They say that drawing a disco-dancing robot on a polystyrene cup by means of an X-ACTO® knife is the mark of brilliance. I have never attempted this myself.
Posted Wed 01 Jun 2005 03:02:46 PM EDTI share John Goerzen's distaste for incorrect use of the term « newsreader », and I am intrigued by the idea of using NNTP for such things.
Posted Thu 02 Jun 2005 10:23:00 AM EDTMark Liberman, who ignores my plea to fix the RSS feed on Language Log, calls « SarbOx » a « constraining structure ». Really, he should have identified it as the instrument for a bad pun.
Posted Thu 02 Jun 2005 07:40:22 PM EDTKenshi Muto discusses potential costs for having a DebConf in Japan, as do other people on a mailing list where it isn't on-topic. I am under the impression that I can get a plane ticket to NRT more cheaply by an order of magnitude than a flight to Helsinki. This is probably because I know tons of people who want to go to Japan and none who want to go to Finland.
Posted Fri 03 Jun 2005 10:54:50 AM EDTsixdegrees had a better name and a better service than either Friendster or orkut. I suppose it's a good thing that things like Frumster and Shagster seem to be paying tribute to something lesser instead.
Posted Fri 03 Jun 2005 10:42:42 PM EDTI have discovered that there are zsh users
who torture themselves with unnecessary commands like find and
xargs. While I do not think this is something of which to be
ashamed, other solutions exist.
zsh has powerful globbing, which makes find irrelevant. For example, if one wanted to get a list of all files under /home that start with the character « q », one could do
find /home -name "q\*" -print
With zsh, one could type
print -l /home/\*\*/q\*
Another trivial example is that
find /home -name "q\*" -exec rm {} \\;
could become
for i (/home/\*\*/q\*) rm $i
I imagine that there are a number of cynics out there saying,
« Oh, no, asterisks confuse me, and so it is not worth it for
me to change my silly ways, and furthermore, find can do lots of
things. » Yes, find can do many things beyond filename
comparisons, but zsh is actually more powerful. Want to glob based
on file ownership? This find command
find /home -name "q\*" \\! -user clint -print
is so much more pleasant as
print -l /home/\*\*/q\*(\^u:clint:)
The reader is invited to figure out how to accomplish the task of identifying all files owned by the process's effective user ID with zsh, and compare it to the same task with an inferior shell.
Now, to introduce zargs, try a silly xargs example
echo this is a test of the emergency broadcast system | xargs -n2
The Z-Shell version is not much of an improvement
zargs -n2 this is a test of the emergency broadcast system
One may run into length issues when not using shell builtins. For example, this command would work regardless of how many files the glob matches, and regardless of what characters those filenames contain (whitespace will be handled fine, and the command will print one file per line, unless there are newlines within the filenames):
print -l /\*\*/j\*
This command will not work with a very long list of files, unless
one is explicitly using zsh's builtin rm command, which is not
loaded by default.
rm /\*\*/j\*
To successfully delete all those files beginning with « j » and owned by “mrwiggles”, one can do
for i in /\*\*/j\*(u:mrwiggles:); do rm $i ; done
which will handle any number of arguments, but will fork rm for
each file, or one can use
find / -name j\* -user mrwiggles -print0 | xargs -0 rm
(where it is necessary to delimit with NULs to avoid word-splitting problems introduced by whitespace) or, better yet,
zargs -- /\*\*/j\*(u:mrwiggles:) -- rm
Note that for each shell instance, you need to either load the
zargs function explicitly, or autoload the zargs function
explicitly, as in autoload -U zargs
These examples are fairly simplistic, but with more complex tasks, doing things the zsh way can pay off considerably.
Posted Mon 13 Jun 2005 03:36:37 PM EDTI know some people who love Williamsburg, and some people who despise it. Some people are intimately acquainted with its characteristics (despite never having been there), and others think that it is a theme park in Virginia. I am referring to the home of Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, Peter Luger Steakhouse, and a variety of peoples highly suited for mockery.
