This week I finally managed to crack a problem I’d been trying to solve for a couple of weeks, namely how to only print the foobar errors, and the ensuing stack trace of these errors from a logfile:

awk 'BEGIN { section = 0 } /foobar/ { section = 1; print; next } /^[A-Z]/ && section == 1 { section = 0; next } section == 1 { print; next }' logfile 

Looking at the solution, I am kindof ashamed that it took me that long to get a workable solution…

I also found this neat little oneliner in a comment on reddit: echo "something long and space separated of which you want the last word" | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | rev. Then again, I’m sure that awk could have done this with a little $(NF-1) magic or something like that.

The headache-inducing stuff

All since my netbook broke down, I’ve thought about two things: restoring the netbook/replacing it, and how to create some form of backup infrastructure which should be better than what I have in place today.

As for the backups, the “system” I have today is couple of USB-disks which I at times plug in and sync files to. That and most of my projects and config-files are in various git repositories all synced to the laptop/server-in-the-wardrobe which I made sure to backup after the netbook died, especially since the laptop/server disk is much older than the netbook disk was.

Another thing which bothers me with the current solution is that I have no off-site storage. And that would be nice to have. Belt AND suspenders of course, and off-site storage comes with its own set of problems such as trust in the offsite storage maintainer.

I think the solution will take the shape of a GNU+Linux box and Unison and possibly aided by incron. Not sure yet, will have to think more about it.

There are some other requirements which I have just barely scratched the surface of or not even begun thinking about yet, for instance it would be nice to be able to backup my parents stuff as well on a regular basis as to keep their stuff safer as well.

And as for the netbook, although it was a nice little machine, the keyboard was getting a bit worn out, and at times it was rather underpowered with its single core 1.6GHz atom processor, so the direction I am looking in now is towards something like this.

The stuff screwing over society

Now there’s truly no way in hell I’ll ever use Skype again.

Nothing new under the sun I guess, but it lends credibility to the Skype quip above.

This sure is some level-A grade retarded society we are constructing for ourselves…

Samsung Galaxy S3: The first smartphone designed entirely by lawyers, a great read about a truly depressing matter which probably is closer to the truth than we imagine. On the other hand, my personal opinion is that the midnight blue version looks pretty damn sweet.

SaaS and other crap where someone else is in control sure is a honking good idea, isn’t? Well, I guess it is if you’re the one in control, but I guess you won’t ever get my business…

The cool stuff

And I also managed to find some posts which touched the hacker in me, such as this post about how one could go about generating pseudo-random numbers (don’t use the algorithms, just be inspired by them) or how this guy started shaving bytes off of his “hello, world!” binary.

I immediately thought about FSCONS when I read this, and I didn’t feel at all worried about people thinking the same about our conf

Until the other day, when I read about its inclusion into git, I’d never even heard about git subtree, but this post makes a compelling case for looking into it.

I also came across a, to me, new data structure: the XOR linked list. Now, it has a couple of drawbacks, and I don’t think I’ll find much use for it, ever, but as a concept it is a very interesting idea, and just goes to show that XOR is frakking awesome.

I thought this was a pretty cool thing.

While I don’t have any problems with my ISP hijacking DNS requests right now, it is nice to know for posterity that there are ways around it

If you are going to use JSON, and need comments, this seems like a reasonable way to go about it.

While I haven’t decided what I think about Go I really liked this blog post on how to create a grass mowing agent which derives the most optimal way to cut the digital grass in a simulated world.

Hopefully I ain’t the only one who finds this hilarious

This is actually quite neat: Instead of adding “lorem ipsum” paragraphs all over your design, tweak the word list in the script, include it in the mockup, and markup all places which need filler content. Done.

In the latest issue of DatorMagaZin there was an article about FUSE which caught my eye, and having read the article my interest was piqued, so I just had to go look at the list myself, and truly, have you seen all the cool filesystems people have come up with? Frakkin’ awesome!

