I know Sarah Jane got her own K-9 in that one TV special long ago ("K-9 and Co."? Can't be bothered to look it up...) and then got a new one from the Tenth Doctor, which made a small number of appearances... But still, isn't it a little strange to use K-9 as a memorial for her when K-9 didn't appear on Doctor Who until after Sarah Jane left?
As a career Perl hacker, I sympathise, but you're enthusiasm is misplaced in this situation.
First, system() only gives you the return value of the command you executed, so you haven't got anything useful. Backticks would work, but they're horribly insecure if you're doing variable interpolation.
That's like saying that the original poster's shell command didn't give him anything useful since it just wrote the output to stdout (i.e. his terminal).
But in shell that's exactly what you need for the next step of processing. In Perl you'd want to capture this in a variable, or split it on newlines to produce an array value, or something. That's... what, backticks? I am no Perl master.
Python could be nice, if it ignored whitespace/indentation.
I keep hearing this as the #1 complaint about Python, but isn't Python open source? Why doesn't someone just modify it to ignore whitespace and use braces instead of indents? I don't get it.
If you create your own in-house branch of Python that behaves differently from the mainline version, then you've just given yourself more work to do - maintaining this piece of software. Presumably you'd also want to keep it up-to-date with all the changes in mainline Python, so you don't find yourself in an awkward situation years later where you're still using that in-house branch and maybe you've lost the source code with your modifications but you have tons of stuff that relies on it and not a whole lot of free time to remake your altered version or migrate your scripts or whatever....
And personally I see nothing wrong with Python's approach to whitespace.
Sure you can use a wrench to hammer in a nail but a hammer is much more appropriate. Modern scripting languages have concise syntax, small footprints and fast load times. There is a high confidence that such languages will be on unknown systems and they have been around for years sporting vast libraries cough... CPAN.. cough that rival and exceed most anybody's bag of shell tools.
The real point is that modern scripting languages are languages and as such offer sophisticated and proper design for engineering eloquent and useful solutions to real world problems. There's a reason why languages are designed and there are reasons for each and every bit of functionality and concepts that they put in them - even if you fail to grasp them. As such there is good reason to move to them instead of arcane shell incantations that do not promote sound software engineering principals.
That said I will whip out a quick bash script to do some research or investigative type stuff but if I ever find it being run frequently, growing bigger or being put into production I usually take the time to re-write it properly in Perl.
It amazes me that you can write all that about proper design in the same message as you're advocating Perl...:)
- high confidence shell scripts will run on unknown systems
I guess it depends what you consider a "high confidence shell script". Avoiding GNU extensions to programs you run and sticking as strictly as possible to POSIX options and behavior would probably get you most of the way there, but that's a pretty big limitation.
The way I see it, the strengths of a shell for scripting are that it's an environment truly made for running other programs and interfacing them together, and it's an automation (scripting) environment that matches your interactive session (and thus it's easy to experiment, and translate your experience in day-to-day usage of the system to scripting and vice versa). But on the flip side, the fact that the shell and programs running in it don't share any common conventions for exchanging data is a crippling limitation...
Many people unknowingly confess to copyright violations in their You Tube postings.
I wouldn't say "unknowingly"...
But, really, given that Google's pretty good at identifying misappropriated content, one could say the only difference between being up-front about it and being evasive about it is that in the former case you're at least giving credit where it's due... That's not gonna help you legally, I think, but I think it's ultimately a more responsible way to conduct oneself.
Still, it's generally pretty funny when people try to legalese their way around the fact that they've just blatantly violated someone's rights under copyright law. My favorite is "No copyright infringement intended. All rights are still totally theirs."
Like the attack dogs are gonna read that and be like, "Oh, OK, it's cool, bro."
So are they going to send MAFIAA members to school too, when they claim that videos are infringing when actually they are making fair use?
It's not the MAFIAA lawyers' responsibility to determine what is and isn't fair use. If you're using something in a way that you believe is fair use, defending that assertion is your problem.
Pffft! The only sensible approach now is an alternative to youtube that's more resistant to this bullshit. Some 'distributed' format maybe. Gotta be encrypted, or at least well hidden.
