Kurt's Weblog

I really need to learn how to use the zoomable area stuff listed on The qt4 resource center as A Zommable Picture Viewer. Then I want to be able to draw vector graphics over this image. Back to the days of the PDDT (Panorama Display and Designation Tool) that I did in 1996 using SGI's ImageVision library.

LITA ORT Documentation from GrokLab and Peter Coppin's EventScope crew.

Linux on the WRT54G

80 security tips - Mostly windows PC stuff.

Marcel recommends the free for home use avg anti-virus program for MS-Windows. My recommendation for Mac OSX is do not run an anti-virus program. All anti-virus programs on Mac OSX is mess things up (especially installation programs from Apple).

pycdf and pyhdf look like handy tools to have around!

New Periodic Table of the Elements - the periodic galaxy. Strange.

Remote SSH access and SSH tunneling with the WRT54G

Mac OSX util programs:

drutil(1)                - interact with CD/DVD burners
escputil(1)              - maintain Epson Stylus inkjet printers
hdiutil(1)               - manipulate disk images
mdutil(1)                - manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight
niutil(1)                - NetInfo utility
plutil(1)                - property list utility
smbutil(1)               - interface to the SMB requester
textutil(1)              - text utility
textutil(n)              - Procedures to manipulate texts and strings
tiffutil(1), - tiffutil(1) - manipulates tiff files

JWZ asks about X11-Aqua pasteboard/clip bourd issues - This has been bugging me for quite a while. Some discussion of autocutsel. Does it work?

Also, his discussion of backup solutions

Google Moon

SPE Stani's Python Editor

Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions

New ibooks any day now?

Wouldn't it be great if IBM OpenSourced OS/2? I have never actually used an OS/2 machine, but I hear that were pretty cool 10 years ago. I know that it may not be possible with other companies' codes embedded deep in there.

Boo hiss! Google earth is still only for MS Windows.

Improvements in Wind Energy

NOAA Takes Steps To Reduce Ship Collisions With Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales

Google local to find wifi

Ice Shelf Collapse Reveals New Undersea World

NASA Put Life on Mars - would not be terribly surprising.

Check out picotux which is the size of an ethernet connector! Now if this thing had 2 A/D and 2 D/A ports, this could be the entire computer for a chirp seismic system! Then the only thing taking up space in the pressure bottle would be the power amps and maybe a preamp/filter for the receivers. 55 MHz might be a little under powered, but if the system is only doing chirp that would be enough. Imagine running a web server on the system too with status and system configuration. That would be awesome. That would mean the end of MS-DOS and an actually spinning hard disk in the chirp. More A/D ports on the thing the better. Then we could do more help (especially temp) monitoring of the gear and extra sensor.

Russia says it wants to go for Mars

How To: Make your own Home Theatre Mac (HTMac) (if you have the right set top box)

http://sqlzoo.net/ - A "gentle" introduction to SQL.

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ - ext2/3 on Windows XP?!?!

$99 Linux device with WiFi.

Who lives on your street? using google maps

I had meant to use an old knoppix cd, but it disappeared somewhere in all the boxes. I figured I would try Damn Small Linux since 50MB would take 30 minutes (much more reasonable than downloading knoppix again).

I have to say that it works perfectly on the old P3 500MHz machine. Very nice. The one bummer is that it does seem to have NFS serving built in. I dropped in an 100Mb ethernet NIC and I am copying files.

Scientific Linux also looks cool. It as OpenAFS!

RssOwl

BashPodder and BPConf

But python is cooler than bash: pyPodder

Then get podcasts from techpodcasts

Mac OSX keyboard shortcuts

http://acronymfinder.com/

I got this email today from southwest air. Is there really such a law?

  Southwest Airlines Needs Your Help Now!
 
  Wright Is Wrong! Set Love Free!



  I am sending you this ALERT today to ask for your help. By now, you
  have probably heard about our fight to repeal the Wright Amendment,
  the 1979 law that makes it illegal to fly or advertise flights from
  Dallas Love Field to points beyond the four states surrounding
  Texas, plus Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas. We need your help to
  make this happen!



  The Wright Amendment has a strong history of stifling competition
  and creating high fares. Simply put, the Wright Amendment is Wrong!
  It's time to Set Love Free and repeal this archaic, antiquated law
  now! Southwest wants to bring you low fares and Legendary Customer
  Service from Love Field to many of the 60 cities that we currently
  serve across the nation.



  Please join our efforts to Set Love Free by visiting our web site:
  setlovefree.com to take action now.

Air Traffic Control Algorithms Take Off - Might be good (and easier) for ships!

  The first step though is to develop the mathematical algorithms that
  would be at the heart of an advanced collision avoidance system. To
  do that, Bayen and his colleagues use formulas to describe the set
  of all possible positions of the two aircraft relative to each
  other. By solving the problem for the worst-case scenario, they
  prepare for the worst and hoping for better. 



  "We solve it under the assumption that one aircraft will do
  everything possible to avoid being hit and that the intruder
  aircraft is trying its hardest to collide," Bayen says. "In real
  life, hopefully the intruder won't act so badly." 



  To deal with the complexities of the problem, Bayen employs the
  mathematics of level sets, a method developed in 1988 at UC Berkeley
  and UCLA to track and simulate shifting boundaries of dynamic
  objects and materials. Rather than compute each of the aircraft's
  possible trajectories, the planes are represented by level sets
  incorporating an infinite number of trajectories. 






  This .avi video clip depicts air traffic over a period of ten hours
  in several sectors covered by the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control
  Center. Aircraft flying above 33,000 feet are displayed. Aircraft
  that appear to collide are actually traveling at different
  altitudes. The visualization was created using Enhanced Traffic
  Management System data provided by NASA Ames. [Video] 



  "If you can compute these sets, it gives you a mathematical border,"
  Bayen says. "Outside the border, you're safe. Inside, you're not
  safe. As soon as an aircraft hits the border of the unsafe set, the
  pilot will receive an alert that might say, 'Warning! Here is the
  way to avoid a collision.' We can prove mathematically that if the
  pilot responds right away, he or she can escape the danger." 



  In Bayen's laboratory, the researchers are applying the algorithms
  to air traffic computer simulations developed jointly with NASA
  Ames. Meanwhile, his former adviser at Stanford University ,
  aeronautics professor and Berkeley alumna Claire Tomlin, is
  experimenting with hardware implementations based on the algorithms
  and testing the systems on manned and unmanned aerial vehicles. 

Andrew Goodwillie is here at SIO this week.

GeoMapApp

Download the java jar and double click. Looks like this is going to be very cool!

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L Read has some nice little tips in my 2 minute quick skim.

How to Handle Boring Tasks



  Sometimes it is not possible to avoid boring tasks that are critical
  to the success of the company or the project. These tasks can really
  hurt the morale of those that have to do them. The best technique
  for dealing with this is to invoke or promote Larry Wall's
  programmer's virtue of Laziness. Try to find some way to get the
  computer to do the task for you or to help your teammates do
  this. Working for a week on a program to do a task that will take a
  week to do by hand has the great advantage of being more educational
  and sometimes more repeatable.



