Source Guru

Online food shopping - oh the joy.

When you shop for food online, generally, something will be out of stock, so you’ll get it substituted for a similar item.  This I can accept.

However, my monthly shopping came last night, and there was one replacement.

This would have been fine, it was a pasta sauce that they simply substituted for another flavour. However, for some reason, they substituted 2 x Flavour I asked for for 3 x Other Flavour.

Considering that the products differ only on their content (the flavour) and are the same price and weight, what makes them think that adding an extra one to my order is correct?

*sighs* I accepted it anyways, as it was actually the flavour I wanted, but couldn’t find on the website.

And on another note, darn Firefox for flagging up “flavour” as a spelling mistake. (even with the language set to en_GB!)

If you are viewing this on a planet, you may need to click here to view the video

Hehe. As I’m moving soon, and I’m only going to have wireless internet, I thought I’d sit down and have a look to see whether the D-Link USB adapter I’ve had for about 2 years would actually work with Linux, which, while it had previously picked up details of the networks, never seemed to work.

After reading through a couple of Ubuntu Wiki Pages, I managed to download, compile and install the working module - and guess what - it works!

Now this is great news - I won’t have to go out and search for a new Wireless Dongle/Card, and well - seeing as the end of my ethernet cable is missing the clip, and keeps falling out of the router, I can now use wireless! woohoo! (and it’s even working with WPA!)

Oh, and hello Planet #bitfolk

It’s coming up to that time of year when the London PHP Conference is gearing up and getting ready to go.

Head on over to http://www.phpconference.co.uk/ to book your tickets!

When a few people in IRC noticed Daniel Silverstone’s post about his new phone number, that started a whole conversation regarding whether his number crunching alogorithm was good enough.

I made a lovely script in PHP, which told me the numbers that it could have been.

There are 67786 combinations that it could be, it took me about 27 seconds to find that once I’d written and debugged the code.

It’s an interesting puzzle, so if you’re bored, why not write some code and see whether you can get the same answer?

“I am your father”

It’s official, The President said it

On another note - one heck of a day at work. I need a drink

So, after the last blog post, I was talking to Seveas and mentioned how I thought with all the nifty and useful commands coming in on here, I might make a niftyutils package. The conversation is as follows

<Mez> thinking of compiling a few of these into a nifty-utils package
<Seveas> so we have coreutils, moreutils and nifty-utils?
<Seveas> just contribute them to moreutils
<Mez> and a few more
<Mez> patch-utils being the most obvious
<Mez> findutils, psutils …
<Seveas> dennis@mirage:~$ apt-cache -n search utils | wc -l
<Seveas> 266

Ok, so I had to get one up on this, as I only wanted fooutils, not foo-utils or foo-utils-bar, and came up with

apt-cache search utils | awk '{print $1}' | egrep '^.*[^-]utils$' | wc -l

for which I got told off. Awk can do everything, so why pipe to grep?

After a bit of back and forthing, the equivalent command, without egrep is

apt-cache search utils | awk '/^[[:alnum:]]*([-[:alnum:]])*[^-]utils[[:space:]].*/' | wc -l

I think the first version was prettier.

Oh, and another comment relating to my last post, specially going out for “Bork Fomb”:- I’ve deleted your post, and I’m glad I have approval on here - you could have done some damage to people who didn’t know what that does, so here’s a special command, just for you

sudo iptables -I INPUT -s 77.185.71.113 -j DROP

So, helping someone with an issue earlier (amarok had crashed and they couldn’t kill it properly), I told them to issue the following command

ps x | awk '/amarok/ {print $1}' | xargs kill -9

Now, this is a command I use a lot to kill programs that are being evil (generally, I use it to kill evolution!)

But the comment came back “That’s nifty!”

So I’ve got to ask, what are your favourite “nifty” commands? and what do they do?

<edit> So far, within 5 mins of posting this, I’ve had 2 people ask why I don’t just use killall

mez@apathy:~$ ps x -ocommand | grep [e]vo
evolution
/usr/lib/evolution/evolution-data-server-1.12 <snip>
/usr/lib/evolution/2.12/evolution-exchange-storage <snip>

Today on the way to work, a truck crashed into the railway bridge as my train was going over it. Luckily, noone was injured, and it was right by the station I had to get off at anyway. Now at work, but have an interesting photo to add to my collection

(Click for full size image)

Sorry about the quality, it was taken on my Mobile Phone Camera… which I spent ages playing with someone else’s Vista machine so I could get the picture off of it. Damned Proprietary Software. I should go get a greenphone