random($foo)

Just noticed something Jeffrey Veen posted on Seven Steps to Better Presentations. As an interesting contrast, MJD’s Conference Presentation Judo, a talk on giving technical presentations.

Semi-related, Edward Tufte answers questions on information design on his site.

• The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint: Q&A with Richard E. Mayer
• PowerPoint Remix – Edward R. Tuftes The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation
• Tufte, PowerPoint and Web Content – w/ an excellent comment on PPT’s parallels to television and political discourse. The latter came up in conversation w/ a friend during dinner
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• New edition of “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”
• ET on Columbia EvidenceAnalysis of Key Slide
• Powerpoint suggestions, alternatives
• Report of Columbia Accident Investigation Board: The Boeing PowerPoint Slide

• 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

• 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

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 ‘^$’

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)

• 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

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

Why Java is retarded: changing a regex in SnipSnap’s Radeox engine involves digging into the jar file, making the changes, and then reloading the entire application. That’s really just not very convenient. Am I missing something? Is it acceptable for that much downtime for seemingly trivial changes?

• Snipsnap-help – some of the syntax is quite annoying. And how does one make HR’s?
• Source Code Formatter Tutorial
• HTML 2 SnipSnap – good idea

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.