  If all else fails, apologize to those who have to do the boring
  task, but under no circumstances allow them to do it alone. At a
  minimum assign a team of two to do the work and promote healthy
  teamwork to get the task done.

I got an email today that Mail.app refused to decode into the pdf that was the email:

--Apple-Mail-6--850890775
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/pdf;
	x-unix-mode=0444;
	name="some.pdf"
Content-Disposition: inline;
	filename=some.pdf



JVBERi0xLjMNJeLjz9MNCjEzNCAwIG9iag08PCANL0xpbmVhcml6ZWQgMSANL08gMTM5IA0vSCBb
IDI1MTIgOTA4IF0gDS9MIDM2NDk4MyANL0UgNjQxODAgDS9OIDggDS9UIDM2MjE4NCANPj4gDWVu
ZG9iag0gICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAg
...

I found the base64 program in fink. Worked like a charm. Copy all of the test in the base64 block. Here that was from JVBER down to the next blank line. Then run base64 on this file:

  base64 -d some.pdf.mime  > some.pdf
  file some.pdf
  open some.pdf

That's it!

Basic mapping in Fledermaus off of topography is just about as easy as it was in Viz 1.0 for MPL. Still missing are ways to mess with each waypoint on a polyline.

I loaded in terrain C from the Santa Barbara CD and zoomed over to the western slide. Then I did Data->Add 3D Line. Then I selected the Polygon Select (P) function. Use the left mouse button to click around the outside edge of a unit. Double click on the last point to close the polygon. In the Internal 3D lines object, click the Add Polygon Selection. Now to get it to an ascii xyz file, click Export YZ. That is it!

I saved two files: westernslide-excavated.xyz westernslide-toe.xyz To plot these up, just use the 3D plotting feature of gnuplot:

  splot 'westernslide-excavated.xyz' with l, 'westernslide-toe.xyz' with l

This is what you will see!!!

From the wayback machine...

There was discussion today about simulating sea floor spreading. I wish had more to offer them or time that I could create a better simulation system. My recommendation was to keep using Fortran 77, add some optimization flags, and just abuse a few G5 Macs. The optimization flags that I recommended (but do know know if g77 accepts them) are:

  F77FLAGS := -O3
  F77FLAGS += -funroll-loops 
  F77FLAGS += -fexpensive-optimizations
  F77FLAGS += -DNDEBUG
  F77FLAGS += -ffast-math
  F77FLAGS += -mpowerpc

There probably are more and maybe even some G5 specific arch type flags, but that is what I had in my density pkg Makefile.

It would be nice to really turn my old C++ code into a real application. It would be great to put in the magnetics forward modeling code to actually generate the synthetic magnetic curve. Also I was thinking about a set of gengetopt command line options that allow selection of model sizes and flow types. Being able to specify the distributions for material and flow types would really make this a great tool. It would also be nice to work in the longitude and latitude and depth profiles so that it can be easily matched to actual ship or vehicle tracks.

And what about a 3D model? That would be a lot more trouble, but fun to work on.

From fastdike, here it the README: I added a new paragraph what was on the web and added that as a README... hence the jump from 1.11 to 1.12. The code is all the same. I am sure it would run a lot faster on today's computers Looking back on this code, I have to warn you that the C++ programming style is not great. I used macros for TRUE and FALSE, .h on C and C++ headers that should not have them. This is before I learned doxygen and gengetopts.

-Kurt 7/2005

---

This was inspired by a seminar with J. Gee and S. Cande. We read a paper simulating mid ocean ridge spreading. This is an attempt to recreate the process, but use a different data structure. The data structure is a doubly linked list. Inside the each column in an array that grows over time as lava flows over the top. The first element in the array is deepest and new lava is appended on the end of the array. If the array becomes longer than the current space allocated, the program reallocs the array with more space. It also is able to prune things as they move far away from the spreading center. Jeff estimated a run might take 1/2 hour. I don't know if that was with or without the magnetics being calculated. This program takes about 20 seconds (PII 333 w/196MB to produce a 6483 x 1435 simulation), but does not do the magnetics. Most of that time is spent writing the data to disk.

Idea from "Central anomaly magnetization high: constraints on the volcanic constructin and architecture of seismic layer 2A at a fast-spreading mid-ocean ridge, the EPR at 9deg30'-50'N," 1999, H. Shouten, M. Tivey, D. Fornari, J. Cochran, EPSL 169, p37-50.

Kurt Schwehr -- Feb 2002

From the National Institude of Standards and Technology: Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

As an example, I looked up Octrees. It sent me to Octree Algorithms here http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/lodestar/tech/octree/

It is missing things like path planning with A*, but it looks like a nice online resource for simple browsing.

Becca pointed out this one...

Hypertext Help with LaTeX from Switzerland

Hurricane Dennis Flips Sunken Ship Upright

  KEY LARGO, Fla. (AP) -- What humans were unable to do, Hurricane
  Dennis handled nicely. The former USS Spiegel Grove, serving as
  artificial reef on the bottom in 130 feet of water off Key Largo,
  flipped upright as the core of the storm passed some 200 miles to
  the west. 



  It's a position project organizers wanted since the retired 510-foot
  ship prematurely sank and rolled over May 17, 2002, leaving its
  upside-down bow protruding from the water. 



  A salvage team managed to fully sink the vessel three weeks later -
  on its right side instead of its keel. 



  The Spiegel Grove is the most popular artificial wreck in the
  Florida Keys, home at least 166 different fish species, said Lad
  Akins of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation. 



  But its realignment will make it a better platform for sports
  divers.

I just made use of segy-py to help with a figure. I wanted the shot position x,y (lon/lat) pairs for the shots in my seismic figure of the Santa Barbara Crack. SBC - am I in trouble yet? I just used the database!

  sqlite segy.db 'select x/3600.0,y/3600.0 from segyTrace \
    where Shotpoint>=82000 and Shotpoint<=84000' \
    | tr '|' ' '\
    > ~/Desktop/core4-fig.xy

Which gives:

 head -1 ~/Desktop/core4-fig.xy 
    -120.058333333333 34.3691666666667



 tail -1 ~/Desktop/core4-fig.xy 
    -119.553333333333 34.3786111111111

Now there is a problem. The shot number got reset a few times throughout the cruise. The solution is to plot the cores at the same time just to make sure. loc.dat:

  -120.05883333 34.36566666 
  -120.05716666 34.37899999 

Then gnuplot> plot 'core4-fig.xy' with lp, 'loc'

Now we need a better query that uses some geographic bounding to avoid the other shot numbers!

  sqlite segy.db 'select x/3600.0,y/3600.0 from segyTrace where \
    Shotpoint>=82000 and Shotpoint<=84000 and y>34.36*3600 and \
    x<-119.8*3600' \
    | tr '|' ' ' \
    > ~/Desktop/core4-fig.xy 

Notice that you can see the issues with the GPS logging that are in the xstar format files.

