On Workspot

Chris Gulker on Workspot – Linux anywhere!

Compare $10 for Workspot to, say, the $8.25 .mac costs: both give you an email account, but .mac’s is via a clunky (read: slow) Webmail interface, where Workspot gives you the full Ximian Evolution email application (with address book that autotypes, calendar, etc. etc.) – it’s what you wished Outlook was.

Sounds interesting, if I had a fast internet connection and wanted to learn about Linux I’d try this. It could be very useful if I was travelling and wanted a familiar desktop to work off too.
I’d probably use a Yahoo account and whatever was available though 😉

KDE vs Gnome

Right, this is a completely personal observation. On my redhat 8 box here at work, KDE just kicks the ass off Gnome 2 for speed. I don’t use the file manager of either environment much, so this is simply and observation on how using Galeon, Gnome Multi-terminal, xchat and Kmail work. They just work faster!

Unix: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

While searching using a popular search engine for Bash help I found a few goodies:

  1. Unix: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – short article on the short-comings of Unix, from a user-friendly perspective. While I agree that “info” is horrendous, the much more useful “pinfo” is much better. Instead of using arcane key combinations to navigate you can use your cursor keys to move about. Of course, in Gnome, you can (or used to be able to) view helpfiles through their help system. I’m sure the same exists in the KDE world. There is already a searchable database of commands. You access it through the “apropos” command, although I never use it so that might indicate how useful it is.
  2. Shell scripts in 20 pagesA guide to writing shell scripts for C/C++/Java and unix programmers which is a good summary of shell scripting when you’re already familiar with programming in other languages. Recommended!

How to loop over filenames wit …

How to loop over filenames with spaces – I knew this, but it had disappeared in the recesses of my brain.

> for f in `cat /pathtolist/mp3.txt` do cp "$f" /newdirectory done

You didn't say exactly how the file is organised, so I'm going to
guess one filename per line.  (Note that a filename is allowed
to contain the newline character; I'm just hoping that none of
your files do!)

Others have already pointed out that spaces can be tricky.  I'm
going to show you that there really is no problem.  Rather than
iterate using for, use while and read:

while read filename; do cp "$filename" /newdirectory; done < mp3.txt

Voila.

Weather’s been bad for the past few days. No real opportunities for photography. Bah! At least I have 99% of my Christmas shopping done. Meanwhile, Mark has an entertaining piece on “The One Toy”.

Oh yes, If you’re over 20, buy RETRO, a (one off?) mag from games mag, Edge. It has great interviews with old Zzap64! staffers, bits on games of old (Elite anyone?) and other great stuff! If you’re under 20, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Hmm, scratch that, if you’re under 24 you probably don’t know what I’m talking about! Getting old ..

Edit in 2019: replaced dead links with archive.org links and copied content of the email from the first link.