Oh, that site rolled out five years ago. But if you don't already know about it I'm not allowed to tell you any details.:)
Why do you think keeping data on your own computers makes it more secure? Big break-ins make news, but that doesn't mean they are the most common.
The distinction here is if you maintain your own data on your own system, you're (probably) a small target. Aggregating a large number of small targets onto a single site makes that site a big target.
As a Brit, I find it hard to believe that anyone in the Tea Party movement has ever come into contact with actual tea. Tea is magical warming calming juice that makes all the world seem ok and all problems surmountable. Basically, tea is nice; no comment on the tea party people.
They only drink the sugary crap that passes for iced tea: "Lipton Brisk" and so on.
Actually, I think we can take the question even further. For instance, does my cat, The Lord, truly exist? I remember having a cat, but how can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind? I couldn't tell you whether he actually exists or not, it merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat.
I imagine that I once devised a test to try and verify the existence of my cat: it consisted of putting the cat inside a box, to try and determine whether the cat's existence depended upon my ability to observe it. However, without observing the cat, it was impossible to verify the outcome.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to populate what appears to be a crossword puzzle with things that this book apparently tells me are words.
To a pull system from a push content system. A push system is defined as something like television, where everything is pushed with a schedule at timed intervals. A pull content gives you a choice, instead of waiting and being forced to stay for a show.
For example, even on legal sites, you choose when and what to watch, availability withstanding.
DVR is a stopgap in that direction. Netflix, Hulu and Youtube are currently going in the right direction.
Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.
Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!
Sure, why not? I mean it may be different "networks" (Netflix or Hulu instead of the broadcast networks, cable networks, or cable companies), and a different form of "feeding" (using ads and hyperlinks, instead of the program schedule, to use one program to promote another) - but if a viewer is content to just consume whatever comes their way, then yes, there will be people willing and able to take advantage of that, feed these people content and reap the benefits.
Did it strike anyone else as weird that the United States is sending robots to Japan? It seems the Japanese are famous for robotic technology.
The Japanese do have robots ready to deal with their reactor troubles, certainly: the problem is deployment. They tried launching one of their robots to deal with the crisis, but the actuators that cause the "swimming pool" launch doors to open were damaged in the earthquake.
Be fair - he had to generate every possible combination of characters for a 883 page book, then select the optimal one to be published. Even with a really good algorithm, that's going to take a while.
You can prune that down with a good heuristic guiding the search. You don't need to search the whole search space, it's generally good enough to work with a pretty good guess of the direction you should go to improve the book, and the algorithm will converge.
The problem is there's lots of local minima fouling up the search space. On this book, for instance, Knuth's book writing algorithm kept getting stuck in basins of angsty vampire fiction and parodies of classic literature with zombies or ninjas. He tried to tweak the algorithm to get it out of those basins, guide it more toward computer science, but there's a long way to go to turn vampire fiction into a comp sci book, so the search algorithm would quit the line searches (classifying the search direction as "worse vampire fiction" because it didn't go far enough to reach the basin of attraction for what would be "good computer science books"
But it all worked out in the end. Knuth published some of the side-products of his algorithm under various pseudonyms and gradually got his algorithm to converge on a better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
You would have to have watched "The Sarah Jane Adventures". K-9 was a main character.
Really? I've never watched it but I'd heard he barely appeared at all in it...
John Kovalich summed it up nicely: http://www.dorktower.com/images/comics/DorkTower942.gif
I know Sarah Jane got her own K-9 in that one TV special long ago ("K-9 and Co."? Can't be bothered to look it up...) and then got a new one from the Tenth Doctor, which made a small number of appearances... But still, isn't it a little strange to use K-9 as a memorial for her when K-9 didn't appear on Doctor Who until after Sarah Jane left?
The Brigadier, died in February.
The Celestial Toymaker, died in March.
Sarah Jane Smith, died in April.
I hope it ends here.
Yeah, you hear that, television actors? We don't want you to die any more! Be immortal, starting now!
Do you also interchange body fluids at will?
Only via proxy (and your mom's availability has been limited since her last visit to the clinic.)
It's trivial to do it in perl!
#!/usr/bin/perl
system("du -x / | sort -n");
As a career Perl hacker, I sympathise, but you're enthusiasm is misplaced in this situation.