On a totally different topic: sdcf is a python library for writing DXF CAD files. However, I can't tell if this library can read in DXF.

I hope NASA has a successful space shuttle launch today!

There is a RSS feed from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/rss/rtf_news.rss

So it was on a track. It is still a great feat!

Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm Robot Makes Unprecedented 200-Mile Autonomous Run

42 gmail tips

Setting up a reverse SSH tunnel by Vincent Danen. [techrepublic.com]

  ...
  This is useful if you have a service on the remote end that you want
  to have connected to something on the local machine, but you don't
  wish to open up your firewall or have SSH private keys stored on the
  remote machine. By using a reverse tunnel, you maintain all of the
  control on the local machine. An example usage for this would be for
  logging messages; by setting up a reverse SSH tunnel, you can have a
  logger on the remote system send logs to the local system (i.e.,
  syslog-ng). 



  To set up the reverse tunnel, use:



  
  $ ssh -nNT -R 1100:local.mydomain.com:1100 remote.mydomain.com
  
  What this does is initiate a connection to remote.mydomain.com and
  forwards TCP port 1100 on remote.mydomain.com to TCP port 1100 on
  local.mydomain.com. The "-n" option tells ssh to associate standard
  input with /dev/null, "-N" tells ssh to just set up the tunnel and
  not to prepare a command stream, and "-T" tells ssh not to allocate
  a pseudo-tty on the remote system. These options are useful because
  all that is desired is the tunnel and no actual commands will be
  sent through the tunnel, unlike a normal SSH login session. The "-R"
  option tells ssh to set up the tunnel as a reverse tunnel 
  ...

Saw this post today. I was thinking about the same kind of thing and was getting tempted to do some preprocessor magic.

From: brotherelf -- at -- gmx.net (Ulrich M. Schwarz)



"Jim Jim"  writes:



> Where \isdraft is a command I've made up for the example (that I'd like to
> have).



Quick and dirty version:
%% isdraft.sty starts here
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{isdraft}[2005/07/12 v0.2 isdraft.sty (ums)]
\DeclareOption{draft}{\drafttrue}%
\@ifundefined{ifdraft}{%
 % it's all great, we don't know ifdraft
 \newif\ifdraft
 \draftfalse
 \ProcessOptions\relax
}{%
 %oh my, isdraft is already defined as a command or boolean!
 \PackageWarningNoLine{isdraft}{%
   There already is a command ifdraft.\MessageBreak
   I'm not touching it}
}
%% isdraft.sty ends here



\documentclass[final]{report}
\usepackage{isdraft}



\ifdraft
 \typeout{draft}
\else
 \typeout{final}
\fi



\begin{document}
 Hello
\end{document}



As usual, the global option can be overridden by a package-option
[final] or [draft].



HTH
 Ulrich

I have been working on improving my LaTeX skills as I write the chapters of my thesis. I am just beginning to get a better feel for things. I subscribed to the gmail digest of comp.tex (or whatever the exact name). The volume of traffic is very impressive, but a bit overwhelming. I have been sort of skimming some just to get a feel for things. Today I started working through an 147 page tutorial called:

The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e

This free pdf book is actually pretty good. In under an hour, I have a much better feel for things. I would bet that this document would be hard on someone just starting out. My current paper is my 3rd journal article that I have done in LaTeX. I did not really understand what I was doing in the previous two, but it worked. I would like to start having more control over what I am doing!

Today I figured out how to add a table of contents to my article. I know, I know! This was not very hard. Here is what I did:

  \newpage
  \tableofcontents
  \newpage

LaTeX then picked up my \section and \subsection definitions and made a nice table of contents. Very cool.

Now back to working on the paper.

Boxes, boxes, boxes. A sea of boxes. I need to brave Costco this morning.

Pumping Out the Juice: Power Supplies Explained - For when I need to understand PSU's.

In fink: "userutils" - Add/Remove users and groups via the command line from osxgnu.org

rename from linux is in the util-linux package. That should really be in fink, right?

NASA Satellites Measure And Monitor Sea Level

40,000-year-old footprint of first Americans - Whoever is doing this research needs a better scale. What in the world is that red and white thing? Is that footprint big or little?

Lacie Mac Mini drives. These look very cool! Now they need a G5 Mac Mini!!!

I have used SGI say and now the much better (but not great) Mac OSX say for quite a while. I just saw a discussion over at JWZ that you can use say to write out an aiff sound file. Nice. I suppose that if I had actually read the say man page, I would have already known OPTIONS string Specify the text to speak on the command line. This can consist of multiple arguments, which are considered to be separated by spaces.

-f file Specify a file to be spoken. If file is - or neither this parameter nor a message is specified, read from standard input.

-v voice Specify the voice to be used. Default is the voice selected in Sys- tem Preferences.

-o out.aiff Specify an AIFF file to be written.

If the input is a TTY, text is spoken line by line, and the output file, if specified, will only contain audio for the last line of the input. Otherwise, text is spoken all at once. Maybe festival has better voices?

When key loggers are a good thing - Like loggin aim chats for later reference, only I get to see every typo and correction. Oh joy.

Otherpower.com - make your own wind turbine. Turbines were awesome in antarctica (until the wind got too strong).

Super Santa Barbara Basin summary paper:

Physiography of an active transpressive margin basin: high-resolution
bathymetry of the Santa Barbara basin, Southern California continental
borderland



Eichhubl, Greenea, Maher



  High-resolution swath bathymetry and backscatter data from the Santa
  Barbara basin reveal a distinct assemblage of morphologic and
  sedimentologic features characteristic of the tectonically active
  setting of the basin. Such characteristics include the north-south
  asymmetry of the basin, the presence of an intra-basinal structural
  and morphologic high, extensive mass wasting, and fields of mounds
  and pockmarks. The north-south asymmetry of the basin and the
  increased abundance of slope failure along the northern basin slope
  likely reflect higher rates of tectonic shortening and sediment
  accumulation along the northern basin margin. High sedimentation
  rates lead to high pore water content of the sediment which, in
  combination with seismic shaking, may explain the abundance of mass
  wasting features even on shallowly inclined lower basin
  slopes. Mounds and pockmarks are the surface expression of locally
  extensive fluid seepage which we interpret to be driven by a
  combination of high sedimentation rates, a high organic content of
  sediment, and anoxic bottom water conditions during extended periods
  in Neogene and Quaternary times. During ROV dives we observed active
  fluid seepage to have occurred preferentially on the shelf and on a
  structural and topographic high, presumably due to structural
  focusing of migrating formation fluids. The preferred alignment of
  some pockmarks along faults is consistent with structurally
  controlled expulsion of formation fluids from underlying Neogene
  units. Despite the high tectonic activity of the basin, fault scarps
  are rare and only observed in areas of low sediment accumulation on
  the shelf and on topographic highs. Mass balance considerations
  suggest that sedimentation rates averaged over interseismic time
  scales are too high and scarp growth rates too low for scarps to be
  characteristic features of the basin floor. Long-term sediment
  accumulation rates that account for the effect of sediment
  compaction are low enough, however, to lead to long-wavelength
  surface expressions of the most active faults. 

