Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 121)

National tragedy in Australia

Australian election is a disaster. That's it. I'm leaving the country. I can't believe they re-elected that pathetic drooling liar for another term.

miconof, just mmap the file once.

AlanHorkan, in "RTFM", the profanity is entirely in the eye of the beholder. You can choose to read it in that way, or not, it's entirely up to you. It's not inherent.

Re: the case in point, most of your arguments are moot, since wget is not only completely and accessibly documented in its man page - if shlomif can't use man then answering his question would have done him little good - but also has its internal documentation which is impossible not to stumble over.

Shlomif needs to be helped to help himself. RTFM is by far the most polite way of doing so (see previous entry).

(additional) Actually I mean nothing against shlomif personally. He's a pretty OK guy. And I really like his solution to Perl Regular Quiz 023.

shlomif,

I recently had to figure out how to do something with wget: get everything below a directory on the web-server, without following links to outside it. So I logged in to FreeNode's #debian channel, where there are many knowledgable people to ask it. The first answer I got was "RTFM". ...

No matter how much you bleat, the answer has always been in man wget AND wget --help. (The latter is impossible to miss, as any incomplete or incorrect invocation suggests you use it.) If you need IRC to babysit you through a command that has comprehensive built-in help, well, you deserve what you get. Make an acronym of this: Try Harder Next Time.

(update) nymia:

So, what is shlomif's chance of getting the answer: 25%.

100% if he uses man wget or simply wget itself.

IRC was the wrong avenue, as he may or may not learn. The fault is not IRC per se. "RTFM" is a valid response because what is required here is not the answer asked for, but the knowledge of where in general to find such answers. "Give a man a fish" versus "Teach a man to fish". The former does not scale. The latter does (and is the premise of education in general).

To your cases I would add:

5. Whether the respondent knows the answer is irrelevant; "RTFM" is appropriate when it is clear from context that answering the question of the instant will do no lasting good.

raph -

I now have a rough interactive app for drawing with Cornu splines. ... I drew the letter R freehand,

Your editor looks very nice. And the "R" does too. Doubles as a good demo of libart - which I've been wanting to play with too. Well done.

apenwarr: have you taken into account:

1) that certain features (or lack of) in some compiled languages militate against reliability (and sometimes even performance)

2) that certain features of "scripting" or "interpreted" or "the other sort" of languages are actually designed to effectively aid reliability

I raise this not in order to settle the debate - which is clearly not a convergent debate as has been proven more times than there are seconds left in my lifespan - but in order to perhaps make you think for a moment. Your assertion is just a troll in a skimpy kimono.

bolsh wrote,

in some locales the alphabet is ordered "AaBbCc....Zz", and in others it uses the ASCII ordering of "ABC...Z...abc...z". This depends on the LC_COLLATE environment variable

Aha! I never would have thought of a non-ASCII collating sequence. So herzi's original problem might have been caused by a collation aAbB..zZ?

herzi: Curious sed problem. I am not a sed guru - although I always wanted to "get my head around it" - but I learned the following.

GNU sed is case sensitive by default. The man page for BSD sed is coy on case sensitivity and doesn't mention any switches for it. It appears to be case sensitive.

OS X has BSD sed of unknown version, so no GNU extensions like '+' in regexps

You need to use sed -r to get the extended regexps (see info sed section on extended regexps)

Neither version showed the [list] problem you described:

(Gentoo)
toby@jumpy toby $ echo FOO|sed -n -e 's/[A-Z]/X/p'
XOO
toby@jumpy toby $ echo foo|sed -n -e 's/[A-Z]/X/p'
toby@jumpy toby $ 

 (OS X)
imac:~ toby$ echo FOO|sed -n -e 's/[A-Z]/X/p'
XOO
imac:~ toby$ echo foo|sed -n -e 's/[A-Z]/X/p'
imac:~ toby$

I was using GNU sed version 4.0.7 (sed -V) on a Gentoo box, and OS X 10.3.5.

Other sed tricks I amused myself with:

toby@jumpy toby $ date|sed -r -e 's/[0-9]/X/g'
Sat Sep XX XX:XX:XX EST XXXX
imac:~ toby$ date|sed -e 's/[^ ]/X/g'
XXX XXX XX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX
imac:~ toby$ date|sed -e 's/[^0-9]/ /g'
        26 14 48 39     2004

(update) DV:

Sure I come from an ISP provided address range (free.fr) but the domain is legit, I even have a working reverse DNS.

That's a common administrative measure. You may also find (as I recently did with sympatico.ca) that the ISP blocks SMTP from subscribers except to its own SMTP server. The solution, in both cases, is to deliver mail via the ISP's SMTP server. It's simple configuring a gateway's sendmail or postfix to do so.

raph, thanks for the informative post. I think I'll have to read it twice and follow the links.

the perturbation of the middle knot damps out very quickly as you traverse (S-shaped) Cornu spiral segments, but doesn't damp out at all with the circular arcs

IKARUS' circle fitting method is actually well damped, and behaves much more like the second example (as does METAFONT's IIRC).

I'm willing to tolerate a significantly larger number of primitives in this internal representation than either input through the UI or exported into a font file format after all manipulations have been done

Doesn't this have some major implications for hinting? I get the impression from FontFocus that stroke-oriented hinting is still a favoured approach.

I keep mentioning IKARUS because for many years it was the gold standard for these purposes... it's interesting you mention auto-tracing. URW produced a rather nice companion program which traced bitmaps into IK format, called LINUS. I still have a copy of the Mac version.

elanthis: Point taken. The battle for freedom doesn't put me in a joking mood. I'll celebrate when the likes of $CO and M$ are properly buried with a silver stake perforating their carcasses in the necessary manner.

(Yeah, I know, the stake doesn't have to be silver. But you can't be too careful. And it's 1.17am.)