Monument ([info]marnanel) wrote,
@ 2009-06-28 21:37:00
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Entry tags:day, firinel, joule, plexq, shavian

Sunday
Woke up at a good time, around seven.  Promptly and stupidly decided to go back to sleep to see what the end of the dream was; it turned out to be a nightmare.  Woke up again at about eleven and went to the gym.  Continued the run of stupid mistakes by forgetting to get lunch for Rio.  Sharon came by and brought her lunch instead.  I hate getting up late. :(

Later, went to the diner for dinner.  Talked to Alex about a shelving project he's working on.

Did a little tidying, but not very much.  But I've got some way towards Inbox Zero: I'm now down to four emails.

Today I learned that cd - changes to the directory you were in before the current one.

Fin gave me an old notebook of zirs to use as a logbook.  It's lovely.

It occurs to me that the simple system I built a while ago which mostly allows Ubuntu to come up in Shavian would also work to get Deseret, Unifon and Tengwar.  I wonder whether there's much of a market for Ubuntu in Tengwar.  Possibly good Slashdot fodder, anyway.

Joule-for-Dreamwidth is edging closer.  I also need to implement a per-day view with a paging system to get around this problem.

Five days until GCDS starts.



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[info]redbird
2009-06-29 01:55 am UTC (link)
I'm glad to hear about Joule-for-Dreamwidth, though DW's system of notifying users fits some of the same purpose. (It doesn't do anything for those of us who occasionally like to amuse ourselves by asking who has added/dropped other people, but some would argue that that option isn't an unmixed blessing.)

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[info]trochee
2009-06-29 05:39 am UTC (link)
i'm amused to be cited on the tengwar thing. good slashdot fodder indeed.

the cd - thing -- how did I know this? this is like pushd plus time travel. awesome.

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[info]hatter
2009-06-29 09:31 am UTC (link)
Except pushd/popd works on a list of previous directories; if you use cd - repeatedly you just flip between 2 dirs. I looked it up in the open group UNIX spec, and it lists it; but on my OS X install 1) it works using the bash builtin 2) it's not listed as an option if you force the builtin to display usage 3) it doesn't work using /usr/bin/cd (which is some magic invocation of /bin/sh, which is actually bash), because somehow the shell's $OLDPWD isn't available to it. It was a new one on me, too, hence investigating, but not motivated enough to see is solaris likes it. Bash/csh/zsh builtins all see to work though.


the hatter

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[info]simont
2009-06-29 10:54 am UTC (link)
Wait. /usr/bin/cd? That can't possibly work at all, unless you either have a system call to change another process's working directory, or do really hideous and almost certainly unreliable stuff with ptrace.

<checks> Gosh, yes, my OS X machine does indeed have a file called /usr/bin/cd, and it's a trivial shell script which does neither of the above and instead just invokes bash's built-in cd. And, exactly as I would expect, it fundamentally doesn't work – run it from a shell prompt, and it changes its own current directory and then immediately terminates, so that the calling shell's cwd is unaffected.

Apparently the same pointless script is hard-linked to about fifteen unhelpful names such as /usr/bin/alias, /usr/bin/umask and /usr/bin/jobs. Blimey. One or two of them might do something faintly useful (/usr/bin/type, for instance, assuming the subshell inherits all the alias and shell function settings from its parent), but really, who thought that lot up?

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[info]hatter
2009-06-29 11:14 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I first thought 'hmm, maybe builtins do magic' before thinking 'but cd is fundamentally an environmental issue. It seems to lay the blame at FreeBSD's feet, maybe they have a reason to break out all the builtins. A man with a big beard claims it's to make the POSIX standards less verbose.


the hatter

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