Here is how I export my endnote references to bibtex:

Select all of the references   Apple-A



Edit->Output styles-> Style manager
Add BibTeX Export to your list
Edit->Output styles->BibTeX
File->Export
Save to something like mypaper-bib.txt
Then open a shell and



mactounix ~/Desktop/mypaper-bib.txt > mypaper.bib



Where mactounix looks like this:



cat ~/bin/mactounix 
#!/bin/bash



/sw/bin/tr '\r' '\n' < $1

Arg. I just had my incoming email wiped by the high quality UCSD email system. Pop stopped working, so I logged in and got an over quota message. When I ran pine, there was nothing. Now:

> acsquota -v
Disk quotas for kdschweh (uid 805):
Filesystem     usage  quota  limit    timeleft  files  quota  limit    timeleft
/var            5169   5000  20000    7.0 days      3    300    500            
/var/mail       3800  18000  30000                  1      5     10            
/var/mail/kdschweh (mail inbox)
                   0   3072  15360                  1      1      1
/backup/var/mail
                3800  18000  30000                  1      5     10            
/home/solaris
               22096 100000 100000                125   7000   7000   

Shoot me now. Oh wait. Five minutes later, there is mail inbox. Where did it go for that time? 15MB is such a pitiful quota!

wordpress theme browser

Paida is yet another graphic package for python.

Tour a missle silo

SSH tunneling with the WRT54G

Building a Home Power Monitoring System - Now I need a home to monitor!

Aimtrack - track who looks at your aim instant messanger profile.

Thanks to all who came out today! We met lots of very nice people. It went great, but I am very sunburnt.

NOTE: No garage sale sunday!

Come by tomorrow or the day after for a garage sale on mission blvd. We will have way more out for this one than was on the web page for the sale. Tons of stuff!!!

Garage Sale Address & Information:
3599 Mission Blvd.
Mission Bay, Ca 92109



Cross Street = San Juan Place



Saturday 7/9/05 = 10:00am - 3:00pm
Sunday 7/10/05 = 9:00am - 3:00pm

schwehr.org/sale

Gansta Name - very cheesy

Be Your Own Hotspot "Turn a backpack into a portable, solar-powered Wi-Fi hotspot, and share a high-speed connection anywhere"

texnik.de - LaTeX tips and tricks

regexlib.com -

  Regular Expression Library. Currently we have indexed 1000
  expressions from contributors around the world. We hope you'll find
  this site useful and come back whenever you're looking for an
  expression for a particular task, or have just figured out a new
  expression that does something useful.

morse code in a minute - NOT. But interesting

Hydrogen power does not seem very good: First Hydrogen-Fired Electrical Generator Planned for Scotland

  convert natural gas to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen
  would fuel the turbines for electricity production, and the carbon
  dioxide would be pumped into the nearly-depleted offshore oil fields

New C book - Free pdf

ll-ansistyle Enables colored text output via ANSI escape sequences

I went digging for more info on LaTeX/Bibtex issues and came up with some links but did not really learn much.

tug.org - TeX Users Group

Spell checkers for TeX. Excalibur looks interesting. I already use ispell/aspell from within emacs.

Word count for TeX documents: (note that detex is a separate fink package)

  detex  | wc -w

Making hyperlinked TeX documents - making html or texinfo.

buildbib - ebib is supposed to run 'inside' emacs

Making Custom bib styles

Forcing capitalization in bibtex

citeURL:

  @misc{...,
    ...,
    howpublished = "\url{http://...}"
  }

What exactly is natbib?

Listing all bib entries: \nocite{*}

Floating figures in multicolumn documents:

\begin{figure*}
  ...
\end{figure*}

include: using include verses input and emitting new pages.

www.latex-project.org: LaTeX - A document preparation system

Awesome! Dual core G5's. I definitely want a 4-way G5 workstation. I could definitely put that thing to use! Also it is exciting to see the possibilities for G5 laptops finally happening. Maybe the whole Macintel thing will just go away.

IBM Announces the (long rumored) PowerPC 970MP

970MP
Dual core
1.4-2.5GHz
Each core has 1MB L2 cache
One core can be swiched off for low power mode



Also low power 970FX processors were described:



1.2GHz at 13W
1.4GHz at 13W
1.6GHz at 16W

Introduction to Shell Scripting, part 6

Faces is a python project management system.

A new Mars/Antarctic vehicle.

.htaccess tutorial.

Linux podcasts

GCC Summit 2005 Diary

I am considering buying AquaMinds NoteTaker. Jeff Dingler has been using it for a while. I tried OmniOutliner and it does not look quite a nice as NoteTaker. I could not get OmniOutliner v 2.x to insert images. I was amused to see the Stanford campus in one of the NoteTaker demos.

When you have an EndNote file that has only been cp'ed rather than Mac OSX dragged, it looses its resource fork info. EndNote will refuse to open this file. I get something like this:

open references.end



2005-07-06 13:55:22.831 open[1271] LSOpenFromURLSpec() returned -10814
   for application (null) path references.end.
2005-07-06 13:55:22.831 open[1271] Couldn't open file: references.end

There is an easy solution:

  /Developer/Tools/SetFile -c ENDN -t ENDB references.end

I got responses back for the best ways to reference Seismic Unix and MB-System. Here is what their authors have to say.

From John Stockwell:



Approved Reference Format:
In publications, please refer to SU as per the following example:
Cohen, J. K. and Stockwell, Jr. J. W., (200_), CWP/SU: Seismic Un*x
Release No. __: a free package for seismic research and processing,
Center for Wave Phenomena, Colorado School of Mines.

Recent articles about SU in peer-reviewed journals:

• Saeki, T., (1999), A guide to Seismic Un*x (SU)(2)---examples of data processing (part 1), data input and preparation of headers, Butsuri-Tansa (Geophysical Exploration), vol. 52, no. 5, 465-477.
  
  
• Stockwell, Jr. J. W. (1999), The CWP/SU: Seismic Un*x Package, Computers and Geosciences, May 1999.
  
  
• Stockwell, Jr. J. W. (1997), Free Software in Education: A case study of CWP/SU: Seismic Un*x, The Leading Edge, July 1997.
  
  
• Templeton, M. E., Gough, C.A., (1998), Web Seismic Un*x: Making seismic reflection processing more accessible, Computers and Geosciences, in press.

From Dave Caress:



We're trying to write a short G3 technical paper to provide a recent
reference, but haven't got it done.  In the meantime, I use a
combination of a 1996 paper and a reference to the MB-System web site:

• Caress, D. W., and D. N. Chayes, Improved processing of Hydrosweep DS multibeam data on the R/V Maurice Ewing, Mar. Geophys. Res., 18, 631-650, 1996.
  
