Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Dolly Parton was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition this morning about her new album. NPR's site has more info and some great quotes like Parton's comment on Whitney Houston's success with Parton's "I Will Always Love You"
I will always appreciate her -- I made a lot of money, and I need a lot of money, because it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.
But the best part is that she covers "Stairway to Heaven" (Real Audio) on her new album and it's not that bad.

Friday, September 20, 2002

Following a story on slashdot about "L33T" Speak Invades Schools, some slashdot readers got into a discussion of the proper way to translate the Lord's Prayer into "L33T" Speak.

Thursday, September 19, 2002

Proof that I'm a unix weenie. I've got a bunch of lines in a web server log file that look like this:

[19/Sep/2002:20:07:50][19141.88][-sched:31-] Notice: ep_email_alerts (1): finished processing user alerts for 20 of 452 total users in 00:07:19 (21.00 sec/user)

I want to know the average "sec/user" value for all of these lines and I do this with one command line:

% grep sec/user gateway108-error.log | awk -F\( '{print $3;}' | awk -F. 'BEGIN {count = 0; sum = 0;} {sum = sum + $1; count = count+1;} END { printf("count = %d\nsum = %d\navg = %.2f\n",count,sum,(sum*1.0)/count);}'

I didn't say it was a simple command line. Here's what the output looks like:

count = 115
sum = 2229
avg = 19.38

So there.

Monday, September 16, 2002

Over on Scripting News, Dave Winer bemoans that searching google for "Dave" doesn't show him as the number one hit, he's only second. At least he's up there and at least the number one hit is a person.... search google for "Doug" and the top hit is an acronym for the Director Online User Group. With a little effort and self-promotion, I might get myself up towards the top. That'll be next year's project.

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Time magazine has discovered instant messaging: "A Swarm of Little Notes", subtitled "Is instant messaging creating a work style that's breezily efficient — or one that's more oppressive?" The article is written at a pretty high level (this is Time magazine, after all), but it hits on many points both for and against IM. It'd be a good thing to share with a boss who still thinks that IM is for teens.

Monday, September 09, 2002

Seen over at ThinkGeek, the Universal Command Guide. "It describes and illustrates every command in every commonly used operating system, and cross-references each command to the equivalent commands in other operating systems." Covers many dialects of un*x, wind*ws, and macint*sh.

Thursday, September 05, 2002

This is a nifty device... the eFilm PicturePad is like an iPod for photos. It combines a 20 or 30 GB hard drive, a small lcd screen, a compact flash slot, a few buttons and outputs for USB or TV display. I suppose it won't be long before somebody combines the features of this with a built in mp3 player.