For the most part I enjoy working on my Mac, mostly for its unfettered shell access, day to day apps (iCal, Mail) and timesaving graces like LaunchBar (just turned my PC back on last week after a month-long haitus. That being said, for some tasks (image processing, ripping/encoding) there’s just no comparison. Also, I’m not a huge iTunes fan (WinAmp any day of the week), and there’s just nothing on OS X on par w/ Trillian or TopStyle.

• Neat Image – I still haven’t found any noise removal app better than this, although Noise Ninja is supposedly coming to the Mac (Q2 ’04)
• Noise Reduction Tool Comparison – Michael Almond gives a buncha ’em a workout
• A report on processing performance – 2004 update of Rob Galbraith’s PC vs Mac for RAW processing

• The Far Side 5 – Worth 1000: Far Side cartoons made real.
• Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search – wow, dedication
• Nestacos – best 8-bit potty humor ever
• Tim’s Chemistry Exam – this thing is great
• Smittens – Walking Mittens For Friends & Lovers

• A History of Apple’s Operating Systems
  

  This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X. An important goal of the discussion is to better understand the reasons, and if possible, the rationale behind Mac OS X and its important components. This, in turn, will be helpful in understanding and appreciating the system as it is today.

• The history of the Apple logo – a new series of articles at Macnyt
• LinuxQuestions.org – an Linux KB on MediaWiki; It occurred to me today that it’d be nice to have a nice xref’ed shell scripting KB

I’m sure there’s a less ugly way to do it, but here’s a command to get a list of files owned by a user ordered by last modified date:

find ./ -user root | xargs ls -ld | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f6-9 | sed 's/^Jan/01/; s/^Feb/02/; s/^Mar/03/; s/^Apr/04/; s/^May/05/; s/^Jun/06/; s/^Jul/07/; s/^Aug/08/; s/^Sep/09/; s/^Oct/10/; s/^Nov/11/; s/^Dec/12/; s/ [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9] / 2004 /' | sort -n -t ' ' -k3 -k1 -k2 | tac

This does a find/xargs to list instead of an ls -r to give full paths. There’s an ugly sed-script because while sort allows multi-key sorting, it doesn’t allow changing order types (there’s a -M flag that will sort month dates, but it’s global, same with -n for numeric sorting, I couldn’t find a way to assign differenting sorts for each of the keys).

At around the point of doing multi-key sorting I probably should have switched to an actual programming language, but it became a ‘principal of it’ thing at that point.

• Find Files in Unix Filesystems
• Alexa extensions to GNU utils
• Perl Practicum: Out of Sorts – part of the Perl Practicum, a series of articles from 1993 to 1997
• A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting
• Perl: grep, map and sort
• Custom sorting records by date (without SQL)

So, finding the files/folders owned by a single user is pretty straight-forward (find ./ -user $USER), but what if you want to find out a count of the files owned by all the users in a folder tree?

# find out number of files owned by users in a folder tree
ls -lARF | cut -d ' ' -f4,4 | grep -v ':' | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Basically, list all the files, then cut so you get just the username, then get rid of extraneous lines, sort together so you can get a unique count, and do a reverse numerical sort to get a descending list.

grep '.' will also work for returning characters only, also awk NF.

• Text Processing Commands
• Complex Commands
• Tips for UNIX users: Listing files (more); Answers
• The Linux Cookbook: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use
• Strip empty lines grep -v ‘^$’

• Dynamically configured mass virtual hosting
• rotatelogs – Piped logging program to rotate Apache logs
• LogToMysql – piped logging from Apache to MySQL
• mod_log_sql: An Apache module for logging to an SQL database

Taking the President Match quiz shows myself (of the remaining candidates) most closely aligned w/ Kucinich at 85%. Kerry doesn’t do too bad at 81%, however. By comparison, Bush matches 4%.

• System Administration Guide: Security Services – see BSM overview, managing BSM Service
• FOCUS on Sun: Solaris BSM Auditing
• Using IP Filter to Protect a Solaris 7, 8, or 9 Workstation

This looks to be a very promising collaborative workgroup tool. Allows instantiation of multiple projects/subprojects w/ their own membership. Channel replication/dataflow push that looks fairly unique… also, standard file repos, forums, issue tracking, wiki, membership options. (Java App, runs on JOnAS, an open source J2EE application server.

LibreSource is an open free software platform that aims at hosting virtual teams and distributed communities for a large range of activities, including co-authoring, co-development and co-engineering activities, for a large spectrum of software and non-software applications. It wants to become an important structuring elements of the free software community, for both industrial and academic actors.

Apparently something that came out of New York, but seems like it’d be a perfect match in LA.

Movieoke – A form of entertainment in which a person acts out scenes from a movie while a silent version of the movie plays in the background.