Something Swift this way comes…

You’ll notice that the site maintenance warning is gone. That means that this site has officially been switched over to a larger hard-drive (120 GB instead of a 4GB) and should run for a while without space worries. The other hardware it’s running on currently blows, but hey, we do what we can when we can. So, the freeze on posts is officially over.

Sorry for the interruption, and thanks for your patience.

S

So it’s been a little bit and I’m still kind of at a loss as to what to post here regularly. Seeing as how my readers seem content just to read whatever I put up, then I guess I’ll just put up whatever! MUAHAHA Command decision. Since I love linux that’s kind of what you guys are probably going to hear about most. Ah well, I’ve almost converted one or two of ya, or at least gotten you past the idea of fearing change enough to give it a rational chance…Which is all I can really ask of anyone.

One cool thing that I did the other day was write a script – I know most of you are probably thinking ‘I didn’t know he wrote screenplays!’ no. Not that kind of script. Put down the air-freshener and seek help. The type of script I’m talking about is a shell script to do something that I find rather tedious, automatically. See, everyone who knows me knows that I play online text based games (called Mush/mux/moo/mu*). Well, I use a text based client to log in to my different worlds – fitting no? – and whenever I log in, it automatically logs everything that I see on my screen. I set this up a while back within the client to auto-log on connection (the client, by the way is TF5 – Tinyfugue 5) and when it logs, it goes to a directory (folder for you windows users) under my home directory named ’share’. So the path looks like /home/swift/share. Now, underneath share is a directory for each ‘world’ or ‘character’ I connect to. TF automatically seperates the logfiles out by the world, and names the file in a MM-DD-YY.log format, so that I can look back on a particular day and find something. Neat, but what happens after abou three or four months worth of logging? Yeah! You get spammed when you go in and list the directory contents by a bunch of files that look like 08-18-08.log. I mean a /bunch/. I connect a lot. So, usually once a month I go through near the beginning of the month, make a directory underneath each character/world directory named in a MM-YY format, so it’ll look something like this – /home/swift/share/Swift/07-08/’all of july’s files here’

Needless to say I can do it fairly quickly but when you consider that I’ve got eight or nine characters/worlds that I connect to regularly, this shit gets tedious after a while. That’s fifteen or twenty minutes I could spend doing something else…like playing on my game! So I decided after getting fed up with having to hand organize these files “You know what? This is the perfect thing to provide a bash script to”, so that’s what I did. After a bit of trial and error, I came up with a script I call tflogarc.sh that I can schedule to go through once a month and do the following things:

• Go into a game directory recursively
• Make a directory that is named for the last month’s numerical-current year’s numerical (07-08 ferex)
• Move all files that start with the numerical month matching last month’s numerical month into the correct directory.
• Go back up to /home/swift/share
• Rinse and repeat until all played worlds are organized.
• Leave me with free time each month to do something else!

Okay, that last one didn’t really occur to me until about halfway through the project. I just started out seeing if I could do it, and with a little help, I did. Thus is the power of linux! And looking at it now, weeding out all the comments (I tend to comment heavily so I’ll know wtf I was thinking six months from now when I go back to tinker with it) the script itself is only 37 lines long*. Not a huge program at all, and if I were more experienced at scripting it wouldn’t have taken me the couple of hours it did to get everything just right. Add in the fact that with a single line in my crontab (file that the linux/unix cron daemon uses to schedule commands to be run) that it runs every month at 1:05 am for the length of time it takes to do the work (about 3 seconds) and then goes back to sleep until the next month. With windows, I’d just be completely shit out of luck unless I wrote it in something like python or perl, or (God help us) Visual Basic. I suppose you could try and script a .bat (batch file) to do it, but then you have to wrestle with the windows taskmanager and all of that. With this, it’s a built in scripting language that lets you do as much or as little as you want, to your own level of ability, and there are plenty of folks out there online willing to help out when you have questions, which is a bonus. If you’d like to take a look at the script it’s at http://swift.homelinux.net/tflogarc.txt.

* – for the command pipe that gave me that answer it’s grep -v \# tflogarc.sh|wc -l
What this does is greps (searches) the file for everything except the # symbol in the file tflogarc.sh then pipes all of them out to the wc -l command which does a wordcount (in this case -l tells it to count lines only, not words.) Wha? You didn’t think I’d actually count the lines by hand did you?

