This Week: Notes, Names and New Sites

08 April 2008

This is the latest installment in my regular(ish) series looking at some of what I have read online since last time.

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This Week: Encrypt /home campaign updates

23 December 2007

So a couple of weeks ago, I challenged all you warriors, well at least those of you using Linux on your laptops, to encrypt your /home directory by Christmas.

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This Week: Freedom not Time-Bombs

07 December 2007

Hello everyone, welcome back to our occassional series about what I have read online since last time. Without further ado, let's dive in to the next installment.

Another reason why Linux is better for the environment

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This Week - Linux is Linux

23 November 2007

Hello, this is my regular look at what I have read online since last time.

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This Week: Free the Radio, Python Web Frameworks, Blank PCs and How to start in Linux

13 October 2007

Welcome to 'This Week', my occasional series about what I have read recently. You are encouraged to tell me if you have written or read something cool that I should notice. Another person to do just that is Rich McIver:

> Hi Zeth, ><br> We recently published "`Linux for Business: 50 Apps to Get your Office on Open Source`_". I figured I'd bring it to your attention in case you think your readers would find it useful. ><br>Either way, keep up the great blogging!

Reading through the list I was reminded how much great stuff there is available from the Open Source community. Are there any businesses of significant size that do not use at least any free/open-source software somewhere in the organisation? I doubt it. It just shows how far we have come. It won't be long before we will be at the point where no computer user will be without some free software on their PC, even if they do not realise that it is there. We are winning, just very subtly and quietly.

Calling all in transit - Radio Free Europe Amarok

Docutils System Messages

System Message: ERROR/3 (<string>, line 5); backlink

Unknown target name: "linux for business: 50 apps to get your office on open source".

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This Week - IT in Russian schools and the Cybermen are on the move

25 September 2007

Here is another dose of what I have read online in the last week or so.

Fun and Freedom

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This Week - PyconUK, Vista Idle usage, SCOX is bust but no need to pity Darl McBride

17 September 2007

Hello! So this is what I have read out on the web in the last week. As always, if I have missed something cool, then let me know in the comments.

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This Week: Heroes and Monsters

17 August 2007

As regular readers will know, this is my occasional series of what I have read this week on the supersized interwibble.

Charting your command history

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This Week: All quite on the Western Front and How many Linux users are there?

11 August 2007

So I continue my regular series of what I have read this week. Not a lot in fact as there is near silence in my RSS reader, it seems that everyone is on holiday and people are not blogging too much. However, a few people had some interesting things to say.

Organisations for Britain's first ever Python conference are continuing and seem to be going well, see you in September if you are going.

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This Week on the Command Line: Lieutenant Worf's favourite distro is?

12 July 2007

I was at the LugradioLive 2007 conference this last weekend which was fab, see here for my take on it.

I am famous, well no, but at the end of the JakAttack podcast 55 [ogg | mp3], they read out my email, rock on!

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This Week on the Command Line: The Light and Dark Sides

06 May 2007

Hello everyone, it has been a little while since I last did a round up of random blogs I have read. So lets get started.

Freedom of speech

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This Week on the Command Line: Bring back CD-RWs but not the draft, also choose your dessert carefully!

30 March 2007

Long time readers will know that I occasionally do a Friday round up of selected things that I have read on blogs and so on since the last time. Hope you enjoy it!

Fixes and tips

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This Week on the Command Line: Laptop Backups and apt-get for Windows

04 November 2006

It has been a while since last time, so lets do this. 'This week on the command line' is my look at what I have read online in the past seven days. If you have read or written anything cool then leave a comment below and tell me about it.

Phill has taken up Ruby on Rails which is kind of scary. Learning Python is quite enough for me right now, however I am just a humanist while but Phill is a proper computer scientist.

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This week on the command line: Custom isos and barriers of entry

11 February 2006

At the end of each week I round up what I have been reading online. If you discover an interesting link that you think should be covered then please drop me an email using warrior at commandline dot org dot uk.

Automatic Custom Linux Isos

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This week in the world of the Command Line; The Friday Round up!

03 February 2006

Package Management in Mac OS X... in Japanese!

A user has featured one of my posts with comments/criticisms in a post in a Japanese blog, I have no idea what he is saying, however Google Translator does attempt to make sense of it.

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Blogwatch: cURL, ImageMagick, Network tools and Pizza

09 September 2005

Here is a round up of what I have noticed in the blog world about the command-line recently, if you know anymore good new links then let me know!

cURL tips

cURL is one of my favourite command-line applications. It is similar to wget but with all the features a modern browser would have, e.g. cookies, ssh, etc. You can use it to do anything a browser would do and script routine tasks that you may need to do.

World O' Matty has many posts of interest to those using the command-line. 'Grabbing a protected webpage' was a nicely-written practical example of how to use cURL:

> Ever needed to grab a password protected page from the command line? This can be accomplished with curl’s “-u� option:

$ curl -k -i https://www.daemons.net/secret -u me:somethingstrong |more

System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 20); backlink

Inline substitution_reference start-string without end-string.

