In fact, atq is literally out of order – I guess the idea is that you pipe it through sort. very very old-school thinking

At the other end of the scale, at -c provides an information overload of EVERYTHING about the job. (60+ lines of env? yikes. I don’t need to know that most of the time!)

So where is the simple and useful summary that I’d genuinely expect of atq?
ie, not only the queued command times, but WHAT those commands are – one per line.

As a result, here is my simple “batq” – a better atq

#!/bin/bash

# a better atq
#
# returns the original atq output in bold
# AND IN ADDITION, ALSO:
# * returns items sorted
# * the intended working directory
# * the command to be run
#
        # TODO:
        # $command is not robust - will fail on multiple lines

function do_extraqinfo() {
    while read job ; do
        jobid=$(echo $job | awk '{print $1}')
        detail=$(at -c $jobid)
        dir=$(echo "$detail" | egrep ^cd | sed -e 's/cd \(.*\) || {/\1/g')
        command=$(echo "$detail" | tail -1)
        # alter the following line if the bold offends you
        tput bold ; echo -n "$job" ; tput sgr0
        echo "  $dir    $command"
    done
} 

atq | sort | do_extraqinfo

The wikipedia article on Geek Pride day lists a “manifesto” of sorts, or a “geek code”(see below) for Geek Pride Day…

…here it is:

Rights:

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a geek, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
4. To save and protect all geeky material.
5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.
10. Try to take over the world!

So, I have a problem with this. Not all of it, and mostly the ‘responsibilities’ section…

But I get ahead of myself. Here is where I disagree…

Right #5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).

So, in response to this, some images.

[Thanks to http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/nerd-venn-diagram for what seems to be the original Geek Venn diagram, and http://www.surelyyourenotserious.com/blog/?p=920 for the spectrum diagram]

So back to it.

Whilst Right #5 states that a geek may have no friends – which is fine as a choice, it also implies that geeks may have no friends due to a lack of social grace. …and that, imho, doesn’t sync with the very definition of a geek. (don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against nerds by the definitions given here. I have nerdy friends and geeky friends, and I have nerdy moments and geeky moments. But it’s to be a geek that I aspire, and take pride in)

Nonetheless, it’s a relatively minor issue and harder to defend (but lets me include pretty pictures

Moving on to the responsibilities. Overall, they mix ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ in annoying and inconsistent ways…

2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.

Surely being a geek is largely about individuality. I don’t mind competitive behaviour, but I object to it being a responsibility. You cannot mandate competitiveness.

3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.

MUST?! No. Really not. To be allowed to care passionately and state your case, sure. But I object to “must” here.

4. To save and protect all geeky material.

Even though I myself am a hoarder and packrat, I think to call it a *responsibility* is too wide reaching. Also, “all”?? See point #6

5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”

Again, why is SHOWING OFF now a responsibility? Be passionate, sure. But sometimes collecting is a private endeavour. This links back to #3.

6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.

This… I kind of agree with. Kind of. But still think it’s a bit strong for a RESPONSIBILITY…

Also, this contradicts several other responsibilities listed herein. According to this I have to specialise, but according to #4 and #7, #8, I have to care about ALL and EVERY geeky thing…

7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.

Is this a competition again? sheesh. See point #6

For the record, it’s possible to be a geek without caring about movies or books!

8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.

EVERY? See points #6 and #7. *sigh*

9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.

Limitations is not the geek way. Defining some things as being not geek and therefore a waste of time – is a limitation!

Damn the man. Do what you want.

And another thing…

In accordance with responsibility #6 (and yes, I recognise the irony of citing responsibility #6 which I myself object to), isn’t “Geek Pride” kind of, well, GENERIC?

So on May 25 I celebrate TOWEL DAY. A day for Hitchhiker and Douglas Adams fans to celebrate this specific fandom. A geek fandom. In fact, a specialised geek fandom…

So don’t celebrate Geek Pride Day. Celebrate your geek pride by celebrating your passion when, how, and who with you choose in a manner appropriate for your geekiness. Here are some ideas:

• March 14: Pi day (3.14) – for Math geeks
• May 4: Star Wars “May the forth be with you” day.
• May 25: Towel Day (2 weeks after the death of Bop Ad), and also Star Wars day (the day the original Star Wars was released. Apparently also it’s a Discworld (of Terry Pratchett) day: The Glorious 25 May
• July 22: Pi day (22/7 = a closer approximation to π  than 3.14)
• September 19: Talk Like a Pirate Day

And… Don’t Panic if you disagree. I’m open to discussion, clarification, and reinspecting my opinions

