Double Trouble

Jon Watson Blogs about his post to The Purple Podcaster. Good article.

I think they should be about 30 minutes

I would take this as a sweet spot rather than a rule though. If you don’t have much to say it should be shorter. If you have an interesting story interview and so on it should be longer. The Linux Link Tech Show is a good example of this!

I’d like to be able to comment directly on The Purple Podcaster, but sadly it’s not setup - maybe the previous owner wanted this? I created an account and it said only numbers and letters in your password. I guess The new owner Kelly Penguin Girl might want to get her tech support guy to have a look at it

Jon Watson and Kelly (Penguin girl) of the GNU/Linux user show have decided to go it alone and have started their own podcast!

The first episode of The JaK Attack is here! Not without a few problems on the way though!

Great new show guys! Good to here more from Kelly! Here’s looking forward to more great podcasts from these kewl cats^W penguins. Speaking of which it would be nice to see a few more on the JaK site.

One thing that really gets my goat with Skype forwarding is that when I turn it off it forgets my number. So each time I turn it on I have to re-enter the number.

Grrrr

Been using Skype 2.0 for a while now. And have a few comments.

• Overall it’s better and I like it.
• Many people are noting that Mac and Linux client are trailing behind. I also use the Linux client so I’m one of them. There are understanderable comercial reasons for this so I’ll forgive Skype for this … for now. But too stay on message with the users they do need to make sure they are seen to keep up or at least be making an effort
• I have a webcam but haven’t used it yet as no one else is ready. What would be really cool is the ability to join a standard video conference. This would be a real USP for Skype with video not something it has now in this area.
• The new sounds all sound like you are underwater. I’m not keen. A good opportunity was missed here. What Skype should have done is added two or three sound themes. eg “classic”, “underwater”, “laser”. Then the comunity could have created there own and customised. etc
• Sound seems good … not sure this was changed tho.
• The UI can be confusing. I got a call today and latter wanted to select all calls to decide who to call from the list and it was not obvious what to do. It was obvious on the old UI
• The grouping of contacts is cool.

There is a Skype out feature I’d find very useful. I often call people on direct dial numbers. So only the last 3 or 4 digits are different. I’d like to be able to click on an existing contact and “copy number” so I can’t paste it edit and hit dial quickly rather than go to the effort of typing the whole thing out. Or just paste it into an email!

What I’m finding with skype call quality is

• International call quality is better than PSTN
• Local calls and PSTN is better

This is generally speaking there are of course exceptions to this.

I often use putclip and getclip in cygwin. Today I had an annoying problem in excel where I copied something and wanted to paste it into excel. It had line breaks and it was making the resulting text fill multiple cells.

getclip takes the clipboard and sends it to stdout.
putclip takes stdin and sends it to the clipboard.

So:
getclip | awk '{ printf("%s ",$0) }' | putclip

All done!

Of course you could do other stuff here as well, as it’s just a pipeline. Stick in your own perl script whatever you like!

Well Ok I missed out testing!

You can just send your output to xxd or just let it go to stdout and see what it’s going to do before you add the final putclip like so!

getclip | awk '{ printf("%s ",$0) }' | xxd

Just got a call saying my Sky (Satellite TV) maintenance was gonna expire. It’s not. It was also in my wife’s name. Sky don’t have her name. The number was 01273 774200. So I put the number into Google and got this which seems to suggest it’s fraud or very near!

Fortunately I didn’t give them anything. Be careful what you say on the phone!

I took a jung test and it seems fairly acurate given what the letters mean tho’ I’m not so sure about the name “Administrator”

I listen to quite a few podcasts by the guys that run Friends In Tech on Friday they produced a special Halloween Podcast. The Server room of Horrors This quite simply is the best podcast I’ve ever listened to. Very funny, very well done. Quality, just like the guys that produce these podcasts!

Well done guys!

I use skype out from home and generally it works just fine. One problem I do have though is when I’m uploading or downloading the quality goes down the tubes. With p2p I can limit the upload bandwith so that’s fine. Podcasts getting downloaded or emails with big attachments cause problems. What I need is for Skype to force it’s bandwidth up to deal with this. This probably needs support from the operating system. I don’t know if any O/Ss support this right now tho’. Of course this still doesn’t stop another local machine from hogging the bandwith. This then would require the router to support “protected bandwidth” connections as well.

With gnu grep there is a recursive option.
grep -r foo .
Where foo is the expression and . means start in this directory which is cool but better.

But you can just search for certain file types eg header files.
grep -r --include '*.h' foo .

This is a handful to keep typing in so you could add a couple of lines to your profile.
rgh()
{
grep -r --include '*.h' $1 .
}
rgc()
{
grep -r --include '*.c' $1 .
}

Now you just need rgh foo and off you go!

I use Skype to make a lot of business calls to overseas. I always have my headset on to listen to my music/podcasts so it’s convient as well. I’m a lazy old fecker so what I like is I can just cut and paste the number press dial if it’s not in my contacts.

