Category: General

There is a special place in Hell…
There is a special place in Hell reserved for the person who invented the UNIX command ls. That’s EL-ES. It’s the command that prints a list of all the files in a directory, and like any well-mannered UNIX program, it accepts a whole heap of options.

Specifically, it accepts an option called -l which is very commonly used, because it prints a long format listing, with useful extra information on each file.

But it also accepts a much rarer option called -1, which is used a lot less often, which makes it print a list with each file name in a single line.

Of course, I’m working in a terminal (using the most excellent TeraTerm app), and I’m using a fine font called Courier New, and I’m reading a print-out formatted by a text-to-postscript program and printed two-pages-in-one, with small print, and the difference between -l (MINUS EL) and -1 (MINUS ONE) is about 2 pixels.

It is now 01:55 AM. I am still at work because I had a problem with some data I’m preparing. Some data ? OK, a lot of data.

And the first step of everything depends on listing a bunch of files and writing that list to a file (which I think is used as input to a very ardorous and slow indexing process which I’m re-running now – at least I hope so…). And the person who wrote the command that does that actually knows about -1.

What’s the difference between the command: ls *.seq > foo and ls -1 *.seq > foo ?

Nothing, really.

But ls -l (EL ES MINUS EL) is right off…

There’s a special corner of Hell for people like this…

Here’s something scary: Blogger got hacked on Christmas. Blogger is a very user-friendly web service that lets you write an ongoing personal journal or weblog (like this page). It keeps your account details and the entries you write in a central server, and then uploads the updates to your web site with FTP. The scary bit about their server being hacked is the claim that the hacker might have gotten hold of the user names and passwords for people’s FTP accounts. I would feel all smug about using blogging software that runs locally, except that before that, I had a Blogger account…
Anyway, I just changed my password.

I read an article in Haaretz (Hebrew, and link may change in the future) about the Russian female fighter pilots of World War II. It was translated from the Guardian, but I couldn’t find it online at the Guardian’s site.
What I did find is a big article from the American Federal Aviation Authority’s web page, which covers both the fighter pilots assigned to regular units, like Lily Litvak, the “white rose of Stalingrad”, as well as all-women bomber brigades like the Nachthexen, the 588th night bomber brigade. That link is to the web page of a “combat flight simulation group” (sounds like wargamers to me) named in their honor, and has some photos of the Russian originals.

The FAA article mentions the WASPs, American women who were non-combat pilots. The article in Haaretz quotes one of the Russian women about a meeting organized between the WASPs and their Russian counterparts, saying that all the WASPs were thin and well-dressed, and the Russians were all small and fat.

Dave Winer mentioned two programs other than Frontier/Radio that support OPML. One is a Mac program, but the othe is an outliner written in Java called JOE, which I downloaded and tried out. It’s a nice Radio-style outliner, which reads/writes OPML & plain text, and has a pretty (but sluggish) interface.

My problem with both JOE and Frontier (which it resembles) is that it ‘s all rather autistic – what’s the output of the outline? I still prefer the outliner in Word for organizing thoughts, because it produces documents, and it has styles, and shortcuts, and it’s a decent writing tool. And for programming, you really want an editor that handles all the languages I code in, like Scintilla. Outliners are perfect matches for Usertalk, Python, and that’s it, basically.