My housemates and I have interesting conversations at times @ home.
Mr Krishna was telling me about how he didn’t understand the meaning of ping used here, like “Ping me when you’re done” or “I’ll ping you”
So I reply that meanings of words change, and many a times it get derived so much it doesn’t reflect its original context or meaning. Nevertheless its good to know its original meaning and know how it evolved. So while the technical guys know the purpose of “ping” or the IMCP echo, some might think that ping came from “ping pong” (table tennis), as seen in the IRC days. The most likely inspiration of the word ping would be sound waves created by sonar in submarines.
Another interesting topic is “blog” (in its context have another meaning for ping too), derived from weblog, was in fact a technical term for a developer’s/designer’s tool. After some time, blog was almost a synonym to “online diary” and these days blogs has also almost become an essential part of online marketing.
Other times brand and product names affect people’s vocabulary too. For example, most people doesn’t seem to know that “Rollerblade” is in fact just a brand for the sport “In-line skating”. Photocopying could be called “Xerox” in America, and “zapping” in Singapore. I used the word “Scotch tape” for years before knowing its a trademark for a adhesive tape product.
Then the singaporean language “culture” or Singlish is a big culprit of giving new meaning to words, infecting the native English, Malay and Hokkien. And for that we have a few online Singlish dictionaries here and here.
Its interesting but whether this word morphing culture is good or not, I don’t know. We tend to get petty smart and lazy using such words, but at the same time we are adding more definitions to our dictionary entries.
Not too sure how much this would help in debugging python scripts, but at least it tells you any syntax errors before a long script runs for an hour before throwing an error.
Here’s the code
# compile.py
import py_compile, sys
py_compile.compile(sys.argv[1])
Here’s a sample python script
# helloworld.py
print “Hello World!”
Here’s an example to compile it
$ python ./compile.py ./helloworld.py
Running this generates a bytecode file called helloworld.pyc which could be run
$ python ./helloworld.pyc
python could also be used with the flag “-O” for optimize generated bytecode
>>> exit()
From the book “Photography and the Art of Seeing” (1979), Freeman Patterson has photography rules to take note of and to break them.
#1
Rule: Focus on the center of interest
Break: Keep the center of interest out of focus; play with the blance of forms
#2
Rule: Fill in the frame with the subject
Break: Allow space around the subject; look for interaction with the environment
#3
Rule: Do not shoot between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M. (golden hours)
Break: Shoot on any day, at any time
#4
Rule: Do not shoot against the light
Break: Photography only against the light for a month
#5.
Rule: Hold the camera steady
Break: Shoot while jumping up and down or spinning around
#6
Rule: Follow the “rule of thirds”
Break: Vary composition. Respond emotionally
#7
Rule: Obey the light meter
Break: Disobey. Mess up the zone system. Oversexpose and underexpose by three , even 4 f/stops
#8
Rule: Photography children (and pets) at their own eye level;
Break: Move up, down on the side, all over
#9
Rule: Avoid lens flare when shooting against the sun ;
Break: Use lens flare to enhance a composition
#10
Rule: Keep camera level with the horizon
Break: Create your own horizons.
Pretty interesting stuff I thought. Here’s also a blog by photographers exercising these tricks.
Let’s say you are creating a batch script to loop through each “folder” you have in an directory- run:
$./list_dirs.sh /app
inside the shell script:
#list_dirs.sh
for i in $(ls -l $1 | awk ‘/^d/ { print $NF }’) ; do
echo $i # replace with actions to be done
done
#end script
basically ls -l will display all files+folders with their attributes.
awk filters to those lines starting with d attribute (/!d/) and strips out to the last field ($NF)
blog>logout
The first PC I used had a 512MB hard drive. It wasn’t long before I had to do clean up when the disk was reaching its capacity.
More than 10 years later, having use over 10 hard disks with the capacity of 1000x before, I still face the problem of storage shortage. Perhaps it was my poor management skills that puts me in a spot of doing a serious cleanup job when free space is critical.
Back in DOS (and still application to the windows command line), the “dir” command is used for checking free and used space. In Linux/*nix, “df” and “du” are the priceless tools for disk usage. Moving to the present, Windows Vista provides bar chart like displays under My Computer showing the disk usage. Yet with these and Windows Live searching and indexing, I fail to visualise what is utilising my drive, where and what they are.
Here’s my favourite program from years ago (during windows 98 period iirc)- a delphi (pascal) written lightweight freeware called Scanner. Years later, with many other diskspace visualizing software listed on software directories and search engines, Scanner is usually no where at the top. Its still, however, as useful and preferred for me as it displays in an interactive circular pie chart, as oppose to many bar and block charts (concentric pie charts vs treemaps/voronoi), where you can “drill down/up” or “zoom in/out”.
The only other free tool with “donut” charts I’ve used is Overdrive with more statistical information. If you’re feeling geeky on this topic, lifehacker recommends a couple more software. And for more? Plenty at freeware directories.
So go ahead, graph and see visually what’s taking the space, and manage your drive the way you wouldn’t have notice.
Recent Comments