Posts tagged ‘unix’
Shellhead
January 15th, 2013 at 8:48 pm by Dr. Drang
One of the nice things about having a plain text archive of all my posts on my local machine is that I can learn more about my writing through the standard Unix toolset. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out the best tool for the job. As I said last night, I now have…
Info man
October 2nd, 2012 at 10:30 pm by Dr. Drang
This is not a post about a superhero librarian. Last week, as I was trying to figure out what the -s option to the sort command really means, I ran into a problem that drove me crazy during my Linux years but which I thought I’d left behind when I switched back to the Mac.…
Unshelled
September 29th, 2012 at 6:44 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve spent the last couple of posts dissecting a shell script, one of my most popular posts is about shell scripting, and yet I really hate shell scripting. I was thinking about this last night as I added updates to this small rewrite of Marco Arment’s feed subscriber counting script. Then this morning a tweet…
Many happy returns
August 20th, 2012 at 11:54 pm by Dr. Drang
I keep getting tripped up by a historical quirk in BBEdit.1 It’s something that regular BBEdit users probably don’t think twice about, but it catches me every time. I’m hoping that by writing about it here, I’ll train myself to think before typing. You know about the line endings problem, right? Those of us who…
Dating myself
July 2nd, 2012 at 11:44 pm by Dr. Drang
One of the things I like about TextExpander is the flexibility with which it can create date and time values. I used to think that some of that flexibility wasn’t available using the standard Unix/C strftime codes, but last week I learned I was wrong about that. The date/time formatting feature of TextExpander that stood…
Base64
March 4th, 2012 at 10:27 pm by Dr. Drang
The other day I asked a new coworker to send me his vCard. I had an entry in my Address Book for him, but I wanted to make sure I had all his contact info. As I imported it into Address Book, I noticed that the various parts of his name were screwed up, so…
Fortunate tweets
December 28th, 2011 at 9:27 pm by Dr. Drang
Earlier this month I read a couple of things that made a connection in my head and turned into this little program. As best I can tell, it has absolutely no value other than to give me something to do while sitting in airports and on planes. A perfect project for the week between Christmas…
More shell, less egg
December 4th, 2011 at 10:50 pm by Dr. Drang
My TextExpander/shell script post of last week reminded me of Doug McIlroy and some unfinished business from back in October. So let’s talk about shell scripts and Unix again. In the comments to my October post about the early Unix developers and what good writers they were, Bill Cheswick mentioned Doug McIlroy, and said it…
Microsoft and Unix redux
November 18th, 2011 at 9:19 pm by Dr. Drang
In an otherwise insightful critique of Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that Steve Jobs was a tweaker rather than a visionary, John Gruber says this about Bill Gates: Gates was (and remains) a large-scale visionary in his own right. He was simply never a product visionary. But the whole idea that software in general could be more…
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…
