4/04    Is there a good way to diff 2 files that consist of columns of
        floating point numbers, such that it only tells me if there's a
        difference if the numbers on a given line differ by at least a given
        ratio?  Say, 1%?
        \_ Use Excel.
           1. Open foo.txt in Excel.  It should convert all numbers to cells in
	...

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?
	...

11/7    If I don't need to print for a few months, do I need to keep adding
        new ink to inkjet printers to prevent them from drying and clogging
        heads? Or will it just magically work once I add in new ink
        in a few months?
        \_ The nozzles will clog. Print a test sheet every couple weeks.
           Or remove the cartridges and put cellophane tape over the nozzles,
	...

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
	...

8/28    Hi, anybody printed a photo image to a big plotter?  Something like
        36"x36"?  I'm wondering how many megapixels the image need to
        have in order for the print to "look good".  There is a rule of
        thumb?  Like 6 megapixel is good for X size print.  10 megapixel
        is good for Y size print.  Thanks.
        \_ You don't need that many more megapixels for much bigger prints,
	...

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
	...