  
• Caress, D. W., D. N. Chayes, and V. Schmidt, "MB-System",

leo

  Leo is: 1) a programmers, outlining editor and a flexible browser, 2)
  a literate programming tool, 3) a data organizer and project
  manager. 4) fully scriptable using Python, 5) Portable. Leo.py will
  run on any platform with Python and Tk/tcl.

Pseusdo static typing for python: http://merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/wiki/index.php?title=Inventor_Projects_2005

Most of authors have placed them in the public domain, however they will be happy if you keep their names with the sources. You can also send an email to the author if you really liked his project or want to discuss something.

Note: The sources are without support, just as the people put them there. Some of them are excelent, some of them just do something.

BeOS: Has-Been Or Will-Be? open-BeOS (Haiku)

Button Maker

pystats is only at 0.1, but could be useful .

JWZ on Mail.app flags - one of those things that someday I could really use, so I will paste it here.

  Mail.app in 10.4 stores each message in its own file. The first line
  has an ASCII integer on it, the length in bytes of the message; then
  comes the message; then an XML "plist" blob with a few key/value
  pairs like "sender" and "subject". One of those properties is
  "flags", holding an integer, presumably bits indicating "unread",
  "replied", etc. But there are a lot of bits set in there -- some
  otherwise-uncomplicated messages seem to make use of up to 30
  bits. What are they? 



  Update: An anonymous benefactor has the goods:



0	read	                 1 << 0
1	deleted	                 1 << 1
2	answered     	         1 << 2
3	encrypted	         1 << 3
4	flagged	                 1 << 4
5	recent	                 1 << 5
6	draft	                 1 << 6
7	initial (no longer used) 1 << 7
8	forwarded	         1 << 8
9	redirected	         1 << 9
10-15  	attachment count	3F << 10 (6 bits)
16-22  	priority level	        7F << 16 (7 bits)
23	signed	                 1 << 23
24	is junk	                 1 << 24
25	is not junk	         1 << 25
26-28  	font size delta	         7 << 26 (3 bits)
29	junk mail level recorded 1 << 29
30	highlight text in toc	 1 << 30
31	(unused)

Not being able to truly use the capabilities in my cell phone is really annoying. Especially when I see that the tech support area in the Verizon store is just a PC with a big black box serial port selector box to cope with all the different connectors. From slashdot: Hacking the Motorola v265

  Unfortunately, Verizon Wireless cripples their phones so that you
  have to use their fee-based service in order to add new ringtones,
  or to transfer the pictures you take with the camera. The Verizon
  logo conceals the date display on the main screen and covers over
  the top portion of the background, among various other corporate
  silliness. Selling a device that is intentionally crippled is just
  plain ridiculous. Of course, the only natural thing to do in a
  situation like this is to hack it. 

From Geb/GROK Lab came this link. Now that I think about it, competition with China might be almost an exact duplicate to the cold war and end up with us putting people on the Moon or Mars. The space program works in strange ways. The Future of NASA from the Daily Kos

Now this is cool: Google Maps with Transparencies!

History of the NeXT - If only I could have figured out how to make the NeXT get past /afs/ to ir.stanford.edu without waiting 30 minutes to stat all the cells across the US... then I might have really started to like using the NeXT boxes that were around. Hey JJ, you have got to write up some of your experiences! A lot of us would love to hear some of your war stories!

We got an excellent dual show last night. First the red tide was going strong with nuclear green waves coming in to the beach. The we got two good firework shows looking out at La Jolla.

Windows XP services



Slashdot: Graphics In Science. Nature online: Artists and scientists conspire at conference

Cartoons and morphing software may help to convey scientists' finds.



  "We must do this more often" was the constant refrain at a gathering
  of scientists, artists, film makers, designers, writers, editors and
  art historians at a meeting in Los Angeles. They were there to
  explore the use of images in science, for both understanding data
  and communicating it to others. 



  Image and Meaning 2, held from 23 to 25 June at the Getty art
  museum, was the successor to the first conference of this sort,
  staged in 2001 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
  Boston. 



  The conference series is the brainchild of Felice Frankel, a science
  photographer working at MIT. Frankel helps scientists present their
  work using imagery that is both informative and striking. Her
  photographs have graced many covers of Nature and Science. 



  Frankel convened the meeting because, she says, "we have a serious
  problem. There is an assumption that in science our graphics
  communicate. But they often don't." Frankel argues that many
  scientists don't see imagery as an integral part of the scientific
  process. This, she says, is doing the community a disservice. 
  ...

NASA's Deep Impact did it's thing yesterday.

BBC news: Japan monitors 'volcanic' steam

  An underwater volcano is thought to be behind a huge column of steam
  above the Pacific Ocean, Japanese officials say. 



  The coast guard sent helicopters to monitor the 1,000m (3,280ft)
  cloud, 1,120km (700 miles) south-east of Tokyo, and warned ships to
  stay away. 



  The team said the area around the site appeared to be red.



  "It's highly likely that it's caused by an eruption of an underwater
  volcano," coast guard spokesman Shigeyuki Sato said, adding it had
  happened before. 



  Japanese troops stationed on the island of Iwo Jima first noticed
  the cloud of steam on Saturday. 



  Television footage showed white smoke billowing into the sky from the
  brick-red water.

A better picture is on MSNBC

A artical on Dan Mass who has made some really nice 3D movies of NASA projects.

Win XP Tweaking Companion - 170 page pdf

Just had my track pad freak out. Zooming across the screen when I let go. Restarted and all is better now. Phew!

RSS inventor slams Apple's podcast approach

  Cupertino (CA) - With the release of iTunes 4.9, Apple included the
  first edition of a long-anticipated XML document type definition
  (DTD) for RSS 2.0, that will enable access to podcasts. Apple aims
  to build podcast support directly into both the software and iPod,
  but leaders in the RSS community, including the standard's own
  creator, are taking Apple to task for developing an ill-advised DTD
  without seeking input and guidance from the community. 



  So-called "media RSS" implementations would enable podcasts to be
  categorized by any syndication service, the way existing RSS tags
  today enable text pages--including Tom's Hardware Guide pages--to be
  listed on many syndication services today, including Moreover. Last
  February, Yahoo released an updated media RSS specification that,
  while receiving minor critiques, has been generally embraced for its
  openness and adaptability. 



  But last Tuesday, responding to Apple's iTunes 4.9 release on one of
  his many blogs, Dave Winer, the creator of the original RSS standard
  and its most vocal supporter, chastised Apple for explicitly using
  the name of its technology, "itunes," within the DTD namespace. With
  this and other measures that appear, at least on the surface, to be
  part of an unsupported effort to make the iTunes DTD proprietary,
  and a podcast's inclusion in the iTunes catalog exclusive to Apple.  