It seems like it was only just this Saturday that I was discussing with Mako the Dogfish Head on tap at Barcade. Just today, someone referred me to an article about a video game tournament. This article should lay to rest any misconceptions that Williamsburg is populated only by Hasidic Jews.
Posted Wed 15 Jun 2005 07:02:15 PM EDTJacobo Tarrío Barreiro appears to be under the mistaken impression that “Could not grok results of statting file %s” is a useful and appropriate employment of the word « grok ». In fact, it is neither.
Posted Wed 15 Jun 2005 09:44:00 PM EDTSome people think that having multi-committer Arch repositories is evil. Others attempt to deal with the failings of SFTP by installing a wrapper to set the umask. This is would be an insane workaround for arch.debian.org, so what I and others like to do is make use of ACLs to avoid the headaches which one might otherwise face.
For example, if one had a repository in /arch/dbnpolicy/hamm , one could run
setfacl -R -m 'g:dbnpolicy:rwX' /arch/dbnpolicy/hamm
setfacl -R -d -m 'g:dbnpolicy:rwX' /arch/dbnpolicy/hamm
The -d is the magic here; it ensures that all new patches will be
writable by the dbnpolicy group. This is important because each
member of that group needs to be able to manipulate Arch
lockfiles.
Have fun.
UPDATE: Daniel Stone correctly points out that the « rwX »'s above, which were « rwx »'s, should be « rwX », as they are now.
Posted Wed 15 Jun 2005 11:17:26 PM EDTThis is a game. The objective is to guess which authors of fantasy literature are being lampooned in the following passages. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I am interested in your guesses.
Number one
Brando al'Piprin sat quietly in the tower, communing psychically with wolves, while Matth Broondybook stood in the courtyard, quizzically eying the Mountains of Dhestiny. Elminaynendha burst in on Brando, exclaimed, “I love you,” kissed him, screamed, “I hate you,” slapped him, and ran out.
Brando sighed. “Women are so confusing!” he muttered loudly. “Maybe Matth can give me some pointers on how to deal with them. Matth really understands women.”
Elminaynendha bumped into Matth in the courtyard, and gave him a brazen glare. “Women are so strange”, Matth thought to himself. “How does Brando juggle eight of them? He really understands women.”
Number two
Brando al'Piprin sat quietly in the tower, communing psychically with wolves, while Matth Broondybook stood in the courtyard, quizzically eying the Mountains of Dhestiny. Laestaer al'Piprin burst in on Brando, exclaimed, “I am King this week, brother,” and raped him.
Meanwhile, Arwyn al'Piprin dressed as a boy and went to the stables with her father's sword. Some guards apprehended and raped her. “Did you hear,” one gossiped, “that the Cannister boy is the product of incestuous union?” The other guards responded by raping him.
Number three
Posted Fri 17 Jun 2005 03:28:27 PM EDTRaaiserfore awoke, rubbed some pine-scented oil on his torso, donned a red tunic, rusty hauberk, and a blood-stained chapeau bras. From the innkeeper he ordered a breakfast of lentils, local ferns, lentils, squab pigeon, lentils, lentils, and lentils.
“Would anyone care for a game of dice?” he inquired.
“Sure,” replied a man with one eye, no teeth, and an enormous dagger, “but let's use my dice. Yours look a bit strange.”
Raiiserfore eyed the man's dice briefly, and exclaimed, “I have just now remembered a previous engagement!” He quickly made his exit, stabbed three bandits to death, hijacked a boat, and sailed it 1200 miles to the city of Maandaak.
He checked into an inn, and ordered a meal of lentils, lentils, turnips, lentils, bread, and lentils. Looking around, he asked, “Would anyone care for a game of dice?”
Bennjamen Marko Hell has neglected to mention that he is giving haven to one of my very valuable AC cords.
Posted Tue 21 Jun 2005 09:59:10 AM EDTIt figures that the Boston sarge release party would be on the same day as the Mermaid Parade. Fuckers.
Posted Thu 23 Jun 2005 08:34:54 PM EDTI am rarely blown away by bands of which I have never heard, but a Canadian band has joined the ranks.
Posted Sun 26 Jun 2005 12:28:46 AM EDT