The food for thought stuff

Oh yeah, finally remember to treat everyone the way you’d like people to treat your own mother

:wq

In my netbook install of Archlinux I was running out of disk space on / because the package cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/) was always filling up with old versions of packages. The reason for this obviously being that whenever I would upgrade a package, it wouldn’t be until next reboot I’d know if something was amiss or not, so pacman -Sc wasn’t really an option. And at next reboot, did I remember to run pacman -Sc? Of course not.

But, as it has been said before, and will be said again countless times: the arch wiki is fantastic!

Take for instance the pacman page, where it gives a hint that if you don’t really like pacman -Sc, you could try cacheclean (found in the AUR).

It takes at least one parameter, or, I guess, two at the most. The required one is a number, indicating how many previous versions you wish to keep. And on top of that you could add -p for preview, in which case it will only simulate removing the packages, and instead printing their names, so you have a chance to spot any mistake you might have made. With -v, cacheclean will perform the task, and tell you what it has done.

Since it will operate on /var/ you’ll need to execute it as root.

Simple as that. The only gotcha is that it is a python3 script, but since that is the standard in arch these days anyway, it shouldn’t make much of a difference anyhow.

:wq

And I know that it is the popular thing to do, to hate on Ruby and Rails and that entire community, but seriously, what self-respecting person would want to identify themselves as a brogrammer? But, if I don’t consider myself a rock-star programmer, what then do I consider myself to be?

My first thoughts reading this post revolved around oh no, not another hare-brained “improvement” to something which doesn’t need changing. Then I thought some more, and saw how this could be useful. But then I had another thought.

Ordinary letters, you know, the pen and paper kind, has worked pretty well without being programmable, and I suppose that is because you probably tend to formulate these letters in a different way, thus circumventing the need to programmability. Just a thought…

The world needs more people like this.

The world needs less of this type of operations.

:wq

All of my configuration files, at least those I care about, had been added to a git repository. And most of the binaries I wanted to preserve had been rsynced to my server.
Not all of it though, which is a shame, but it shouldn’t be hard to replace what I’ve lost. Especially if I can get the old hard drive to function just one more time, just long enough to at least make a list of what it is I’m missing. The rest of the disk, well, it’s spring, perhaps a spring cleaning was in order.

So all is not lost, and looking beyond this setback, I did learn some other things this week (except for the fact that I need to become better at performing backups) such as:

• mplayer will work rather well without X: mplayer -vo fbdev </path/to/movie>
• how to revert the uncommitted changes of a single file in a git repository: git checkout -- <filename>

Also, quite some time ago, I went around thinking about how to automatically track my working time, and while this isn’t exactly like what I had in mind (I would probably just have created a daemon which somehow fetched the window title of the currently active window from X, and did so randomly 6 times per hour (not deterministically enough to be able to cheat the system).

And some assorted links which may or may not be of any particular use for anyone:

• It would seem like A/B testing is not optimal for testing web designs
• Who needs net neutrality anyway, right?
• As you sow, so you shall reap
• Programming is a culture, couldn’t have said it better myself
• Mental note to self
• The Zeitgeist framework seems like a pretty cool idea, although feel that it might operate on too high a level for my tastes. If it just worked on file access and time, and not stuff like email (would it work with any client, or do you need to use “certified” clients?) or what websites have been visited (although that could be useful)
• Funny, I thought people were innocent until proven guilty, and how can you be guilty of something which hasn’t happened?
• Making shit work is everyone’s job

:wq

:wq

This week I found myself wanting to count all the occurrences of “foo”, but ONLY if they occurred BEFORE “bar”:

awk 'BEGIN { fooCount=0; stopCounting=0 } /bar/ { stopCounting=1 } /foo/ && stopCounting=0 { fooCount = fooCount + 1 } END { print fooCount }' <myfile>

And despite the quite hectic schedule, I did manage to help a colleague with a little scripting, and those are two things which almost always sets me in a better mood: scripting (problem solving), and helping others (of course, if I don’t manage to be of any help, that kindof defeats any positive mood change I get from scripting, but in this particular case it all worked out really well in the end)

