8/9     I'm 5 years out of college and I'm a lot lazier than before. I used
        to work 12 hours a day and was the king of our product. Now I barely
        work 4 hours a day (still get paid pretty well) and I don't really
        care about our product. Am I normal?
        \_ you're asking the motd if your *normal*!? um.. yeah, are you a
        \_ you're asking the motd if you're *normal*!? um.. yeah, are you a
           white or asian male between 22 and 35 who rides a bike to work
           at their sysadmin job for which they are paid upper 5 figures or
           six figires? do you carry alot of handguns? do you read unix
           source code for fun?  are you a libertarian? yes, you're normal.
        \_ I can't answer the normal/not-normal question. I'm 6 years out.
           Now I find I care more about bringing other programmers up to
           speed and turning them into better programmers. I still care
           about the product, but not as much as the company would like.
           That is, I've seen companies change product requirements at
           the slightest whim, so I don't get too attached to any particular
           product.
        \_ Well I'll be the the first to admit; I used to be a workaholic
           when I got this job at my current startup. Put in 60+ hours a week,
           worked two project sites, and almost gave up social life entirely.
           Now I limit myself to no more than 40-45 hours a week and I no
           longer live to work. I'm no longer over-passionate about work but
           still proud about what I do. Inner-happiness is, like Mastercard
           would say, priceless. - jthoms (5.5 yrs out)
           \_ I seriously hope you're not the first against the wall when
              the layoffs come.
              \_ He'll be the first up against the motd!
              \_ Luckily we're still OK in terms of financials so no layoffs
                 for us. Plus I'm still one of the cheapest employee they
                 have (since I'm the only junior guy here); and plenty of
                 useless senior guys here in front of me. :) But I am in no
                 way stating that I'm a slacker at work; I now know when to
                 stop working and enjoy life. - jthoms
                \_ how much are you paid?
                \_ Enough to cover major expenses and then some.
                |_ are you making six figures yet?  I am thinking I need to
                reach that in a year or two.  I am currently doing JSP/Servlets
                I can certainly do the whole product from start to end by mysel
              \_ Only the stupid ones don't appreciate a balanced worker.
                 Granted, too many of them are the stupid ones, but still..
                \_ considering EVERYONE went up against the wall when  the
                   layoffs came, I'm glad I didn't put 60 hrs a week into the
                   life suckers.   Doesn't matter how good your code is or
                   how good the product is, if yer company's busdev people
                   dont know how to make a buck off it.
        \_ I believe it is typical for those out of college to work
           very very hard.  Then later, cut down on their work because
           they are getting tired, or because there are other things
           in their life which are becoming more important than work.
        \_ the key is getting other people to do the work for you.  looks like
           you still got a lot to learn, grasshopper.
        \_ I must be the abnormal one here.  I've been in the business over 7
        years and I work exactly the same # of hours now as I did at the
        beginning, approx 40-45 hours/week.  The big difference is that now
        I am much more experienced, so I can tackle much larger and more
        complex projects and work much more efficiently.

8/9     Who said this:
        "Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons
        released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and
        enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources."
        \_ go go google.  Ronald Reagan (10 Sep 1980)
        \_ He was right then and he is right now.  Reagan rules!
           \_ Riiiight.                                        -Dr Evil
                \_ Someday you'll understand.
        \_ eh. what a dumbass thing to say. we were worried about dangerous
           chemicals dumped in rivers and CFCs, and he's talking about
           hydrocarbons?
           \_ He right. Tough environmental standards reduce the
              effectiveness of American industry and cause big losses
              in jobs because industry will move overseas to more hospitable
              countries. What's the point in "preserving the environment"
              when people are going to go hungry and die in the streets
              because they can't get jobs to buy food.
              \_ This doesn't quite hold up in a country with ~4% unemployment.
                 Ask the workers in those countries overseas if they have a
                 "hospitable" working environment.  Get a fucking clue before
                 you start blathering.  --scotsman
                 \_ It always amuses me when people jump to these absurd
                    ideological extremes to validate their viewpoint.  It's
                    something that I see from highschoolers most commonly.
                    It just seems so strange that someone could swallow
                    someone else's specious argument and internalize it so
                    fucking readily without really investing any of their own
                    thought.  Of course, maybe that's one of the
                    reasons the preferred age for new army recruits is in the
                    late teen age range.

