4/29    Why were C and Java designed to require "break;" statements for a
        "case" section to terminate rather than falling-through to the next
        section?  99% of the time poeple want a "case" section to terminate.
        In fact some compilers issue warning if there is no "break;" statement
        in a "case" section.  Why not just design the languages to have
        termination as the default behavior, and provide a "fallthru;"
	...

3/5     Three emergency Java updates in a month. Why do I have a feeling
        that the third one won't be the last one?
        \_ Bingo!
	...

12/18   Happy 25th birthday Perl, and FUCK YOU Larry Wall for fucking up
        the computer science formalism that sets back compilers development
        back for at least a decade:
        http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/18/print-happy-25th-birthday-perl
        \_ I tried to learn Perl but was scared away by it.  Maybe scripting
           lanauages have to be like that in order to work well?
	...

8/29    There was once a CSUA web page which runs an SSH client for logging
        on to soda.  Does that page still exist?  Can someone remind me of the
        URL please?  Thx.
        \_ what do you mean? instruction on how to ssh into soda?
           \_ No I think he means the ssh applet, which, iirc, was an applet
              that implemented an ssh v1 client.  I think this page went away
	...

12/8    Java code much worse IRL than pretty much everything else:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/d5e46cq [ars technica]
	...

4/16    Whoa, I just heard that MIT discontinued 6.001 (classic scheme)
        to 6.01. In fact, 6.00, 6.01 and 6.02 all use Python. What the
        hell? What has the world become? It's a sad sad day. SICP forever!
        \_ old story, they've ditched that shitty book and lang for a while.
        \_ I used to think scheme was cool, then I saw Ka Ping Yee's
           "Beautiful Code" class aka 61a in python, and converted.
	...

2/24    Go Programming Language.  Anyone here use it?  It kind of
        reminds me of java-meets python, and well, that is fitting given it's
        a GOOG product.  What is so special about it?
        \_ as I understand it, it's a suitable OOP-y systems language with more
           structure than C, less complexity than C++, and less overhead than
           Java/Python.
	...

8/8     Trying to make a list of interesting features languages have
        touted as this whole PL field comes around, trying to see if they
        have basis in the culture of the time: feel free to add some/dispute
        1970 C, "portability"
        1980 C++, classes, oop, iterators, streams, functors, templates
             expert systems
	...

12/4    what do people have their JAVA_HOME's set to on soda?
        \_ don't. are you trying to get sun java? It is installed, but not
           the default.  check dpkg -l and dpkg -L
           \_ I'm trying to run maven to get scala/lift.net working
              properly and it's complaining that JAVA_HOME is not set.
              \_ you probably want one of the directories in /usr/lib/jvm,
	...

9/28    http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
        Java is #1!!! Followed by C, PHP, C++, Visual Basic, Perl,
        C#, Python, Javascript, then finally Ruby. The good news is
        Pascal is going waaaay back up!
        \_ C is still more popular than C++?  I feel much better about myself
           now.
	...

8/6     In C one can do "typedef int my_index_t;".  What's the equivalent in
        C#?  Thanks.
        \_ C#? Are you serious? Is this what the class of 2009 learn?
           \_ No.  I have to learn .NET code at work.  I am Class of '93.
           \_ python is what 2009 learns, see the motd thread about recent
              cal courses and languages
	...

7/20    For those who care btw, it looks like eclipse is now A Standard Tool
        at UCB ugrad cs, probably replaced emacs.  Furthermore, people get
        angry at seeing Makefiles, (since eclispe takes care of that).  I
        guess it's just a sign of the times.
        \_ The more people at my work use eclipse the less the code is
           managable in emacs.  I'm not sure which application's fault
	...

4/27    I wrote a little shell script to collect iostat data:
        #!/bin/bash
        DATE=`date +%m%d`
        DATADIR=/var/tmp/user
        OUTPUTFILE=$DATADIR/$DATE.out
        while true
	...

5/8     Hello everyone!  This is Josh Hawn, CSUA Tech VP for Spring 2012.
        About 2 weeks ago, someone brought to my attention that our script
        to periodically merge /etc/motd.public into /etc/motd wasn't
        running.  When I looked into it, the cron daemon was running, but
        there hadn't been any root activity in the log since April 7th.  I
        looked into it for a while, but got lost in other things I was
	...

10/24  What's an easy way to see if say column 3 of a file matches a list of
       expressions in a file? Basically I want to combine "grep -f <file>"
       to store the patterns and awk's $3 ~ /(AAA|BBB|CCC)/ ... I realize
       I can do this with "egrep -f " and use regexp instead of strings, but
       was wondering if there was some magic way to do this.
       \_ UNIX has no magic. Make a shell script to produce the ask or egrep
	...

7/29    Happy Sysadmin Day
        \_ our "sysadmin" today deleted /home. When we asked her why
           she said she didn't do it. When I checked the sudo logs,
           I found these two commands in order:
               COMMAND=/bin/rm -r /home testuser
               COMMAND=/bin/rm -r /home/testuser
	...

5/19    If script A runs, and calls script B ..... is it possible for me to exit\
        script A based on results of script B and not continue?
        \_ assume any shell
        \_ Yes.
           \_ without passing the result to some stupid temp file?
              \_ It sounds like you want "scriptb || exit", which will run
	...

4/22    In Linux is there an easy way to rename the scripts in /etc/rc?.d ?
        For example I want to set all the /etc/rc?.d/S91apache to S100apache
        so that it'll run the ramdisk BEFORE going to apache.
        \_ Sure, just move them.
           \_ I mean is there a script that will rename all of them
              for me? Like: setrc apache2 0 0 1 1 1 1
	...

10/27   http://www.maxgames.com/play/flash-mind-reader.html
        how does this work?
        \_ sh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-(\
$i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
        \_ bash -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j\
-($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
	...

8/18    Hi again, new freebsd guy here again, in bash I was able to go
        LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/foo/lib ./runmyapp
        I managed to do this in tcsh by using setenv in a shell script
        that setenv's the lib path and then executes $1, just wondering
        if there was a way to do it in 1 line from the cmd line as in bash?
        Thanks, btw %2c or %3c worked.  Freebsd, tcsh and vi forever!
	...

5/5     Is there a good (or standard) way to make an offline copy of a w
        ordpress blog (mine, not someone else's)? tia.
        \_ oh man.
           \_ I could cobble something together with curl / wget, but I'd
              rather not if there is a standard way of doing this.  I'm
              pretty new to wordpress / blogging and I just want to keep
	...

2/10    I have an sh file that does a mount.. the mount does an
        authentication. I previosly stored the username and password
        from zenity prompts. However, I can't get a return on the password
        field. The following only works on the username:
        mount -t davfs "http://blahblah.com/BLahUser11" /mountdir << EOF
        ${username}
	...

1/13    I want to extract a couple integer from an xml file, mainly,
        xml file from http://weather.com so I can put it on my xplanet marker
        file. has anyone done similar things (parse and extract data
        from xml) using shell script instead of python/perl?
        in the world of perl, it make sense to dump things into a hash
        which i can easily extract key/value pair.  can i achieve similar
	...

12/18   Campus USENET service will be terminated on 12/31.
        http://ls.berkeley.edu/mail/micronet/2008/1608.html
        \_ I emailed RobR to tell him. -ausman
        \_ The CSUA is considering asking campus to allow us to run NNTP for
           ucb.class.*, as bSpace sucks major major ass. Thoughts? --t
           \_ That's noble, but maybe the effort would be better spent
	...