And now for the mandatory collection of links from this week:

• This must be a joke right? The US can’t really, for real, be irritated with Australia for preferring national service providers over American ones, right? Especially when it could come down to storing data about Australian citizens, or in other ways vital to the government. This has to be a joke right?
• I wonder if this is something most programmers can relate to or if it’s just me
• This post could have been written by me… well, not as articulate, but the spirit of it. What’s even more interesting is the response this triggered on HackerNews.
• QArt Codes is where QR codes, Solomon-Reed error correction, some extra calculations and your imagination mix together
• Hilarious post making fun about certain governments and their want for even more snooping laws, especially about conducting surveillance in in-game chats…

:wq

Some noteworthy things however:

Just how, in their infinite wisdom, does the EU expect to test the security of their own servers and services if they are going to outlaw so-called “cyber-attack tools”. For that matter, how do they propose ANY manufacturer of ANY type of digital system perform ANY type of actual security testing worth a damn?

Social AND Private? Well… not quite yet, but if they get the p2p and encryption stuff working, then we’re in business

ENCRYPT ALL THE THINGS!

And it wouldn’t be one of my hallmark blagposts if it didn’t have some random links which may or may not be of any value, no would it?

Dunno just what it might be useful for, but creating 3D graphics procedurally using Lua, like with Fugu seems like just the right approach for me. If I were to do 3D models that is.

Now this promises to be an interesting game.

And a rather interesting programming language.

:wq

But with problems resolved, and tests underway, I found some time to help a colleague out with a script to automate some pretty tricky measurement tests.
This included doing some expect-scripting.

In this particular instance I needed to get a bunch of parameters sent to expect, and treat them as a single string. Ordinarily something like ./foo.exp "some space separated parameters" would have worked, but quoting would be a hassle, so if I could avoid that it would be great.

So I learnt about Tcl’s lrange (up to that point I’d only worked with lindex) and constructed something along the lines of set foo [lrange $argv 3 end] (the first three parameters were other things).

This week I’ve also had the pleasure to read about some pretty cool people this week:

• Like fighting fire with fire and doing it in a positive manner,
• or like a German fighter pilot escorting a British bomber because anything else would have been cold-blooded murder,
• or turning peoples “disabilities” into strengths,
• or a businessman who dresses as Batman to go visit sick kids in the hospital

Of course, there are people in the other part of that spectrum, people who doesn’t seem to like the ugly truth or who’d just like to kill off the Internet in its present form.

Now, if you’re still a Firefox user (these days it seems people have all jumped on the Chrome bandwagon) and you still don’t understand why it could be good idea to use NoScript, RequestPolicy or BetterPrivacy, Collusion, from Mozilla might visualize it for you. For my part, with those add-ons activated, there weren’t any surprises, but just for fun I turned them off, only leaving collusion on. Frak me! A whole lot of stuff happening behind the scenes.

I also sniffed out a new timeline library which uses jQuery and is powered by JSON.

:wq

Managed to execute two test cases (yes, that’s a little slow, but there were mitigating circumstances, so all in all I am not too worried, and I did learn from it so it’s all good), got a small lecture in a subsystem (which made me want to tinker with Erlang and mnesia again), went swimming after work one day, and spent Thursday evening at an OWASP event, listening to a very entertaining dude named Jim Manico

There was a change in plans, so the talk wasn’t about Web Application Access Control Design but instead about the ten most critical web application security flaws found on the “OWASP Top Ten Project”-list.

Learning interesting stuff AND having fun at the same time? Oh wait, when I put it like that it just sounds like any other (work)day in my life, but you get the point. Great event, looking forward to the next

And Friday evening was spent hanging out with Rikard, Zara and Alfred. All in all, a rather good week.

I did have some trouble with tmux, not all of which I managed to solve.

There were actually two issues, and only one of them have been “solved”, and I use that word pretty lightly because I don’t find the solution particularly good, although it is probably the solution.

