Random Musings - Day #300

I was looking at the weather map and noticed how close Scotland is to Northern Ireland. On closer inspection, it doesn't appear as close as it is from Dover to Calais but apparently you can get from Larne (N.I.) to Cairnryan (Scotland) in an hour by ferry!

McDonalds have pulled out of Iceland. You can work out on your own what the story is about. ;)

It's all about the cut. Once again, computerhope have a good guide.
Actually I am trying to split, mix'n'match fields delimited from a csv file. There's a bunch of useful linux and unix commands at laynetworks and one must get up to speed in using the powerful but tempermental awk.

Random Musings - Day #238

I watching skins tonight and heard the old bronski beat song, "Small town boy". The acoustic version played is by Andre Herman Dune. I think it's an adequate cover but I don't think you can go wrong with the song. If I sung it, it probably sound good too...

Songs on my mind,
Corporation of One's original version of "The Real Life".
The mashup of "You rock my world" and "Rock your body".
The space cowboy mix of discostick song by Lady Gaga.
The Legend of Zelda sounds of Unicorn Kid with "Wee monster".

Fancy ways to...
Remove last character from a string and merge lines. This led to the following one-liner!

grep "172.16.0.1" auth-sel-1.txt | grep "MS0" - | awk '{print $2}' | uniq | sort | rev | cut -b 2- - | rev

grep "172.16.1.4" auth-sel-1.txt | grep "MS0" - | awk '{print $2}' | uniq | sort | sed 's/:/,/g' - | tr -d '\n'

Scuba is evidently not only used diving but for Oracle databases

Ubuntu and Caviar don't mix

I finally got round to looking at a PC that I bought way back in December. I wanted to use a different hard drive to the one that came with the PC (which has Windows XP installed). I stripped another computer down and tried to use the hard drive from it. The drive in question was an old Western Digital Caviar, model WD450AA. This is 45GB hard drive running at 5400rpm. But it has been around seen 2000. Very old. Anyways I tried to install ubuntu (server) on it. Ubuntu did not recognise the hard drive and complained that "No hard drive was detected". Windows 98 fdisk did find the drive and anyways that hard drive had been running Windows 2000. I replaced that drive with the hard disk that came with the PC (a seagate 40GB drive) and that was recognised by the ubuntu installation. Of course, I terminated the installation at the point.

I was seriously trying to bash my head and get it to work. But sanity or more to point sleep got the better of me and I gave up.

I could ghost the seagate and then ghost the image on to the caviar. But it is an old device. I am trying to save money at the moment but I've decided to bit the bullet on this one and ordered a seagate 80gb drive for 25 quid.

London Perl Workshop

Yesterday, I attended the London Perl Workshop just to see what stuff is the out there in the Perl world. There was some interesting stuff discussed. I should look into more of these details. I badly need a new (used) desktop with Linux. I'm still of the opinion things are better that way for Perl development. I bumped into a couple of acquaintances as well! One of the funny things that happened was someone brought in a cowbell and played it at the end of the workshop and made reference to more cowbell in a Saturday Night Live sketch, which I started playing the video loudly.

I also bought a couple of books Intermediate Perl and Mastering Perl for work.
But I will have a look at it first. ;)

Useful Java/Perl/Javascript/Linux links

I find it annoying that I keep forgetting to grab the links I've found for certain websites that are worth pointing out that I have spent my precious little time researching.

Anyways I've decide to take a big step back and re-evaluate what are the key things that I like, use and need to focus on.

1. Java has always been on my mind even though I've barely touched in the longest while. It's been knocked for being slow and clunky but it does have its place in server-side computing. http://java.net appears to be a good resource on keeping tabs on Java as well the omega site http://java.sun.com

2. Perl. Ever since I went to yapc::europe in 2006, I've known about the good effort they have been putting into CPAN and Perl 6.

3. Rapid Javascript Development. Client side stuff. A lot has changed since I originally did web development. There's so much you can do. The basic knowledge is still there but there should be lots of tools to develop a quick application with fancy moving graphics and fancy moving windows. Firebug and Mozilla seem to a common thing that's cropped up in searches.

4. Linux. A lot of above languages go hand in hand with Linux. In particular, Perl's catalyst package has little support for Windows. This has to be a basic building block for me.