Posts tagged ‘linux’
Dennis Ritchie, Unix, and clarity
October 17th, 2011 at 9:37 am by Dr. Drang
Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the remarkable clarity of the writing done by Ritchie and the other early Unix developers at Bell Labs. The early Unix user’s manuals, both the man pages…
Addresses, labels, and scripts
August 29th, 2011 at 8:52 am by Dr. Drang
A few days ago I added a new script to my plabels repository at GitHub. This is the repository that contains my scripts for printing on Avery address labels, although the previous two scripts in the repository weren’t for printing addresses. This one is. The script is called palabels, and it’s set up to print…
Label printing scripts on GitHub
April 23rd, 2011 at 11:33 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve just created a GitHub repository, for my label printing utilities, one of which I used a few days ago to make labels for my new hard drives. What follows is the repository’s README, which should explain how to use and customize the scripts for your own purposes. Perl scripts for printing sheet-fed labels. They…
Hard disk failures, past and present
April 14th, 2011 at 9:26 pm by Dr. Drang
When I woke up my office computer yesterday morning and looked in the upper left corner, I saw this: That’s the output of my SuperDuper! log file extractor being displayed on my Desktop by NerdTool. Not good, but not the worst thing in the world. My nightly backup sometimes fails because the backup disk won’t…
Text files and me - Part 3
April 7th, 2011 at 9:15 am by Dr. Drang
I ended the second installment of this odd memoir in the early 2000s. I was using Linux, editing my files mostly in NEdit, and generating paper reports for my clients though a combination of SGML and groff. This episode will cover my switch to LaTeX. You may recall from last time that an important reason…
Text files and me - Part 2
March 7th, 2011 at 8:15 am by Dr. Drang
I ended the first installment of this reminiscence in late 1996, a time at which I was dealing with two sources of frustration: Everything I’d written in the previous decade was either lost or on the way to being lost. I’d done my writing in a variety of word processors (see Part 1 for the…
Ack
June 18th, 2010 at 11:03 pm by Dr. Drang
At the end of last week’s post about trusses, I mentioned that I had found an old photo of a roof truss by greping for the word “truss” in a folder of project reports on my work computer. I should not have grep’d; I should have ack’d. Ack is a Perl script that’s meant to…
Feet down below his knee
May 27th, 2009 at 9:44 am by Dr. Drang
Following up this post from yesterday, I downloaded and compiled GNU units to give it a test run. Although it’s feature-packed, it won’t let me use units like [\sqrt{\textrm{in}}]. Also, the inclusion of addition/subtraction and the change to equal precedence for multiplication and division make it, I think, a little less usable than the traditional…
Help me get my feet back on the ground
May 26th, 2009 at 8:00 am by Dr. Drang
units is a Unix command line program that just doesn’t translate well to a graphical user interface. You have: 105 m/s^2 You want: g * 10.70702 / 0.093396667 You have: 240 cc You want: floz * 8.1153654 / 0.12322304 You have: 16 m/s You want: mph * 35.790981 / 0.02794 You have: 2.7 ft water…
Linux fonts and fontconfig
August 18th, 2005 at 12:15 am by Dr. Drang
