Filed in "distractions"

command line history - me too

I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs recently so I thought I’d give it a go on the VPS this site is hosted on: steve@decaf:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}’ | sort -rn | head -10 190 ls 80 cd 24 cp 22 sudo 19 rm 14 svn 12 history 11 tar 10 wget 10 vi And as root: 172 ls 59 vi 56 cd 22 apt-get 20 less 20 apache2ctl 17 apt-cache 15 cp 10 pwd 10 ps

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$BIG_CORP rides the snake - my first Python script

In between support tasks at $BIG_CORP I’ve been slowly reading through O’Reilly’s Learning Python and trying a few things out with the command-line interpreter. The first script I’ve written that actually does something useful is countdown.py: #!/usr/bin/env python countdown to 5pm 2008 SJW import datetime now = datetime.datetime.now() home = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, 17, 0, 0, 0) total_secs = (home - now).seconds hours = total_secs / (60 * 60) minutes = (total_secs - (hours * 60 * 60)) / 60 print hours, " hours and “, minutes, " minutes until 5pm”

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Trigger happy without broadband

For 2 days now the “ready” light on my cable modem has failed to light up and hence I’ve had no internet access at home :( I’ve tried power-cycling the modem, leaving it unplugged overnight and even disconnecting and reconnecting the cable input. No Joy. I checked the Virgin Media service status page and can see that there was maintenance scheduled for Belfast this morning, maybe this will remedy the problem…

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I made this

I can’t believe it, but I actually took the time out yesterday to make this. Here’s what it’s meant to look like: ..and here’s my effort: It is safe to say I drank too much coffee yesterday ;)

Wikipedia HiJinks

I was reading this article on Wikipedia this morning and something didn’t seem quite right. See if you can spot it in this screenshot: I had been up from early morning and thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I read it and re-read it and still the words remained, I can’t say I was shocked but I certainly was surprised. My next thought was “hehe, who can I show this to?

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Barely Legal

Richard just drew my attention to this news item describing Banksy’s latest escapade, an exhibition which includes a “37-year old Indian elephant […] painted, from head to tail, in a floral pattern reminiscent of an old fashioned living room or a British pub,” genius! I hadn’t heard of Banksy before until I read about him replacing 500 copies of Paris Hilton’s album in record shops with CDs containing music by Danger Mouse and featuring doctored artwork.

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Pink Is The Colour

I was reading a discussion on Lifehacker this morning about listening to music while studying, whcih mentioned an earlier post about pink noise. Between the guy on the radio and one of my coworkers I knew I had to take action or suffer the consequences. I felt a MacGyver moment coming on. One of the comments on the pink noise post led me to download a little app which generates a wave file containing 12 seconds of the stuff.

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Wee Me

I was sorting through my bookmarks in Firefox and I found a link to this site which allows you to create a miniature clone of yourself (in colour!) Here’s what I (mostly) look like today: Pretty much a Regular John, huh? I should really get back to some “proper” work, instead of creating things like this: Google Maps here I come…