[Thu Mar 27 13:56:06 CDT 2014]

I just came across a video presenting the new GNOME 3.12 while I was reading posts on Google Plus:

It looks pretty neat, I think. Actually, I know it's sort of trendy among techies to criticize GNOME, but I like it. I have been running it as my main desktop environment for years now. Even when they switched to the new GNOME Shell, I find it aesthetically pleasing overall, as well as highly functional. Yes, the GNOME Shell involved changing one's mindset a bit. And what? Things change. It was about time that open source projects stopped copying whatever Microsoft did in a stupid, futile and ultimately defeatist attempt to come up with the perfect Windows clone to "lure" users. {link to this entry}

[Tue Mar 11 11:57:11 CDT 2014]

A co-worker just shared a funny Dilbert cartoon with us:

{link to this entry}

[Mon Mar 10 17:09:48 CDT 2014]

Here is an interesting package I had no idea of that I discovered thanks to a post on Google Plus:

$ apt-cache show moreutils
Package: moreutils
Version: 0.47
Installed-Size: 158
Maintainer: Joey Hess 
Architecture: amd64
Replaces: lckdo
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7), perl, libipc-run-perl
Suggests: libtime-duration-perl, libtimedate-perl
Conflicts: lckdo
Description-en: additional Unix utilities
 This is a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought
 to write long ago, when Unix was young.
 .
 So far, it includes the following utilities:
  - chronic: runs a command quietly unless it fails
  - combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations
  - errno: look up errno names and descriptions
  - ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output
  - ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty
  - isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8
  - lckdo: execute a program with a lock held
  - mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first
  - parallel: run multiple jobs at once
  - pee: tee standard input to pipes
  - sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file
  - ts: timestamp standard input
  - vidir: edit a directory in your text editor
  - vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe
  - zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command
Homepage: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/moreutils/
Description-md5: fe92b00292d03dc58e79fc3733a6db2b
Tag: implemented-in::c, implemented-in::perl, interface::commandline,
 role::program, scope::utility, works-with::text
Section: utils
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/m/moreutils/moreutils_0.47_amd64.deb
Size: 62370
MD5sum: 2c70a4f74ae0fcad1aa594fdeb24203e
SHA1: 5363b92abf173b474ecf3f2fe2d4c42734d13d5c
SHA256: 5c8867a9b50dfe8de3ed71acec6913b415e96bfb2982348762808ec92ffb378b

Some of the tools includes in the package are quite useful indeed. For example:

$ errno 111
ECONNREFUSED 111 Connection refused

$ ifdata -pa wlan0
10.0.0.22

$ ifdata -p wlan0
10.0.0.22 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.255 1500

Anyways, you get the idea. Sure, it's not going to transform our life, but it will certainly make it easier at times. {link to this entry}

[Sat Mar 8 13:42:49 CST 2014]

OK. Here is something I recently had to do on mutt. While running some tests for a tool that triggered alarms, I ended up getting thousands and thousands of them in my Inbox. They all had a very similar subject line, so deleting them was easy enough. After you do Shift+d, simply enter the following on mutt's command line:

~s <pattern>

Obviously, you should enter a given pattern for the subject line where I typed <pattern>. After you do that, simply commit the changes by doing something like Ctrl+x or quitting the client. {link to this entry}