So you see, sometimes I get on a little kick and make my life a little easier by using the tools that are around, laying there, free for use, all we have to do is pick them up, brush them off and put a little effort into learning to use them.

More later,

S

So. Holy crap. I actually have people reading my blog – not like a huge amount of people, but constant readers that I know and care for. You guys really know how to make a geek feel guilty. I feel like I’ve been letting you down by not posting! *laughs* Ah well, here’s another one for you.

My grandmother passed away this past week and she did it in a style that is so like her. She waited until everyone in the room had dozed off and then just packed up her bags and left without a lot of fuss and no goodbyes. We buried her yesterday in a small ceremony with family and friends gathered, and she would’ve wanted that too. I dare say though there was a great lot of sadness, there was some relief in the folks gathered as she’s been rattling around in that big old house by herself now for around fifteen years. I know she missed her family, her husband, all her loved ones who have gone through the veil that seperates this world from whatever is beyond. I know there has been some strife in our family that has caused rifts that may never heal, but I think some small bit of healing took place this weekend. At least I hope it did.

On to other things, I sat in there tonight with my girls while the wife sat in there with the boys, getting them ready for bed, and going through the nightly ritual of bedtime delays. I held my oldest girl and talked with her – she’s getting so big! – and she crawls up into my lap and said something that melted my heart. Daddy, will you rock me? Ugh…never thought that I’d be such a big softie. She absolutely holds the key to my heart, I tell you. And those big blue-green eyes of her as she smiled up at me. So we rocked and I sang, and she sang with me, and I thought about heaven, about the things that we try to busy ourselves and not think about because some of it can be frightening. I thought about the fact that heaven would be like this, that I would be able to see those that I loved so much again, that I wished I could have just had a little more time with, maybe curled up in their lap and said ‘Granddaddy, rock me?’. Sometimes these things are not chance, sometimes they’re not mere happenstance. Sometimes the turning points of our lives take place between wake and sleep, and we’re better off for it – something that can be so blessed coming in a week that has been so absolutely difficult to deal with. I pray that if you ever have a hard time, that you can be the recipient of such a blessing at the end of your hard walk. I hope that you can feel the love that emanates from those around you, for you, that you can take solace and healing from it and drink from the well that is so deep and eternal that it is everlasting and never runs dry.

Thank you all for spending a little time with me today, and I hope that you have a great week.

S

So it’s been a little while since I posted last. I’ve had a lot of heavy work between then and now. I’ve managed to stay pretty much on top of things, just sometimes it feels like staying on top of things is a lot like getting run over by things. I was at my parents’ house tonight for a little while visiting with them for the first time in a couple of weeks and mom kept saying how dark the circles are under my eyes and how she’s worried about me because she hasn’t seen them that bad before. Had to go through the whole rundown of have I been having any stomach troubles, chest pains, headaches, etc. with her. I know she’s just worried about me, and it makes me smile to know that she still mothers me when she’s worried. Somehow mom can make it all better just by asking me if I’m alright, how I’m doing and if I’ve been feeling okay. I guess it’s because most people these days couldn’t care less how you’re doing or feeling as long as they get theirs and they’re doing alright…it feels good to have that love and concern. I guess those who love us can hurt us the most in our lives, but those who love us really and truly are the ones who can heal us too. Funny to think of that double edge sword of hurting and healing, but it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it, so I think I’m going to go with that as a truth right now.

So, I’ve not heard anything back from you guys…the two or three of you who actually check back here. I’m guessing that I probably ran everyone off with all the geekspeak. I guess that to be passionate about something you have to be truly blind to the fact that nobody else really cares about what you’re passionate about *laughs*. Maybe that’s the case, or maybe everyone has just been busy doing their own thing. It’s not like I advertise this place or anything, and not more than a handful of people even know about it – I guess it’s odd to expect a few people to give much in the way of feedback. I’ve thought about advertising it somehow and trying to drive up readership, but to what point? This is the kind of rambling diatribe that I usually give and if it were me reading it from someone I don’t know, I guess I’d probably turn the page too *laughs*. Anyways, all that said to say this – if you guys want to see me talk about something or see my thoughts on something, feel free to leave a comment in the little box down there at the bottom and I’ll see about it!

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

S