PS: “Geek Code”? I think that is more correctly this old gem <a href=”http://www.geekcode.com/”>http://www.geekcode.com</a> – for which I have a collection of old codes somewhere, and in fact I’d support it’s re-emergance as a part of the Geek Pride Day, since that would help expand awareness of different elements of geek nature

To summarise the previous posts…

Winter:

The room: 14 – 30.5C

The rack: 23.3 – 43.4C

Spring:

The room: 14.4 – 33.8C

The rack: 22.6 – 45C

And newly…

Summer:

The room: 19.6 – 34.9C
The rack: 27.9 – 45.7C

The seasonal trend is there. Not unexpected for it to be there, just nice to know what it is, quantitatively.

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

If you haven’t seen it, then do so now.

If you have, proceed…

So if I can be allowed to blow my own horn for a moment, I’d like to boast that I occasionally seem to have quite marvelous ideas independently or others. Admittedly, others who were lucky enough to think of it earlier enough and/or had resources enough to make something of it. But my claim is that I sometimes think of these things _independently_.

And it has has been said of inventing – the best inventions are obvious, which is why it’s so humbling to remember that one didn’t think of these ‘obvious’ things themselves.

But in my case, can I finally “prove” that I did…?

Back to the video – I’d like to draw your attention to a point approximately 3:45 in: “…time travel. I’m not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here – there’s some in here with horses and carriages as well [...] it also is the foundation for augmented reality“.

Now compare with an email of mine to a friend, where I wrote this:

What would be kind of cool: augmented reality goggles (this is one of those ideas I had years before I knew there was a word for it) that show recreated historical versions of the world… but, instead of just showing a certain era, you see the ‘prettiest’ building at any given location. Making a best-of-all-possible-eras virtual world

So as far as I can tell (can anyone confirm?), this talk was made on Feb 11 or 12 (based on dated video comments afterwards). My email has a date stamp of: 10 Feb 2010 15:17:07 +1000). And, frankly, even if the video was recorded first, I sure didn’t see it till today

As an aside, my email was prompted by a rather ugly house I see regularly in town, and my own wonderings if it used to be pretty…

• • Contemporary Google maps street view
  • Sometime pre 1994, it was ugly then too
  • Circa 1930s – it was gorgeous.

I especially love how you get basically the same angle on all three – which was, of course, the key to my own inspiration

So clearly, the next thing for me to work out is real time travel – at which point I can begin to start sending these ideas of mine back to people in the past with the resources to make them a reality asap! =)

Here are the spring results

So in 3 months of spring, the ‘indoor’ (outside the rack) temperatures: 14.4 – 33.8C

And the “outdoor” (inside the rack) for the same winter season: 22.6 – 45C

So in short – not too different from winter… a couple of degrees warmer all around… though I bet a bellcurve plot of common temperatures would show a slightly different bias to the story too.

Thermometer reset, and into summer… hello summer!

256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And it’s… not only not enabled by default, there is no clear and simple way of enabling it even if you WANTED TO.

I was going to blog more about this, but the following IRC fragment I think says it all. Any questions?

<nemo> it'd be sure nice for a distro to set itself up with no self-crippling
        for ancient stuff that, frankly, nobody is using anymore
<nemo> (or if they do, then it's being used by people savvy enough (probably)
        to work out the compatibility issues themselves
<nemo> ubuntu does a good step, I think, but probably not enough
<nemo> 256colours should be the GLOBAL DEFAULT these days
<Screwtape> Every time somebody suggests that, they get shouted down by people
        who say things like 'BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I SSH TO MY
        FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris/Dragonfly/Xenix MACHINE!'
<Screwtape> We can't even figure out whether backspace should be ^H or ^? 
<nemo> [a] don't use this distro then
<Screwtape> It's hardly global domination if everybody stops using it. 
<nemo> it's hardly global domination if we're compromising ourselves for the
        compatibility of those who DON'T use it
<nemo> [b] have a nifty 'set_maximum_compatibility' script, which backwardsify
        everything

...

<nemo> so, what else has potential, but is held back by... historical compatibility?
<nemo> and by 'potential', I mean "it's there on your system now, just waiting for
        you to apply the correct settings'
<nemo> I am identifying terminal colours, and default prompts
<nemo> (terminal colours, and all the terminals, applications (screen, elinks, etc),
        etc that go with.
<Screwtape> I.. can't think of anything else off the top of my head, sadly. 
<Screwtape> Or perhaps luckily.
...