First, system() only gives you the return value of the command you executed, so you haven't got anything useful. Backticks would work, but they're horribly insecure if you're doing variable interpolation.
That's like saying that the original poster's shell command didn't give him anything useful since it just wrote the output to stdout (i.e. his terminal).
But in shell that's exactly what you need for the next step of processing. In Perl you'd want to capture this in a variable, or split it on newlines to produce an array value, or something. That's... what, backticks? I am no Perl master.
It's trivial to do it in perl!
#!/usr/bin/perl
system("du -x / | sort -n");
As a career Perl hacker, I sympathise, but you're enthusiasm is misplaced in this situation.
"you're" is a contraction. What do you suppose it's a contraction of?
I keep hearing this as the #1 complaint about Python, but isn't Python open source? Why doesn't someone just modify it to ignore whitespace and use braces instead of indents? I don't get it.
If you create your own in-house branch of Python that behaves differently from the mainline version, then you've just given yourself more work to do - maintaining this piece of software. Presumably you'd also want to keep it up-to-date with all the changes in mainline Python, so you don't find yourself in an awkward situation years later where you're still using that in-house branch and maybe you've lost the source code with your modifications but you have tons of stuff that relies on it and not a whole lot of free time to remake your altered version or migrate your scripts or whatever....
And personally I see nothing wrong with Python's approach to whitespace.
Sure you can use a wrench to hammer in a nail but a hammer is much more appropriate. Modern scripting languages have concise syntax, small footprints and fast load times. There is a high confidence that such languages will be on unknown systems and they have been around for years sporting vast libraries cough... CPAN.. cough that rival and exceed most anybody's bag of shell tools.
The real point is that modern scripting languages are languages and as such offer sophisticated and proper design for engineering eloquent and useful solutions to real world problems. There's a reason why languages are designed and there are reasons for each and every bit of functionality and concepts that they put in them - even if you fail to grasp them. As such there is good reason to move to them instead of arcane shell incantations that do not promote sound software engineering principals.
That said I will whip out a quick bash script to do some research or investigative type stuff but if I ever find it being run frequently, growing bigger or being put into production I usually take the time to re-write it properly in Perl.
It amazes me that you can write all that about proper design in the same message as you're advocating Perl... :)
- high confidence shell scripts will run on unknown systems
I guess it depends what you consider a "high confidence shell script". Avoiding GNU extensions to programs you run and sticking as strictly as possible to POSIX options and behavior would probably get you most of the way there, but that's a pretty big limitation.
The way I see it, the strengths of a shell for scripting are that it's an environment truly made for running other programs and interfacing them together, and it's an automation (scripting) environment that matches your interactive session (and thus it's easy to experiment, and translate your experience in day-to-day usage of the system to scripting and vice versa). But on the flip side, the fact that the shell and programs running in it don't share any common conventions for exchanging data is a crippling limitation...
Many people unknowingly confess to copyright violations in their You Tube postings.
I wouldn't say "unknowingly"...
But, really, given that Google's pretty good at identifying misappropriated content, one could say the only difference between being up-front about it and being evasive about it is that in the former case you're at least giving credit where it's due... That's not gonna help you legally, I think, but I think it's ultimately a more responsible way to conduct oneself.
Still, it's generally pretty funny when people try to legalese their way around the fact that they've just blatantly violated someone's rights under copyright law. My favorite is "No copyright infringement intended. All rights are still totally theirs."
Like the attack dogs are gonna read that and be like, "Oh, OK, it's cool, bro."
So are they going to send MAFIAA members to school too, when they claim that videos are infringing when actually they are making fair use?
It's not the MAFIAA lawyers' responsibility to determine what is and isn't fair use. If you're using something in a way that you believe is fair use, defending that assertion is your problem.
Pffft! The only sensible approach now is an alternative to youtube that's more resistant to this bullshit. Some 'distributed' format maybe. Gotta be encrypted, or at least well hidden.
Oh, that site rolled out five years ago. But if you don't already know about it I'm not allowed to tell you any details. :)
Why do you think keeping data on your own computers makes it more secure? Big break-ins make news, but that doesn't mean they are the most common.
The distinction here is if you maintain your own data on your own system, you're (probably) a small target. Aggregating a large number of small targets onto a single site makes that site a big target.