8/9      Do any Java developers use make these days or has Ant pretty much
        become the de facto standard?
        \_ ant stopped sucking enough to use it six months ago, make still
           sucks
        \_ my old job used ant... worked well.
        \_ "ant" is just stupid. or rather, grotesque. XML is only
           vaguely human-readable. Gime a simple makefile any day of
           the week.
           \_ simple makefile? uh... ok go ahead... and dont get any tabs
              confused with spaces.
              \_ You must be exceptionally stupid.  I have been using make
                 for a couple years now, and this has NEVER been a problem
                 for me.  Christ, what are they teaching at UCB nowadays?
                                  \_ From the motd posts it seems like they
                                     have substitued real computers running
                                     real operating systems with cheap x86
                                     crap running Linux and Win32. You can't
                                     blame them though since most of today's
                                     incoming freshmen are so clueless its
                                     frightening.
                                        \_ you'd rather have HP crap running
                                           HP/UX?  Get a clue.   -tom
              \_ Those who confuse tabs with spaces in makefiles have
                 not yet achieved enlightenment.
           \_ I'm with you on the first part.  I just use an IDE that
              generates makefiles (acutally, jam) underneath and I
              don't need to care about it at all.
        \_ Cons!  Cons!  Cons! is the standard!   Make replacement!
        \_ I use make for just about everything. make rocks!

8/9     Any way to save emacs macros that I've defined so that I can some-
        how load then when I restart emacs?
        \_ You can put them into your .emacs file with fset.
           (fset 'macro_name "keystrokes")
           Try M-x apropos on fset to get more information.        -mice
           \_ boy that's a bad way to get help on a function.
              either do m-x describe-function or c-h f
              \- you can "compile" a macro into a elisp function. I wrote the
              emacs 18/early 19 macro2el "compiler" but that is superceeded
              by various other functionality. this is what i would look into
              if you really want a macro to be persistent. you can look at
              power-macros also. ok tnx. --mr emacs.
              \_ you can also use emacs to INDENT YOUR POST correctly.
                 --mr motd.

8/9     Are there any proactive measures to determine if a keystroke logger
        is running on your system?  Is this sort of thing even possible?
        \_ what? a keystroke-logger logger? Something to watch something
           watching your keystrokes? What if the keystroke logger is logging
           such that if it detects a keystroke logger logger being started
           or logs queries, it will intervene and spit out false info?
           \_ "you have trace-buster-buster?  I have trace-buster-buster-buster!"
              \_ Never heard of radar detecter that watches out for radars
                 watching your speed, plus the radar detector detector that the
                 cops came up with to counter that?
                 \_ how many logs could a logger log if a logger could log logs?
                 \_ How, pray tell, would a radar detector detector work?
                    \_ I have no idea.  I don't even have a radar detector.
                       You know what?  I just did a search on Yahoo and found
                       that some radar detectors can detect rador detector
                       detectors, effectively making themselves radar detector
                       detector detectors!
        \_ No, but you could fill it so full of crap that the logs would be
           worthless or difficult to use.

8/10    Are Benjamin Bratt and Michael Keaton related by blood?  They look so
        much alike.
        \_ Yes.
           \_ And their relation is ...?

8/10    Are there commonly used filename suffixes for sh scripts, csh scripts
        and tcsh scripts?  (e.g. .pl is for Perl scripts; .c is for C files.)
        Thanks.
        \_ Use .sh for sh/bash scripts; never use *csh for any sort of
                       \_ and ksh
           scripting purpose.  It does funny things sometimes-- see Unix
           Power Tools.
           \_ In the words of Tom Christiansen:
              http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot
           \_ My script is very simple and it only has several lines of
              commands.  No variable substition, no conditional, etc.  The
              only thing I need the shell to do is some filename expension
              of the form:
                cmd1 ~/foo/{`whoami`_*}/bar/{dir1,dir2,dir3} arg1 | \
                cmd2 ~/baz/`date | cut -d' ' -f1`.txt arg2
              I couldn't get this to work in my crontab file which I suppose
              uses sh syntax, so I ended up putting it in a csh script.  I
              [ Reformatted - motd formatting daemon ]
              know very little about shell scripts anyway.
              [ Reformatted - motd formatting god ]
              \_ It only works in csh because of the ~.  Some other shells
                 will let you use ~, but you should be able to rewrite it in
                 \_ But the {} part doesn't work either.  How do I do
                 sh using ${HOME} instead of ~.
                 \_ But the {} part doesn't work in sh either.  How do I do
                    "bar/{dir1,dir2,dir3}" in sh so that it expands correctly?
                    \_ for i in dir1 dir2 dir3 ; do <stuff> ; done
              \_ DIR="$HOME/foo/`whoami`_*/bar"
                 FILE="$HOME/baz/`date | cut -d' ' -f1`.txt"
                 for i in dir1 dir2 dir3 ;
                 do cmd1 "$DIR/$i" arg1 | cmd2 "$FILE" arg2 ; done
                 \_ But that means running the commands three times instead
                    of running the commands once with the three paths as
                    three arguments.
                    \_ DIR="$HOME/foo/`whoami`_*/bar"
                       FILE="$HOME/baz/`date | cut -d' ' -f1`.txt"
                       for i in dir1 dir2 dir3 ;
                       do MYDIR="$MYDIR $DIR/$i" ; done
                       cmd1 $MYDIR arg1 | cmd "$FILE" arg2
            \_ Actually, .pl is supposed to be for "perl library" files, or
               included snippets of scripts.  Whole perl scripts are supposed
               to be .p, though I never bother putting an extension on them,
               as they're executable in their own right.
               \_ What's your source? Nothing on google that supports your
                  statement, and .pl is absolutely standard usage (with
                  .ph = perl header [mostly perl4 and down] and .pm = perl
                  module [perl5 and up]). Furthermore there's a story floating
                  around about Larry Wall taking the last 2 letters of "BCPL"
                  to complete the sequence of BCPL descendants (.b, .c, .pl).
                  \_ perlcc, for starters.
               \_ In actual usage, I always see .pl as perl executables,
                  and never see .p
                  \_ indeed.
               \_ I thought perl libraries and modules had the .pm extension
                  \_ no, just modules

