Unix Frivolities and LOTR

Open the Terminal in Mac OS X (Applications / Utilities).

Type

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep “LOTR”

You should see a list, in month and day order, of events in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. For instance, September 14 is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo.

This particular Stupid Terminal Trick is not unique to OS […]

Unix Frivolities and The Language of Flowers

We all know Unix, even with the very user-friendly OS X GUI, is the realm of the serious user, especially when it comes to using Terminal, the OS X application for using a command line interface. But thank goodness that along with all the Unixy goodness OS X inherited from BSD, we also got the […]

Musical Baton

I’ve been passed the “musical baton” meme by Dori. My responses are:
Total volume of music files on my computer: my iTunes folder is 2.14 Gb with 647 songs. Some of those are audiobooks, though, so I’m not sure how they count. That includes some drama and poetry, and the total is about half what it […]

Why God Invented Graduate Students

According to Chuq von Rospach, it’s because of this. Though I grant that his is a persuasive example, I think think he needs to generalize his argument to the ultimate purpose for graduate students.

Computer Folklore

Saturday I attended the Con José panel on “Computer Folklore: Tales from the Geekside,” featuring Eric Raymond, Chris Garcia, Tom Galloway, Brett Glass, and Corey Cole. Aside from a brief discussion of the first chain letter (an MIT student did it!) it wasn’t what I’d expected, though that’s OK. There are some good sources […]

Hypertext and Mackers

Wired has a review of multimedia artist dlsan’s HyperMacbeth. dlsan’s web-based piece of interactive performance art uses phrases from the play and places them against an annoying Flash annimation. He has also translated the Macbeth bits into Italian, and accompanied the production with music from Nine Inch Nails and others.
I hate it. Yeah, I know, […]