1. Scrolling backwards (up) in an terminal inside tmux is painful. C^b [ sets you in the mode you need to be to enable PgUp to work, but that is not nearly as easy as my muscle-memory-bound Shift-PgUp (plus this also means I need to exit that “cut-mode” or whatever it is called when I’m done scrolling
2. tmux doesn’t seem to interact all that well with a mouse. I admit, that probably wasn’t high on the priorities, but if I don’t have vim bindings (visual-mode, yank) the mouse is by far the easiest way to copy text from a terminal. Click and hold mouse1, drag over the area to copy, release mouse1, DONE!

The mouse issue is probably easy enough to fix, I suspect I just need to read the man-page better and fiddle some more with the configuration. But I am not so sure about #1. That’s the built-in way to do it… getting something better working there is probably not straightforward at all.

Finally, this week I also “rediscovered” zodiac and I am now pondering whether or not to just use that instead of building my own “makefile blog”-type of thing. I’d need to hack it a bit, there are some things I don’t want to make do without (RSS, prev/next-links, tags) and it would be pretty neat (albeit useless) to have post signing using GPG.

:wq

For one, I used Wireshark to (successfully) diagnose a problem for the first time

The problem was an overly restrictive iptables rule on the system I was trying to connect to, but boy did it feel good to identify and solve that problem on my own.

I also managed to squeeze in time to write scripts to two work buddies so that they didn’t need to perform overly repetitive and very error-prone tasks by hand. The one script even needed a little bit of Expect-scripting, which I’ve been aching to hack some more.

I also found out about vim‘s :e # (to try it out, open a file in vim, then :e someOtherFile followed by :e #)

I found a very pedagogic explanation about how quicksort works, which made me start thinking and wondering about algorithms in general again, even to the point of investigating quicksort further.

I also found this post which makes a fair point: IFF you are going to rely on a web service (in other words, a SaaS you are probably better off getting hooked up with one charging money for it.

Not that I could ever conscionable recommend anyone using a SaaS as this is bound to lock you into dependence of that provider, but sure, I get that some (most?) would rather throw money at it than learning (learning is scary, and you don’t have the time right?) to set up your own service.

Furthermore, I can’t really decide whether the author is being disingenuous or illiterate in naming this stance an “anti-free-software movement”. It is unclear if s/he meant “anti-gratis-software movement” or if s/he is actually feeling threatened by free software. Had there been a comment field on that “blog” I probably would have spent the two minutes required to ask, but since there isn’t one, I won’t bother, and on pure principle, if I ever need a bookmarking-service, I’ll just make sure to stay clear of that one, just in case s/he actually was taking a jab against free software.

Yes, I am petty and vindictive at times, shit happens.

Whilst toying with the idea of modifying my homepage a bit, a site wide change, I realized that it might make a lot of sense to rewrite it so that it is, if not template-based, at least modularized. But I guess I’ll continue thinking about that before making any changes.

A funny thing I just thought of out of the blue the other day was that with some sites, like LinkedIn and probably Facebook and others, there are options for giving these services your email account username and password, so that they could log in, check your contact list, and hook you up with other people you know.

But I am pretty sure that most email providers license agreements state (no, I haven’t checked, but it would be foolish of these mail providers not to) that it would be a violation of said agreement for the user to disclose their account password to anyone else.

Then again, I don’t really understand people who would use those tools, but I guess there are even more people who wouldn’t understand why I chose not to…

A very interesting read about the Batman and the Joker. Those who know me can probably guess what character I voted for.

I’ve also been thinking about the prospect of storing binaries in some sort of version control, mostly because I have a friend who is into game development/modding, and doing so without version control. And that has bitten him in the ass more than once now.

And since I am nowadays a git convert I naturally started looking there, and found this, which lead me, among other places, here. Haven’t tried it yet, but it is definitively an interesting idea.

And now that I have begun working with Wireshark, tcpdump seems to be a good next step.

Finally, yet another reason why the patent industry needs to change.

:wq