urwhatu

And the Award for the Server with the most 404's goes to...

http://n.nfshost.com/ (hint: it goes to 30)

Technorati Tags: puzzles

Linux Magazine Connection Tips (?!) of the Week

These have got to be the saddest Linux tips I've ever seen. For people who are subscribing to Linux magazine? For example, this week

grep is great if you're looking for a fixed pattern. But egrep (a kind of alias for grep -E) is far superior
because it can search for matches based on a regular expression. For example, the command...

$ egrep -w -E '.ink$' /var/dict/words
link
mink
oink
pink
...

... searches for any whole, four-letter word that end with "ink.

So why does this suck so much? First of all, what's with the redundant egrep -E? Perhaps homie doesn't know that you don't have to specify -E to egrep because, after all, grep, egrep, and fgrep are almost always the same binary and just switching their behavior based on argv[0]:

stechert@kirin:~ [1035] $ ls -l /usr/bin/{e,f,}grep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/egrep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/fgrep
-rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 204496 Jan 13 11:26 /usr/bin/grep

Second of all, WTF is a "fixed pattern"? Obviously, the dude who wrote this doesn't know either because his example works just fine with grep:

stechert@kirin:~ [1036] $ grep -w '.ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
bink
dink
fink
gink
jink
kink
link
mink
pink
rink
sink
tink
wink
zink

He should have read the man page which clearly makes the distinction between basic and extended regular expressions. Why not use an example with infixed OR, optional matching, or something? Make it interesting -- 90% of people I know who use Linux know this stuff rote. How about:

stechert@kirin:~ [1037] $ grep -w '.?ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
stechert@kirin:~ [1038] $ grep -Ew '.?ink$' /usr/share/dict/words
bink
dink
fink
gink
ink
jink
kink
link
mink
pink
rink
sink
tink
wink
zink

See? That wasn't so hard. Or maybe illustrate the difference in how wildcards are specified:

stechert@kirin:~ [1039] $ grep -w '\(.\)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
ging
kink
tint
stechert@kirin:~ [1040] $ grep -Ew '(.)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
ging
kink
tint
stechert@kirin:~ [1041] $ grep -Ew '\(.\)in\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
grep: Invalid back reference

*sigh* ok rant over -- just had to get this off my chest because this is the second time in 3 weeks there's been some utter foolishness in that newsletter (last time it was some nincompoopery about using 'cd $OLDPWD' instead of just 'cd -').

Technorati Tags: linux magazine, nincompoopery

No, THIS is the Definition of Ironic

The Long Tail, a book by the guy who's announced the end of the hit, is headed straight to number one. Many declare it his best day ever.

zomg feedburner hotness

I just discovered link splicing and photo splicing at FeedBurner. OMG, the hotness. Once-a-day link updates from Furl and photo splicing from Flickr are now in effect. Which leads me to the tagline of the day:

Feedburner: If you're not using it you're either uninformed or stupid :-).

Technorati Tags: splicing, feedburner

Lack of Openness Causes Teen's Death

For the last few weeks, Japan has been in an uproar over the death-by-severing of sixteen year old Hirosuke Ichikawa. The sad thing that's missing from a lot of the print-based news articles (versus NHK's nightly news show) is that the elevator was regularly serviced, but that the third party maintenance company blames the problem on the fact that they were handicapped in their ability to diagnose and repair the elevator because the Schindler elevator company was reluctant to share technical details about the elevator with them (or to sell proper repair parts). The upshot of the latest articles is that Schindler elevators are experiencing over 300 accidents per year, at a rate about 3 times worse than its peers.

While the consequences are usually less severe, this is analogous to what we see with closed software, too. I wonder how long it will be until we start seeing companies providing open solutions for equipment like elevators? Now that I can build my own CNC machine, all I need is open sourced CNC instructions, raw materials, and open source control code to have a fully-open elevator. Wouldn't you rather ride in an elevator whose control system has been flushed of shallow bugs? I would.

Technorati Tags: open source

Mac OS X Internals

I ordered this book over a year ago. It was originally going to cost around $35 (which is what I ended up paying as a result of the pre-order). It's now about $65 on Amazon and when it arrived it was over 1600 pages. When Vito brought it over, he said "your unabridged dictionary has arrived". I haven't read it yet, but I get the feeling somebody's editor was on vacation :-).

Technorati Tags: OSX