  Suddenly, the company indirectly responsible for naming one of
  today's hottest technologies, is being chastised not only for being
  slow to adopt, but also appearing to hide an ulterior motive.  



  By toughing out the development of the iTunes DTD on its own, stated
  Tristan Louis, one of RSS' earliest proponents and editor of
  TNL.net, "Apple has made a number of mistakes that show that they
  don't truly understand a) how XML works, b) how RSS works, and c)
  how the RSS community and community process works. Now, this is not
  the first time that Apple is using a standard to extend its own
  agenda. However, considering the level of support that RSS has been
  getting from other vendors--most recently, Microsoft--it is
  surprising to see that Apple would want to corner itself into its
  own small space." Microsoft recently announced its plans to support
  RSS within Longhorn, the next generation of Windows; and its appeal
  for community support and input has lately received some praise. 



  ...

Publishing audio podcasts with CL-HTTP

  Apple has just released iTunes 4.9 with support for
  podcasts. Podcasts are audio content you can download to your
  computer. Apple hosts a large list of free podcasts. You can add
  podcasts that are not listed at Apple to iTunes, too. Just drag the
  podcast URL onto your iTunes podcast listing. iTunes will by default
  look once a day if there are new podcasts that you have subscribed
  to and download them. If you have an iPod, you can sync them to the
  iPod, take them with you and listen to the audio while you are on
  the road, in a train, ... Podcasting brings Internet-based audio
  broadcasting to the masses. 



  Clearly even with a Lisp-based web server, we want to join the
  movement. Time for a little experiment: publishing podcasts for
  iTunes with CL-HTTP. 

Crazy stuff!

Blogging for dollars - I don't make any money off this, but others do. My 1000 views last month would not add up to much anyways.

  In mid-July of this year, the new weblog service Typepad launched,
  and after a couple months of beta-testing I was hooked on the
  features. Rather than try and move my highly-customized blog over to
  the service, I decided starting a new site would be much easier, so
  I decided my next site would be housed at Typepad. 



  I've long been a fan of TiVo, having owned one for the past three
  years. Last year I finally started hacking them and found it to be
  much easier than I thought. I have always followed TiVo news, I'm
  often writing long emails evangelizing the product to those that
  ask, and I've wanted to write easier how-tos than the ones I'd read
  on TiVo hacking. I realized then that a blog focused on the digital
  recorder space would be perfect for Typepad, and PVRblog was born
  (actually I originally wanted to call it DVRblog, but accidentally
  bought pvrblog.com before I realized my mistake, so pvrblog it is). 



  When I started planning and designing the site, I realized that
  since it was at Typepad, it was going to cost me some money to run
  it each month. Currently I already have one commercial unix account,
  a co-located debian server, and a co-located windows server. I
  wasn't looking forward to another monthly bill, so I looked at my
  options and realized I could throw Google's Adsense textads into the
  template and perhaps defray the costs. I designed the site templates
  with this in mind, making sure there was room for it. 



  ...

ExtremeTech recommended gear

Check out the relief on this Opportunity MI picture: 1M173457552EFF55W4P2956M2M1

2005 IDEA design contest.

Whacked out signs

MOC image of a dusty volcanoe

Tips for photographing fireworks. Yes, I already know that I should use a tripod.

vObject - python library for vCard and vCalendar files.

Not like I have time to go to these things, but I have always wanted to see what a Usenix even is like. USENIX Lisa 05 in San Diego. Lisa == Large Installation System Administration

  Join us in San Diego, CA, December 4-9, 2005, for the most in-depth,
  real-world system administration training available.  The annual
  LISA conference is the meeting place of choice for system, network,
  database, storage, security, and all other computer-related
  administrators. Administrators of all specialties and levels of
  expertise meet at LISA to exchange ideas, sharpen old skills, learn
  new techniques, debate current issues, and meet colleagues and
  friends.

Some things are worth really quoting. I would have disagreed with this until 1999. Now I know that bash is better than csh/tcsh. If you write scripts in csh/tcsh. STOP RIGHT NOW It is not that hard to switch, so SWITCH TO BASH!

And if you are doing complicated stuff, shouldn't you be using python?

Csh Programming Considered Harmful

From: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell, comp.unix.questions, comp.unix.programmer, 
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
Subject: Csh Programming Considered Harmful
Date: 6 Oct 1996 14:03:18 GMT
Message-ID: <538e76$8uq$1@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>



Archive-name: unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot
Version: $Id: csh-faq,v 1.7 95/09/28 12:52:17 tchrist Exp Locker: tchrist $



The following periodic article answers in excruciating detail
the frequently asked question "Why shouldn't I program in csh?".
It is available for anon FTP from perl.com in /pub/perl/versus/csh.whynot.gz



	       *** CSH PROGRAMMING CONSIDERED HARMFUL ***



    Resolved: The csh is a tool utterly inadequate for programming, 
	      and its use for such purposes should be strictly banned!



I am continually shocked and dismayed to see people write test cases,
install scripts, and other random hackery using the csh.  Lack of
proficiency in the Bourne shell has been known to cause errors in /etc/rc
and .cronrc files, which is a problem, because you *must* write these files
in that language.



The csh is seductive because the conditionals are more C-like, so the path
of least resistance is chosen and a csh script is written.  Sadly, this is
a lost cause, and the programmer seldom even realizes it, even when they
find that many simple things they wish to do range from cumbersome to
impossible in the csh.






1. FILE DESCRIPTORS



The most common problem encountered in csh programming is that
you can't do file-descriptor manipulation.  All you are able to 
do is redirect stdin, or stdout, or dup stderr into stdout. 
Bourne-compatible shells offer you an abundance of more exotic
possibilities.    



1a. Writing Files



In the Bourne shell, you can open or dup arbitrary file descriptors.
For example, 



    exec 2>errs.out



means that from then on, stderr goes into errs file.



Or what if you just want to throw away stderr and leave stdout
alone?    Pretty simple operation, eh?



    cmd 2>/dev/null



Works in the Bourne shell.  In the csh, you can only make a pitiful 
attempt like this:



    (cmd > /dev/tty) >& /dev/null



But who said that stdout was my tty?  So it's wrong.  This simple
operation *CANNOT BE DONE* in the csh.






Along these same lines, you can't direct error messages in csh scripts
out stderr as is considered proper.  In the Bourne shell, you might say:



	echo "$0: cannot find $file" 1>&2



but in the csh, you can't redirect stdout out stderr, so you end
up doing something silly like this:



	sh -c 'echo "$0: cannot find $file" 1>&2'



1b. Reading Files



In the csh, all you've got is $<, which reads a line from your tty.  What
if you've redirected stdin?  Tough noogies, you still get your tty, which 
you really can't redirect.  Now, the read statement 
in the Bourne shell allows you to read from stdin, which catches
redirection.  It also means that you can do things like this:



    exec 3<file1
    exec 4<file2



Now you can read from fd 3 and get lines from file1, or from file2 through
fd 4.   In modern, Bourne-like shells, this suffices: 



    read some_var 0<&3
    read another_var 0<&4



Although in older ones where read only goes from 0, you trick it:



    exec 5<&0  # save old stdin
    exec 0<&3; read some_var
    exec 0<&4; read another_var
    exec 0<&5  # restore it






1c. Closing FDs



In the Bourne shell, you can close file descriptors you don't
want open, like 2>&-, which isn't the same as redirecting it
to /dev/null.