The username and password can be passed as an argument to the “-u� option. If you are paranoid about your password being visible on the command line, you can omit the password, and curl will prompt you for it:

$ curl -k -i https://www.daemons.net/secret -u me password:

In case you are curious, the “-k� option forces curl to dump the HTTP headers. I use both options to debug web server issues.

I have been using cURL a lot myself, and I plan to do a series on it in the future.

Introduction to ImageMagick

Another great tool that we have not yet touched on here is ImageMagick which is a great tool that allows you to work with images at the command-line.

Himal, the Essex boy that runs the Optimus blog, has a useful introduction, imagemagick and the strengths of the command line:

> Most people don’t think of the command as a place to do image manipulation. They are wrong.

Let’s say I have a situation where I’ve got about 50 images at 1024×768 in png format that I need to quickly turn into small jpg thumbnails. I could use Photoshop Actions, or perhaps some other tool. But that would be reinventing the wheel, why not do it all with the UNIX command line and ImageMagick?

Himal goes on to give practical examples of how to resize images. He also points out that ImageMagick can be used in server-side web-scripting to create image galleries 'on the fly'. The first example that he gives is the a simple one image job:

> convert someimage.png -resize 25% someimage.jpg

The above will take a png image called someimage.png and turn it into a jpg, scaling it down 25% from it’s previous size. Or this:

convert someimage.jpg -resize 640x480 -quality 40 someimage_1.jpg

That will create a scaled 640×480 image from someimage.jpg and save it as someimage_1.jpg, with jpg compression of 40%.

Network commands

Frank Teegelbeckers has a blog called Network+ and it has an interesting ` ">post about basic network commands: Ping, Traceroute, ifconfig/ipconfig, netstat, Telnet, and FTP.

Most of these utilities have been ported over to DOS and so Teegelbeckers gives both Unix/Linux and MS-DOG based explainations for them all. For example:

> Ping can tell you if the TCP/IP stack of another system on the network is functioning normally. The ping program generates a series of Echo Request messages using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and transmits them to the computer whose name or IP address you specify on the command line. The basic syntax of the ping program is as follows:

ping target

Bash with pepperoni

I am a bit fan of providing custom interfaces to Internet applications and sites. This website explains how to order Pizza using Bash!

The application works with Dominos' website and I found that the command-line modifiers in the man page were quite amusing!

I have not tried this yet so do not know if it will work with Dominos' non-us sites; if you try it out then do let us know if it worked, and of course whether it tasted any good!

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About

Hello, my name is Zeth, I'll be your host here.

Command Line Warriors is about taking control of your own technology, it looks at our experiences of computing; especially using GNU/Linux, the Python programming language, the command-line and issues such as techno-ethics, best practices and whatever is cool now. If you take control of your technology then you are a Warrior too!

This site is your site too which means that you can contribute and get involved. You can leave comments using the facility provided. For me, the comments and discussions are by far the best part of the site. So please do have your say!

Latest Discussions

Nui

July 18, 2008
Hmm, this would be more persuasive as an argument with some evidence. I am a happy admin of Windows and a novice user of Linux, so I have taken the ...
Give Linux a chance

Paddy3118

July 18, 2008
Hi, I too work with Electronic Design Automation tools, where Tcl is used extensively. I tend to only occasionally have to write in Tcl and so find the TclTutor utility: ...
Python and TCL

Cliff Wells

July 17, 2008
I personally cannot live without the Web Developer extension or Firebug. Unfortunately these are probably both among the more difficult to port extensions. Given how poorly Firefox functions on Linux ...
Will Epiphany be able to compete with Firefox's extensions?

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July 17, 2008
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A year after my 2007 predictions - the score card

Leatherjackets99

July 16, 2008
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Email Syntax Check in Python

Åke Forslund

July 13, 2008
I'm pretty much a novice in both of these languages but I find them both easy to use and preform the tasks I give them. However I rarely use them ...
Python and TCL

Christopher Thoday

July 12, 2008
A single test is not sufficient to give you confidence that the algorithm is working. You should make 'number' an argument of 'main' so that you can test some boundary ...
Python and TCL

paul21

July 10, 2008
Shame on Mozilla. They should make developers specify the extension license before hosting it. They should show the license next to download button as well.
Are your Firefox extensions proprietary software?

Tris

July 8, 2008
Justin - You say they had not heard of Linux? That doesn't sound very professional to me!
Give Linux a chance

michael

July 8, 2008
what about Galeon? in Gnome i use Galeon mostly. it is fast and stable and has a nice portal with search masks for Debian, FSF, Freshmeat and so on. wtf ...
Will Epiphany be able to compete with Firefox's extensions?

vermin

July 7, 2008
> Eventually, after a bit of digging and Googling, I found their Toolbar-License... You simply found the license of the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Internet Explorer. This is another product, much ...
Are your Firefox extensions proprietary software?

Andrew West

July 6, 2008
Both the Python and the Tcl example could do with error checking. While at first this may not seem on topic with the post I think it better shows the ...
Python and TCL

Kurushiyama

June 30, 2008
XML is no replacement for SGML, it's a subset.
An Introduction to ReStructuredText