8/10    Can anyone recommend a good contracting company? (to work for) Or maybe
        suggestions on how to find contracts w/o a company.
        \_ what kind of work?  SA/IT?  coding?  --chris

8/9     On Win ME, something happened.  When I copy files, the file name
        gets copied but the whole filename gets capitalized (every letter).
        What happened?  How can I fix this?
        \_ why are you using WinME?  seriously.  at least use Win2k.  Jesus.
           anyway: where were you copying from?  local HD or network share?
           were you copying via Explorer, or were you copying from the command
           prompt?
           \_ explorer from local drive to external drive.
              why ME?  System came with it when I bought it.
              I didn't bother inquiring about the others
              \_ what kind of external drive?  what file system does it use?
                 \_ firewire external drive.
           \_ Isn't ME supposed to be like 95 and 98 which are for single user
              and are supposed to be lighter-weight than NT/2k/XP?
           \_ I don't use WinME so I can't say I know what the issue is.
              But it sounds like Windows is somehow retrieving the DOS
              FAT16 8char filename rather than the FAT32 long filename upon
              copying.  By default, FAT16 DOS filenames in Windows are all
              caps, right click on any shortcut in Windows for evidence by
              looking at its DOS name.  Read this tech doc for more
              information on Windows/DOS filenames.
              http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/2bea.htm
              \_ thx!
              \_ thx!  I think something got corrupted somewhere.  I ran
                 scan disk, and my whole filesytem looks like FileN~1,
                 FileN~2.  Are external drives this unstable?
                 \_ That's not a bug.  That's what long filenames look like.
                    \_ When the old file name used to be
                        "This is an example of a filename", then gets
                        transformed into "FileN~1", then that is a problem.
                 \_ WinME sucks. Either use win2k or downgrade to win98

8/10    I have a ps file with a small bug (when I jump to page 1 from a later
        page, gs barfs). I used ps2ps and it fixed the problem. But ps2ps
        made all the text into ugly graphics. How do I make it keep text as
        text? (running ghostscript 5.50 under linux).
        \_ hand-edit the old file? diff the old and new file to try to find
           what was the fix?
        \_ how about converting it to pdf?  speaking of which, is ps2pdf any
           good yet?  last I checked, a lot of documents kept getting vector
           glyphs replaced with bitmaps.  Acrobat Distiller, on the other hand,
           did a fine job with the same files...

8/10    Help!  So, I know the basic operation on Linux, but I am very
        weak on Linux Administration in general.  What is a good reference
        book that is good to have for those who are comfortable *USING*
        Linux, yet weak on administration and trouble shooting?
                --kngharv
        \_ RedHat Linux Unleashed should be right up your alley
        \_ Running Linux
        \_ Running From Linux

8/10    Is there a function that will log the messages that pop up
        periodically on a xterm buffer? Thanks.
        \_ You mean loggin the output of your commands in the xterm?  Left-
           click on the xterm window, choose "Log to File", then look for a
           file like XtermLog.xxx in your home dir.  --- yuen