In fairness, it’s not like it’s not been noticed before:

...
<nemo> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121800
<nemo> 2003... status new
<nemo> wtf
<nemo> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115750
<nemo> amuses me that my no-X11 server has terminfo for 'gnome' and 'gnome-256color',
        but my ubuntu desktop does not
...

And in case anyone wants to bring their terminal into the 21st century with 256colours instead of 8 (“tput colors” will tell you what yours can do), Screwtape has a nice little writeup here:

...
<Screwtape> http://screwtape.jottit.com/automatic_%24term_selection <-- Here's my
        automatic $TERM hack.

…

PS: As a final note: Shortly after this conversation, Screwtape filed the following debian bug report for vim’s syntax handling of sh scripts:  vim-runtime: sh syntax highlighting should default to POSIX.

…

PPS: Originally blogged to: http://blog.thorx.net/2009/10/linux-ui-crippling-itself. Please consider leaving comments at the blog rather than facebook or other social media side that this post may be propagated to. Thankyou

version1 (as I have since backnamed it) was simply all the 3 letter words in the scrabble dictionary, handily laid out alphabetically on both sides of an A4 page.

In the weeks since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it to be a useful reference, and heard feedback along the same lines.

For version2, I have added in all the 2letter words as well, plus a limited selection of 4 letter words. (those able to score 12 or more points with natural (non blank) tiles and no specials.

So here it is, for all your Scrabble needs:

• Scrabble234 <- a PDF for you to download, print out, etc

It’s probably most useful as a real printout next to your (real or virtual) scrabble board

And it also includes a link to the famous and invaluable Scrabble Assistant – where I always learn new words.

Also please, if you are reading this on facebook (where a copy of this post is sent), please note this post originates from http://blog.thorx.net/2009/09/scrabble-sheet-2/ – so please consider leaving comments on the blog directly. Thankyou.

And may the tiles be with you…

(PS: I have ideas for version 2.1 already, and I’m open to version 3 suggestions)

I should note first up, the thermometer measures an “indoor” temperature, and an “outdoor” temp. I have the thermometer hooked up to the outside of my computer rack, approx 60 from the floor (in line with the bottom edge of my monitor, laptop and desktop, and well below the server). The “outdoor” probe sits on top of the server, inside the rack – which also contains the desktop. The laptop and monitor sit just outside the rack.

So in 3 months of winter, the ‘indoor’ (outside the rack) temperatures: 14 – 30.5C

And the “outdoor” (inside the rack) for the same winter season: 23.3 – 43.4C

The perceived room temperature could be said to be between those ranges, but realistically, more like the ‘indoor’ temperature.

…I fear for the summer range however!

Now whilst I was certain that was not a problem, I confess to general ignorance on the subject, and so I intended to do something to correct it. Something a little fun.

Thus, when I recieved the replacement for one of my older ATM cards, I ventured to my nearest ATM with magnets and a plan. Three magnets to be precise. A very weak fridge magnet, a strong fridge magnet (both these of the ‘flexible plastic’ variety), and a small (10×20x3mm) rare earth magnet.

So how much magnetism on the card would stop it working?

I’ll cut to the chase…
Both fridge magnets had no apparent effect after a 1 second swipe over the magnetic strip. A 10 second ‘random smearing’ by the strong fridge magnet still yielded no failure in the basic ’show me the balance’ task.

But a one second swipe with the rare earth, and, not expectantly, the card no longer was readable. I tried two machines, same dice.

Next time: hard drives…

So my system crashed. It’s done that a little bit recently (thrice in the last 6 months, but that is not what this post is about). On return, firefox is a bit fail. Some files are corrupted…

If this has happened to you, this is some information which might help you cope…

So, it’s worth noting that my $HOME is nfs mounted, which I imagine causes (or at least, exacerbates the problem). The problem being that sqlite databases get corrupted.

The two I have had to fix have been: places.sqlite and formhistory.sqlite. These are located within your firefox session directory – so go looking within $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<session name>/

places.sqlite

Effect: You have no bookmarks, and no navigation buttons working.

Solution: delete places.sqlite, and ensure that the newest file within ‘bookmarkbackups’ is also non-zero sized (which it may be if you have run firefox with a broken places.sqlite). On restart, firefox will recreate places.sqlite from the bookmarks backup file.

formhistory.sqlite

Effect: form submits no longer work. (I find I get one, then it fails afterwards till I restart firefox completely)

Solution: delete it. Note that as this will delete your form history, all those nice auto-filled forms will need to be filled in again.

Remember also that backups are invaluable, and being able to restore these files from backup is generally a better alternative.