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.
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.
A friend of mine has been bugging me to compile a list of Mac software so that he can start using his own Mac properly. So I thought I'll just jot down a few programs that I find make life with Mac bearable, in no particular order.
That was the ones I could come up with from the top of my head. Well, naturally I have lots of other programs installed (hundreds of them being regular Unix tools coming from Fink such as ethereal, nmap and tcpdump for network monitoring and troubleshooting), but these are the most important ones. The only game I play is basically the old Command & Conquer Generals, which Aspyr was nice enough to release an Intel update to, so it plays nicely also on my new iMac. Most of the time I spend in OS X's own Terminal application, running irssi or messing around with shell scripts or other coding stuff (another tip: command-double click on a URL in Terminal opens it in a browser).
My vacation has started. Of course, that means sitting up all night getting red-eyed making random hacks. Pretty much the same stuff as usual, that is.
I've found myself booting into Linux on my Mac at home more often nowadays. Ubuntu 7.04 does quite a good job on my PPC Mac Mini. I noticed that IBM has a JDK for PPC - and it was even available in some repository through apt. My two biggest annoyances to date: Flash and no Compiz or Beryl. The open-source Flash implementation that is what you'll have to live with if you're on PPC (Macromedia hasn't released a PPC version of their own player) can't play YouTube videos (which is possibly the most important job for Flash on my computer) and seems to crash the browser occasionally. Also, web sites that tries to figure out whether you have Flash installed or not, tend to think that you don't. As to Compiz/Beryl, I've become so used to having wobbling windows at work, so when I sit at a Linux desktop without any desktop effects, it feels all stiff and, well, boring. It's like rounded corners: it just makes things feel more natural. I did in fact get some wobbliness out of SUSE 10.1 for PPC, however, the graphics drivers were pretty messy and my screen ended up with the colours inverted. I eventually gave up, after many hours of X configuration file editing.
Another annoyance is the lack of write support for journaled HFS+ filesystems, which is what most of my disks are formatted in. I currently haven't yet figured out a good filesystem that works reliably in both Linux and Mac. I have lots of media files that I want to access from both environments, and that doesn't work out too well. Now, I haven't checked up on the ext2/ext3 support in Mac OS for a few months, but last time I checked, there was an ext2 filesystem driver for OS X that worked OK, except that it seemed to often fail to unmount the filesystem cleanly, and then refusing to mount it on subsequent reboots (as it was dirty and there was no fsck). For now, I've been using HFS+ for my big media disk - I can at least safely read from it - we'll see if I totally mess it up if I try writing to it. For my portable hard disk, I've even used NTFS (since I need to mount it in Windows and it needs to store virtual machine images of several gigabytes, so FAT32 is a no-go) and when needed used ntfs-3g to mount it in both Linux and OS X. Very slow, but works for dropping files back and forth.
Late last week, one of my pet spare-time-projects at work finally got the green lights, so now my team also has its own weblog and not just the fancy research & response guys downstairs. Of course, in the end it's just yet another corporate blog, but it's nice to be able to talk more directly to the Linux community through a blog, in a not-so-PR- controlled way. One other really neat thing is that our managers agreed to release our Rescue CD as a free (as in beer, not speech - but still) download - which is a minimal bootable Linux with a simple text-mode menu that lets you scan and disinfect a virus-infested Windows system.
Lots more fun stuff going on, but I'll save that for later. Today I'm still recovering from heavy Vappu celebrations.
My coworker Juha posted this meme that I thought would make for a nice waste of time:
Not half bad, I thought it would get more embarrasing. :-) It'll be interesting to see who kisses the drunk girl at my wedding - and of course I've never been to a prom, but it'd be a hell of a prom if it would be accompanied by Fireside.
Pictured: the shoreline at Hernesaarenranta near where I live looked absolutely gorgeous when I walked home from work this week, with its big ice blocks that have been pushed up to land. Unfortunately my digital camera doesn't work so this shot by my mediocre cell phone camera will have to do. It anyway reminded me once again why I want to live close to the sea.
Interesting to note that even Macs have cosmetic bugs. In this case, some bug is triggered the first time a Preview window is minimized, but not the subsequent minimizations. I'm surprised I haven't seen it earlier - of course, maybe it just hasn't happened before. It reproduced on a newly-created account on the same machine, though.
Minimized Preview window looks ugly:
Minimized Preview window looks cute:
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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