Am I the only one who read, "Cylon"?
Do they have a plan?
No, it's a by-your-command line language. Totally open ended.
Just what we need, yet another trendy programming language that people will learn just because it's shiny and new.
As a Brit, I find it hard to believe that anyone in the Tea Party movement has ever come into contact with actual tea. Tea is magical warming calming juice that makes all the world seem ok and all problems surmountable. Basically, tea is nice; no comment on the tea party people.
They only drink the sugary crap that passes for iced tea: "Lipton Brisk" and so on.
Oh, and they also enjoy Tea Bagging.
As a Klingon I must say that tea and coffee both taste like rainwater, but your blood would have a very satisfying taste.
Here, why don't you try some of this... it's called "Prune Juice".
Trolololol
Yeah, almost expect the summary to wrap up with "Christians:1 Atheistfags:0"
Actually, I think we can take the question even further. For instance, does my cat, The Lord, truly exist? I remember having a cat, but how can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind? I couldn't tell you whether he actually exists or not, it merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat.
I imagine that I once devised a test to try and verify the existence of my cat: it consisted of putting the cat inside a box, to try and determine whether the cat's existence depended upon my ability to observe it. However, without observing the cat, it was impossible to verify the outcome.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to populate what appears to be a crossword puzzle with things that this book apparently tells me are words.
To a pull system from a push content system. A push system is defined as something like television, where everything is pushed with a schedule at timed intervals. A pull content gives you a choice, instead of waiting and being forced to stay for a show.
For example, even on legal sites, you choose when and what to watch, availability withstanding.
DVR is a stopgap in that direction. Netflix, Hulu and Youtube are currently going in the right direction.
Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.
Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!
Sure, why not? I mean it may be different "networks" (Netflix or Hulu instead of the broadcast networks, cable networks, or cable companies), and a different form of "feeding" (using ads and hyperlinks, instead of the program schedule, to use one program to promote another) - but if a viewer is content to just consume whatever comes their way, then yes, there will be people willing and able to take advantage of that, feed these people content and reap the benefits.
humans are not implements, moron
I don't know, there are some real tools out there...
Did it strike anyone else as weird that the United States is sending robots to Japan? It seems the Japanese are famous for robotic technology.
The Japanese do have robots ready to deal with their reactor troubles, certainly: the problem is deployment. They tried launching one of their robots to deal with the crisis, but the actuators that cause the "swimming pool" launch doors to open were damaged in the earthquake.
"Number of elevators"... is that an imperial measurement of some kind? What's the proper metric equivalent - "number of lifts"?
Yeah, but it's not a direct mapping.
Where X is the set of elevators and L(x) is the number of levels accessible via an elevator, the number of "lifts" is given by the formula:
(sum (x - X) ((L(x) - 1) / L(x)))
More robots than ice cream vans.
More robots than a Honda factory.
More robots than a robot factory?
More robots than elevators? Um, yeah, sure.
They're simultaneously bragging about the number of robots, and slamming Afghanistan for its lack of handicap access!
As the Daleks have taught us, attacking a country with no elevators is a guaranteed way for your robots to lose the war.
Not really.
As we all know, they simply level the building.
And they're not robots.
And they can navigate stairs. They've done so (offscreen, at least) since the '60s.
Be fair - he had to generate every possible combination of characters for a 883 page book, then select the optimal one to be published. Even with a really good algorithm, that's going to take a while.
You can prune that down with a good heuristic guiding the search. You don't need to search the whole search space, it's generally good enough to work with a pretty good guess of the direction you should go to improve the book, and the algorithm will converge.
The problem is there's lots of local minima fouling up the search space. On this book, for instance, Knuth's book writing algorithm kept getting stuck in basins of angsty vampire fiction and parodies of classic literature with zombies or ninjas. He tried to tweak the algorithm to get it out of those basins, guide it more toward computer science, but there's a long way to go to turn vampire fiction into a comp sci book, so the search algorithm would quit the line searches (classifying the search direction as "worse vampire fiction" because it didn't go far enough to reach the basin of attraction for what would be "good computer science books"
But it all worked out in the end. Knuth published some of the side-products of his algorithm under various pseudonyms and gradually got his algorithm to converge on a better solution.