#silentsunday
Roles
Fri, 28 Jun 2024, 06:39 PM (-06:00)
1. Where They Are
Their annual trip north is underway: Trudy, Izzy and The Man.
Tonite finds them in western Kentucky at the Corps of Engineers Eureka Campground on the northern shores of Lake Barkley. If you time things right you can gawk at coal barges being pushed east thru the canal. Miss Izzy timed things right today.
And you might enjoy dinner with a breeze coming off the water as afternoon gives way to late-in-the-day.
2. The Roles They Play
As usual, the role of the Fair and Industrious Trudy has been trip planner extraordinaire. The destinations for eight nights of camping were selected and reserved by her. She picked the routes, meticulously cultivating varieties of intentionally slow back-country roads to ensure that getting there is part of the fun.
Izzy’s role has been that of faithful napper companion.
The man’s role has mostly been behind the wheel which includes backing the trailer, but sadly it seems, does not include following instructions. As Trudy will quietly confide (with the man safely out of ear shot), he seems to be responsible for heading west and south, which when you’re traveling north and east is distinctly unhelpful making him the prolonger of getting there is part of the fun.
Unknown Nut
Thu, 27 Jun 2024, 10:13 AM (-06:00)
On a ridge above the lake, on the ground in the shade beneath the canopy the forest at Lake Wappapello State Park in Missouri, there’s a green nut lying on the ground.
“What kind of nut is that?” it makes you want to ask.
My grandfather would have known. “I don’t know what kind of nut that is,” he might have said, “but it sure looks like it fell from a Hickory Tree.”
(Paraphrasing a joke he once made).
Tools
Wed, 19 Jun 2024, 09:22 AM (-06:00)
1. Small is Beautiful!
There’s a strong preference in the Unix community for small, simple tools. It’s a philosophy that emerged roughly at the same time as E.F.Schumacher’s classic reflection on economics.
The Unix Way was a philosophy spread informally but also in books, some of which are on the shelves in the other room.
Bookshelves that line the walls floor to ceiling, interior designer recommendations to ditch them notwithstanding.
2. Simplicity In Practice?
Simple software tools glued together in simple ways.
For example, to remove all the PDF files in a directory except those ending in –STUDENT , you might assemble rm, ls, and grep thusly
rm -f `ls *.pdf | grep -v -STUDENT`
And as I wrote the underlying automation for the next generation of my Algebra 2 guided notes, I embedded just such a snippet into a bash script. Except that a non-fatal error message consistently showed when there were no PDF files to begin with.
Bad juju. Can’t have error messages, fatal or not, lurking in the soul of the machine. But where was it coming from? Finding out was a drag, because it required disassembling the tools and individually checking them out.
In the end, the solution was (as it often is) to use find, a Swiss Army knife of complexity. No one remembers how to use it, ever. It is the antithesis of the Unix Way. But with that single (complex) tool, the job was so much easier.
find . -name “*.pdf” ! -name “*-STUDENT.pdf” -type f -delete
And it reads better, doesn’t it? Bonus: no more error messages.
Now, on to the math…
A Consequence of Chickens
Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 03:33 PM (-06:00)
Not a meat thermometer but kinda the same.
The neighbors have chickens. Which means a bounty for the compost pile. Which means too much microbial action. Which means…
… baby, it’s hot inside.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License