1d. More Elaborate Combinations



Maybe you want to pipe stderr to a command and leave stdout alone.
Not too hard an idea, right?  You can't do this in the csh as I
mentioned in 1a.  In a Bourne shell, you can do things like this:



    exec 3>&1; grep yyy xxx 2>&1 1>&3 3>&- | sed s/file/foobar/ 1>&2 3>&-
    grep: xxx: No such foobar or directory



Normal output would be unaffected.  The closes there were in case
something really cared about all its FDs.  We send stderr to sed,
and then put it back out 2.



Consider the pipeline:



    A | B | C



You want to know the status of C, well, that's easy: it's in $?, or
$status in csh.  But if you want it from A, you're out of luck -- if
you're in the csh, that is.  In the Bourne shell, you can get it, although
doing so is a bit tricky.  Here's something I had to do where I ran dd's
stderr into a grep -v pipe to get rid of the records in/out noise, but had
to return the dd's exit status, not the grep's:



    device=/dev/rmt8
    dd_noise='^[0-9]+\+[0-9]+ records (in|out)$'
    exec 3>&1
    status=`((dd if=$device ibs=64k 2>&1 1>&3 3>&- 4>&-; echo $? >&4) |
		egrep -v "$dd_noise" 1>&2 3>&- 4>&-) 4>&1`
    exit $status;






The csh has also been known to close all open file descriptors besides
the ones it knows about, making it unsuitable for applications that 
intend to inherit open file descriptors.






2. COMMAND ORTHOGONALITY



2a. Built-ins



The csh is a horrid botch with its built-ins.  You can't put them
together in many reasonable ways.   Even simple little things like this:	



	    % time | echo



which while nonsensical, shouldn't give me this message:



	    Reset tty pgrp from 9341 to 26678



Others are more fun:



	    % sleep 1 | while
	    while: Too few arguments.
	    [5] 9402
	    % jobs
	    [5]     9402 Done                 sleep |






Some can even hang your shell.  Try typing ^Z while you're sourcing 
something, or redirecting a source command.  Just make sure you have
another window handy.  Or try 



    % history | more



on some systems.



Aliases are not evaluated everywhere you would like them do be:



    % alias lu 'ls -u'
    % lu
    HISTORY  News     bin      fortran  lib      lyrics   misc     tex
    Mail     TEX      dehnung  hpview   logs     mbox     netlib
    % repeat 3 lu
    lu: Command not found.
    lu: Command not found.
    lu: Command not found.



    % time lu
    lu: Command not found.






2b. Flow control



You can't mix flow-control and commands, like this:
    
    who | while read line; do
	echo "gotta $line"
    done






You can't combine multiline constructs in a csh using semicolons.
There's no easy way to do this



    alias cmd 'if (foo) then bar; else snark; endif'






You can't perform redirections with if statements that are
evaluated solely for their exit status:



    if ( { grep vt100 /etc/termcap > /dev/null } ) echo ok



And even pipes don't work:



    if ( { grep vt100 /etc/termcap | sed 's/$/###' } ) echo ok



But these work just fine in the Bourne shell:



    if grep vt100 /etc/termcap > /dev/null ; then echo ok; fi   



    if grep vt100 /etc/termcap | sed 's/$/###/' ; then echo ok; fi






Consider the following reasonable construct:



  if ( { command1 | command2 } ) then
      ...
  endif



The output of command1 won't go into the input of command2.  You will get
the output of both commands on standard output.  No error is raised.  In
the Bourne shell or its clones, you would say 



    if command1 | command2 ; then
	...
    fi






2c. Stupid parsing bugs



Certain reasonable things just don't work, like this:



    % kill -1 `cat foo`
    `cat foo`: Ambiguous.



But this is ok:



    % /bin/kill -1 `cat foo`



If you have a stopped job:



    [2]     Stopped              rlogin globhost



You should be able to kill it with 



    % kill %?glob
    kill: No match



but



    % fg %?glob



works.



White space can matter:



    if(expr)



may fail on some versions of csh, while



    if (expr)



works!  Your vendor may have attempted to fix this bug, but odds are good
that their csh still won't be able to handle



    if(0) then
      if(1) then
          echo A: got here
      else
          echo B: got here
      endif
      echo We should never execute this statement
    endif









3. SIGNALS



In the csh, all you can do with signals is trap SIGINT.  In the Bourne
shell, you can trap any signal, or the end-of-program exit.    For example,
to blow away a tempfile on any of a variety of signals:



    $ trap 'rm -f /usr/adm/tmp/i$$ ;
	    echo "ERROR: abnormal exit";
	    exit' 1 2 3 15



    $ trap 'rm tmp.$$' 0   # on program exit









4. QUOTING



You can't quote things reasonably in the csh:



    set foo = "Bill asked, \"How's tricks?\""



doesn't work.  This makes it really hard to construct strings with
mixed quotes in them.  In the Bourne shell, this works just fine. 
In fact, so does this:



     cd /mnt; /usr/ucb/finger -m -s `ls \`u\``



Dollar signs cannot be escaped in double quotes in the csh.  Ug.



    set foo = "this is a \$dollar quoted and this is $HOME not quoted" 
    dollar: Undefined variable.



You have to use backslashes for newlines, and it's just darn hard to
get them into strings sometimes.



    set foo = "this \
    and that";
    echo $foo
    this  and that
    echo "$foo"
    Unmatched ".  



Say what?  You don't have these problems in the Bourne shell, where it's
just fine to write things like this:



    echo 	'This is 
	     some text that contains
	     several newlines.'






As distributed, quoting history references is a challenge.  Consider:



    % mail adec23!alberta!pixel.Convex.COM!tchrist
    alberta!pixel.Convex.COM!tchri: Event not found.






5. VARIABLE SYNTAX



There's this big difference between global (environment) and local
(shell) variables.  In csh, you use a totally different syntax 
to set one from the other.  



In the Bourne shell, this 
    VAR=foo cmds args
 is the same as
    (export VAR; VAR=foo; cmd args)
or csh's
    (setenv VAR;  cmd args)
 
You can't use :t, :h, etc on envariables.  Watch:
	echo Try testing with $SHELL:t



It's really nice to be able to say
    
    ${PAGER-more}
or
    FOO=${BAR:-${BAZ}}



to be able to run the user's PAGER if set, and more otherwise.
You can't do this in the csh.  It takes more verbiage.



