Once upon a time, I used to earn a living using awk to do neat things it shouldn’t be used for. I never came up with anything as sexy as this though . These days, awk mostly stays in the toolbox, and I just use perl.
Imagine the fun you could have sneaking round your local technology emporium and judiciously applying one of these labels to anything you think deserves it.
Generate PDF pages of specifically dimensioned graph paper suitable for printing. There are companion generators for posting labels and various calendars.
Photos of smalltalk on the Xerox Alto . This is what the future looked like in 1979.
Another reason why Vinyl is superior to CD or downloads as an audio format.
It shows how infrequently I use it these days, but I yesterday found myself using a remote X client on my Macbook, and to put it bluntly, the X11.app as shipped with leopard is fucked. When I was working for IMDb, this would have scuppered my world. I can’t decide if I even need it enough now to make it worth trying to fix.
Of course I had to try! Installing the latest community developed packages seems to fix most of the immediate problems, giving a useable X11. And the new code base, and launchd integration bring real improvements over Tiger. Now quartz-wm is open source, X11 on the Macintosh can be synchronised with X.org. It would be even better if Apple folded some of these fixes into official updates.
mjd presents an interesting perl module ; works as a catalogue of interesting features from perl’s module loading and object system. All my favourite stunt perl is here, AUTOLOAD, UNIVERSAL, walking the symbol table, the magic goto - but also several tricks I’ve never thought of.
I acquire new music at a relatively steady rate. I’ve been use my computer as a music library, storing my purchased music on a fileserver. Once I migrated to Macintosh, I started using iTunes to manage this process. It’s a useful solution, what small trouble I do have is usually related to my unusual configuration. I keep my music collection on an NFS filesystem, enough of a weird thing to do that I’m surprised iTunes doesn’t have more trouble with it.
A few years into this process I decided to get a portable audio player. An iPod was the obvious choice, despite the cost. Plug and go, lovely interface, Just Works™, all the usual. The 40GB model I went for was larger than my entire music library, compressed, to mp3 or increasingly to aac , with moderate settings. Synchonising is almost magically simple; set the iPod to sync ‘checked items’ and uncheck anything in iTunes you wish to exclude. I extolled the benefit of this approach to anyone who asked.
There approach will only scale so far. After several years of acquisition, the ‘checked’ set must exceed the 40GB capacity of the device. Luckily, by the time I reached it, Apple upgraded the iPod range, the new ‘classic’ guise, offering a potential 160GB storage . I toyed with one of these on display in a shop, but quickly gave it up unconvinced. I had misgivings about the new unit, foremost was the surprisingly sluggish interface.
Ever wondered about building your own emacs, perhaps with blackjack and hookers? Here’s a book that explains how you might go about it.
Mac OS X doesn’t have a /proc filesystem , but it does have MacFuse , which allows for simpler filesystem development in user space. Now bbum has written a MacFuse app which allows you to mount the live Objective C runtime as a filesystem.