Blogthings has a quick and diry IQ test here’s my results:

I thought I was better at logical reasoning tho’

Your IQ Is 115

Your Logical Intelligence is Below Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Exceptional Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

I’ve been really impressed recently by a couple of projects that Novell are bringing to the Linux desktop. Beagle and iFolder

These will help to push Linux Desktop use into the enterprise, which is where acceptance has to begin if we are to see hardware vendors follow the big companies in supporting and supplying Linux machines.

Today’s function lives in my .bashrc file and takes you up


server1:~/aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd/eee/fff
$ up 3
server1:~/aaa/bbb/
$


So we’ve gone up 3 directories in one command. Kinda beats cd ..; cd .. ; cd .. ?


$ type up
up is a function
up ()
{
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
cd ..;
else
n=$1;
while [ $n -ge 1 ]; do
cd ..;
n=`expr $n - 1`;
done;
fi
}


So if you just type up on it’s own it goes up just 1 directory.

Today’s functions are grep related. But first..

In my .bashrc I have
export GREP_OPTIONS="--color=auto"

Which means on a colour terminal all my search terms come out in colour. Cool!

Searching for stuff in code I use this function

fgc()
{
grep -in "$*" *.c
}

I have others eg fgh for headers and so on. Simple and effective.
-i gives case insenitive searches
-n gives the line number

so for example fgc memset might give some results like:
foo.c:177: memset(fing, 0, 99);

Now if you double click on the result you want. It gets highlighted up to the colon an this is stored in the X clipboard.

Under cygwin there are two nice little programs putclip (which puts stuff on to the clipboard when pipe it in) and getclip which echos out the clipboard content.

So with a little bit of magic from sed you can open this file on the line where grep found the match.


#!/bin/bash
x=`getclip | sed 's/\([^:]*\):.*/\1/'`
y=`getclip | sed 's/[^:]*:(\[^:]*\):.*/\1/'`
vi $x +$y

So you type vig and that’s it no useage required.
In the example above it would do vi foo.c +177.

I’m going to share some functions and scripts with you that I use (Here’s the first one)

This one is a function that sits in my .bashrc file.

This one is kinda a sideways cd on sedroids.


cwd()
{
cd `echo $PWD | sed "s@$1@$2@"`
export xwd="$OLDPWD"
}


What it does is it replaces the first string in you directory with the second one.

so if pwd is /xxx/yyy/zzz
and if do
cwd yyy aaa
Then it tries to cd me to /xxx/aaa/zzz

You can do other things like leave the second argument blank eg
pwd /xxx/yyy/zzz
cwd yyy/
does cd /xxx/zzz

You can replace two bits at once
pwd of /aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd
cwd bbb/ccc xxx/yyy
does cd /aaa/xxx/yyy/ddd

Simple and cool isn’t it? Oh and did I mention because we are using sed here the first argument can be a regular expression?

A while ago my boss sent me a mindmap on something he wanted to write up. He had to export this to powerpoint for me to see. He was using Mindmapper now I’m sure this is a very good program. For me to get a copy would require expenditure and therefore hoops to jump through. Just not worth it. I found FreeMind which is free.

So I can send anyone a file and get them to download the app. Even better because it’s Java I can even put the mind maps on my website if I so desire.

There’s a couple of cool regex sites here:

• Regexlib.com and
• Regexadvice.com

I got these from another podcast I’m listening to In the trenches by Kevin Devin.

This is an excellent podcast, produced (usually) very professionally by Kevin. Even when he does it live it’s still much better than the rest out there. Kevin has a wonderful nature he describes something which would have most people swearing madly, and then laughs! And of course lots of useful content!

Just thought I’d let you know about the podcatcher I’m using for podcasts. It’s the Ipodder.

According to the manual:

iPodder helps you find, subscribe to, and download fresh audio onto your iPod. Podcasts are audio distributed in MP3 format using RSS technology. Podcast content can be everything from great homebrewed radio shows, music, and increasingly, shows from public and commercial radio that stations are making available for you to listen to how you want to and when you want to on your computer or portable media player.

Seems really good does what it says on the tin. Written in python, open source and cross platform. Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD. I did try the thunderbird (Alpha 2) build but it’s far from ready as of yet.

I’m listening to a number of good podcasts at the moment. One which is relevant to my current situation Welcome to the Beehive

On the site it says:

A business advice audio book with a new chapter released every week. Learn something about the world of business and improve your chances for success. Not really how to find a job but how to succeed.

Really it’s all common sense. But sometimes you need someone to tell it to you. Not really how to find a job more how to suceed but still relevant.

When I was at school my Ma used to say to me

It’s 99% perspiration 1% insipiration

Meaning working hard is much more important than being clever. It’s true. But it doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Really it’s Attitude. Attitude leads to the inspiration in the first place. But attitude gives you more.

• Work hard
• Get up when you get knocked down
• Be professional
• Be smart look at the problem and do the right thing

In the long term the right attitude will pay divedends. Bad attitude leads to stagnation and turning in on your self.

Well that’s my €0.02 worth.