You can't get the process number of the last background command from the
csh, something you might like to do if you're starting up several jobs in
the background.  In the Bourne shell, the pid of the last command put in
the background is available in $!.



The csh is also flaky about what it does when it imports an 
environment variable into a local shell variable, as it does
with HOME, USER, PATH, and TERM.  Consider this:



    % setenv TERM '`/bin/ls -l / > /dev/tty`'
    % csh -f



And watch the fun!






6. EXPRESSION EVALUATION



Consider this statement in the csh:






    if ($?MANPAGER) setenv PAGER $MANPAGER






Despite your attempts to only set PAGER when you want
to, the csh aborts:



    MANPAGER: Undefined variable.



That's because it parses the whole line anyway AND EVALUATES IT!
You have to write this:



    if ($?MANPAGER) then
	setenv PAGER $MANPAGER
    endif



That's the same problem you have here:



    if ($?X && $X == 'foo') echo ok
    X: Undefined variable



This forces you to write a couple nested if statements.  This is highly
undesirable because it renders short-circuit booleans useless in
situations like these.  If the csh were the really C-like, you would
expect to be able to safely employ this kind of logic.  Consider the
common C construct:



    if (p && p->member) 



Undefined variables are not fatal errors in the Bourne shell, so 
this issue does not arise there.



While the csh does have built-in expression handling, it's not
what you might think.  In fact, it's space sensitive.  This is an
error



   @ a = 4/2



but this is ok



   @ a = 4 / 2






The ad hoc parsing csh employs fouls you up in other places 
as well.  Consider:



    % alias foo 'echo hi' ; foo
    foo: Command not found.
    % foo
    hi









7. ERROR HANDLING



Wouldn't it be nice to know you had an error in your script before
you ran it?   That's what the -n flag is for: just check the syntax.
This is especially good to make sure seldom taken segments of code
code are correct.  Alas, the csh implementation of this doesn't work.
Consider this statement:



    exit (i)



Of course, they really meant



    exit (1)



or just



    exit 1



Either shell will complain about this.  But if you hide this in an if
clause, like so:



    #!/bin/csh -fn
    if (1) then
	exit (i)
    endif



The csh tells you there's nothing wrong with this script.  The equivalent
construct in the Bourne shell, on the other hand, tells you this:






    #!/bin/sh -n
    if (1) then
	exit (i)
    endif



    /tmp/x: syntax error at line 3: `(' unexpected









RANDOM BUGS



Here's one:



    fg %?string
    ^Z
    kill  %?string
    No match.



Huh? Here's another



    !%s%x%s



Coredump, or garbage.



If you have an alias with backquotes, and use that in backquotes in 
another one, you get a coredump.



Try this:
    % repeat 3 echo "/vmu*"
    /vmu*
    /vmunix
    /vmunix
What???






Here's another one:



    % mkdir tst
    % cd tst
    % touch '[foo]bar'
    % foreach var ( * )
    > echo "File named $var"
    > end
    foreach: No match.






8. SUMMARY






While some vendors have fixed some of the csh's bugs (the tcsh also does
much better here), many have added new ones.  Most of its problems can
never be solved because they're not actually bugs per se, but rather the
direct consequences of braindead design decisions.  It's inherently flawed.



Do yourself a favor, and if you *have* to write a shell script, do it in the 
Bourne shell.  It's on every UNIX system out there.  However, behavior 
can vary.



There are other possibilities.



The Korn shell is the preferred programming shell by many sh addicts,
but it still suffers from inherent problems in the Bourne shell's design,
such as parsing and evaluation horrors.  The Korn shell or its
public-domain clones and supersets (like bash) aren't quite so ubiquitous
as sh, so it probably wouldn't be wise to write a sharchive in them that
you post to the net.  When 1003.2 becomes a real standard that companies
are forced to adhere to, then we'll be in much better shape.  Until
then, we'll be stuck with bug-incompatible versions of the sh lying about.



The Plan 9 shell, rc, is much cleaner in its parsing and evaluation; it is
not widely available, so you'd be significantly sacrificing portability.
No vendor is shipping it yet.



If you don't have to use a shell, but just want an interpreted language,
many other free possibilities present themselves, like Perl, REXX, TCL,
Scheme, or Python.  Of these, Perl is probably the most widely available
on UNIX (and many other) systems and certainly comes with the most
extensive UNIX interface.  Increasing numbers vendors ship Perl with 
their standard systems.  (See the comp.lang.perl FAQ for a list.)



If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it
exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want
to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you.  You can get
at networking functions, binary data, and most of the C library. There
are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts,
as well as a symbolic debugger.  Tchrist's personal rule of thumb is
that if it's the size that fits in a Makefile, it gets written in the
Bourne shell, but anything bigger gets written in Perl.



See the comp.lang.{perl,rexx,tcl} newsgroups for details about these
languages (including FAQs), or David Muir Sharnoff's comparison of 
freely available languages and tools in comp.lang.misc and news.answers.



NOTE: Doug Hamilton <hamilton@bix.com> has a program that he sells for
profit for little toy non-UNIX systems.  He calls it 'csh' or the 
'hamilton csh', but it's not a csh as it's neither bug nor feature
compatible with the real csh.  Actually, he's fixed a great deal, but
in doing so, has created a totally different shell.
-- 
Tom Christiansen      Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker      tchrist@mox.perl.com
"Espousing the eponymous /cgi-bin/perl.exe?FMH.pl execution model is like 
reading a suicide note -- three days too late."
	    --Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>

DIY: Wireless Weatherproof Outdoor Camera Rig

Yesterday, I tried to do some seismic processing while writing up a blog entry. When I did a display line.tif and an doing a ghostscript conversion at the same time. That totally locked up laptop. I got a blue screen and a rainbow pinwheel of doom. Music kept playing and the mouse worked, but after 20 minutes, it was still very hung. Lost the blog entry too
Yesterday, I talked to Jeff Dingler about what made the difference between the seismic images he makes verses what Dan Brothers made. Turns out the difference is primarily with the band pass filter. To get rid of the banding, just turn up the frequency of the bottom limit of the band pass filter.

I was using this filter before:

  filter
    fno $FNO lno $LNO ftype 99  pass 150 6500 end
  end

Moving from 150 Hz to 600 Hz made a big difference:

  filter
    fno $FNO lno $LNO ftype 99  pass 600 6500 end
  end

The problem with this narrower band pass is that a lot of detail is getting washed out.

Another good note. The gif image format does an excellent job of encoding these images at a small file size.

A tip from Alison LaBonte:

For best resolution for Matlab figures:

1. Maximize the figure window
2. File menu - export settings (whatever changes you want to make) - apply to figure
3. make any additional changes to figure
4. File menu - page setup click 'landscape', 'man position and size', 'max aspect' or 'fill page'
5. File menu - export settings - 'export' as a pdf

Note: after you apply export settings to figure, if you go into export settings again but don't want to make any changes, you must click OK to exit. If you click cancel to close the export settings window, it will undo original changes you had made.