majid Hameed is an undergraduate student at Department of Computer Science
at the University of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Primary interests are Artificial
Intelligence, Operating Systems, Networking, Programming and Computer
Graphics.
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/kapil.jpg)
Kapil Hari Paranjape has been a ``hack''-er since his punch-card days.
Specifically, this means that he has never written a ``real'' program.
He has merely tinkered with programs written by others. After playing
with Minix in 1990-91 he thought of writing his first program---a
``genuine'' *nix kernel for the x86 class of machines. Luckily for him a
certain L. Torvalds got there first---thereby saving him the trouble
(once again) of actually writing code. In eternal gratitude he has spent
a lot of time tinkering with and promoting Linux and GNU since those
days---much to the dismay of many around him who think he should
concentrate on mathematical research---which is his paying job. The
interplay between actual running programs, what can be computed in
principle and what can be shown to exist continues to fascinate him.
![[BIO]](../gx/2004/authors/oregan.jpg)
Jimmy is a single father of one, who enjoys long walks... Oh, right.
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/seymour.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-180-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-181-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-184-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-186-e.png)