Andy AbramsonBlogs about port blocking in Hotels. I guess what we need is some thing like this directory so we don’t have to keep spending time checking it all out before travelling.

Word has it that Microsoft are going to call rss Webfeeds. Seems like a good idea to me. Cos that’s what they are isn’t it?

Of course some people are saying that they’ll just do this and then make proprietry extensions to them. Well they probably will - this is a bad thing. But … they don’t have to change the name to do this do they? So overall the name change is a good thing. Let’s use common sense name that tell you what something is not acronyms that help to geekize IT. In fact some people are already starting to use this name just search google and you’ll see!

Google has improved it’s search by adding this feature which fills in the blank. Personally I’d like to see regex added. Guess I’ll have to wait a while for that.

Sometimes I send emails to largish groups of people (~20). I’m not sure the best way to address them.

What do you think? Do you use anthing else?

Haven’t posted much lately as I’ve been away on hols and away on business. Will have to make up for that in the week ahead eh?

It’s said that employers expect you to have an answer to this question, so you ought to have a couple of answers because they’ll keep pushing you to see how well you’ll do.

Here’s part 2:

Product/Sofware Knowledge
The software industry is a fast moving industry - alot changes. With the presures of work it can be easy to leave certain areas behind or to become “rusty”. When this is not a core task it’s easy to ignore. It requires one to be proactive to keep up to date. Set up internal training and so on even if this is informal. This is especially a challenge when one has been in a role for a while because it may not be obvious that this action needs to be taken.

I think Albert Einstein summed things up well when he said this:

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

Albert Einstein

Really alot of our problems stem from our inaction rather than actions. The crisis in Niger is an example of this.

Sometimes you want to rename files *.JPG *.jpg for example. You can do this natively in bash like so:


for x in *.JPG
do
mv $x ${x/.JPG}.jpg
done


The thing in curly brackets is a bash shell parameter in the manual here.

It would be much cooler if you could do this with regular expressions. You can of course Marc Abramowitz points this out in his blog. Take a look at this

Time management
There is too much to do in a day and this inevitably means that something won’t get done so someone is going to be disappointed. It can be difficult to decide what is the most important, and one doesn’t always get this right. Partly it’s about setting expectations and getting feed back from whoever the task comes from. Things could be improved by removing tasks which don’t add value. Often there are more strategic tasks that would benefit from more time but which don’t get done. I could benefit from some more formal strategies here, whether that means reading a book or training.

I’ve just been told that my services won’t be required in two months time so I’m looking for a job…

I thought I’d write some answers to tough interview questions. I’ll try to write at least one a week but will aim for more frequent. I’ll post the first one in a moment.

I needed to backup some files today over the internet, from one unix machine to another. I’d already copied 20Gb or so of these files and So rsync and ssh seems the way to do this, as it won’t copy the files that are already there.

I did a quick google and found this Which kinda has what I wanted but not quite the closest is:

$ rsync -avz -e ssh remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir /this/dir/

I actually did

nohup rsync -avz /this/dir -e ssh remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir

Because I am copying files from local machine to the remote machine. I must do it this way because the VPN stops me requesting the files from the machine they’re on.

I did the nohup because the system will cut me off when it thinks I’m idle for a while. This will mean the copy continues when I’m disconnected.

I have one further complication. I must copy to port 443 on the remote machine as all other ports are blocked by the firewall. with scp I would normally do something like

scp-R -P443 /local/dir/ remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir/

But adding the -p option (for ssh) does not work as it’s interpreted by rsync. So I got round this by changing the line for ssh in /etc/services which is an evil hack. But it works. If you know how to do this properly feel free to let me know.

I went into central London yesterday for the first time since the 7/7 attack. You could sense the nervousness. I had a big bag with me and got a few strange looks as a result. I was surprised really - given the media coverage it gets over here.

The police have been really fast off the mark in this investigation. I just hope they catch the ringleaders - and any other cells that might be over here.

ICE stands for in case of emergency. The idea is you put an entry in your phone which tells the emergency services who to call if something bad happens to you. This is especially relevant given last Thursdays attacks here in London. Originally suggested by the East Anglian Ambulance Service

Google have done it again. They just continue to inovate. Another geeky tool but one that non-geeks will love too. You start typing the search term into the search box in the top right hand corner of Firefox and Google Suggest suggests what you might want. R… Ryan Air etc.

Upstairs yesterday… The missus screams I think oh no not another spider. Down stairs… A snail has appear in the middle of the rug - from nowhere. The trail starts in the middle.

Ask two year old where the snail came from he does not seem to know?

Any guesses?

It seems it dropped of a toy shopping cart he brought in from the garden…nice!

This is clearly “photoshopped” but still funny

Today two good things happened London won the 2012 Olympics bid and The European Parliament has thown out the software patent bill.

As boingboing says here

Note: Software patents have been staked through the heart before, but they keep rising from the grave. There’s too much monopoly rent waiting to be extracted by anti-competitive companies for them to simply give up and go home. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

More on this here and the obligatory petition is here

Well here it is my Fergus Doyle first blog on the blogosphere