Top shell commands in my home computer as of today:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
88 git
76 cd
74 ls
34 sudo
21 ssh
18 du
14 cat
13 ps
13 mdfind
12 open

Almost five years ago I took this test, and it classified me as Amiga OS - now I took the same test again and came up as OS X. It would be interesting to see what has changed in more detail; I couldn't figure out any questions that I definitely would have answered differently five years ago.

Which OS are You?

What has changed in the last five years, however, is that run OS X on most of my computers. Back then, I had Windows 2000 on my desktop computer (with coLinux for development), and Windows XP (I think) on my laptop. I do have a W2K VM on my home Mac (mostly used for getting dissapointed at SF Anytime, a local video-on-demand service that requires Windows (and lately, newer Windows than Windows 2000)), and at work I keep a spare hard disk that I plug in when I need to do things that requires Windows (some of the bureaucracy tools require IE, among other this), but about 80% if my time is spent in OS X and 19% in Linux (although it depends on how you count; I'm pretty much always logged-in to my home Linux server (a small fanless VIA x86 with a flash disk), for example, and similarly always using a handful of Linux servers at work where, among other things, our testing infrastructure is largely Linux- based, even the parts that runs automated tests on Mac OS X (which in itself is an interesting topic for another talk or blog post).

Reading about Juha's dream reminded me of my own from a couple of nights back.

In the beginning it was a bit like a bad re-make of BSG. We were heading for a destination of unknown location, on a big Battlestar-esque space ship. Somehow magically me and some other dude was on a smaller ferry ship, travelling through some worm-hole-like tunnel that was made out of metal. We landed on some unknown planet, with grass and stone plates laid out in plaths on the ground. We followed one of the paths and ended up in a candystore. A girl worked in the candy store. I noticed that they had Ahlgrens Bilar, a typical Swedish candy, which I found odd for what was presumably an extrasolar planet. I commented to the shopkeeper girl that I liked that candy, and she replied that she had never tasted it, and went to do so. Soon she had eaten all of it, delighted by its taste. I was a bit sad that I got none myself. I also found it odd that they accepted Earth currency and credit cards, and I noticed that she had received mail from Earth, with postage stamps from some Earth country. I even think she had a phone connected to the Earth GSM network. I asked her about it, and she explained that she was part of an intergalactical conspiracy, where her kind had infiltraded all layers of society in, among other worlds, Earth, like in Fight Club but with no malicious intent. Instead it was just a practical thing to be able to communicate and trade intergalactically, also in worlds that were not intergatactically aware yet. I don't remember her name exactly, but I remember her telling me that if someone wanted to mail her from earth, all they had to do was address the envelope to "Her name with-the- Hat" and people of her kind at the post office would make sure that it made its way to her little candy shop in a completely different part of the galaxy.

Following sti's shell history meme, here are some meaningless shell history statistics from my home computers. (By the way - I would've done that one-liner like this: history | awk '{print $2}' | sort |uniq -c | sort -rn|head - two more pipelines out of habit.)

My home Mac:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
127 ssh
52 ls
45 ping
32 cd
26 sudo
13 open
12 mount
10 top
10 cat
9 df

Surprise: mount - turns out I often use mount without parameters to see which device a newly attached hard disk appears at.

My Linux gateway box

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
47 ls
40 cd
39 screen
38 sudo
24 ps
20 w
19 ping
17 mount
15 cat
14 tuxgdg

No surprises, really - I mostly use this box for IRC in a screen session - but lately also for playing with my Tux Droid, hence tuxgdg.

My work laptop (Linux)

$  history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
92 sudo
76 ssh
41 echo
38 ping
31 ipsec
22 tail
22 cd
21 ls
16 cat
14 vi

This computer is mostly used for remotely connecting to the work VPN (hence ipsec), and through that connecting to work servers using SSH, and the rest is done through Gnome or a web browser.

ping appears everywhere, most likely because my ISP is quite unstable at times. Also, I'm more vi than I thought.

I started watching The Big Bang Theory, a TV-series centred around a few geeks and a hot girl. It's quite humorous at times, and quite stereotypical all the time. In the second episode, they are trying to assemble an IKEA media centre piece and one of the guys says "this is why Sweden has no space program". Of course, as the resident expatriate Swede I have to set the record straight: Sweden has had a space program for 35 years (if not even longer). It's certainly not big or anything, but at least it's something. :-) Nowadays they're even dabbling with commercial space flight - we'll see how that turns out.