Summary

This is the first post of two about a light weight way to implement a thesaurus. It is great for what I need, which is the occasional use of a thesaurus for writing text such as this article. Once it is set up, you can forget about it and just use K whenever you want to look up a word.

A nice bonus or synergy is that the website also returns a definition for the word, so it functions as a simple dictionary as well.

The second post will deal with how to use Vim's built in syntax rule sets to provide highlighting and nice colours.

There are two or three simple steps:

1. a vim script that passes the cursor word to an external shell script.
2. a shell script that looks up the word using an online thesaurus, then parses     [continued...]

I run Slackware on my laptop, as I've mentioned here before, and about the only issue I have with it instead of the natively installed Vista Home is that it runs a bit hot. From what I can tell (because Vista does not give you a lot of tools to investigate), Vista does two things more aggressively: it slows down the CPU frequency, and it changes the fan speed sooner. However, the benefits of have a unix-y environment more than make up for that so I am happy with running Slackware.

However, that does not mean I can't tweak things a bit, such as setting up a CPU frequency governor and scaling the frequency, which I wrote about previously.

Pm-utils

Well, the Melbourne Open has finished after a huge couple of weeks. If you read my previous post on tennis, you know I am not usually a fan of this overpaid over-hyped event. But this one was pretty good.

We saw some great games. The main thing for me, though, was that we saw some relative new-comers get up and win their important games from the big stars. There is a changing of the guard underway in all areas, women's and men's. That started last year or even the year before, but this year was conclusive.

However, to harp on again, women's tennis is still unwatchable because of the banshee shrieking. It is not even improving. If anything, it is getting worse. They have become more vocal and, if it is possible, louder.

Why do they do it? Why is it impossible for them to grunt without shrieking? It is extremely distracting. Until they stop (unlikely), or authorities regulate it (unlikely), or viewers start protesting (maybe), I can't watch it.

Which isn't a great loss since it is as boring as batshit anyway. Pip, pip!

    [continued...]

A quick note to say I haven't been posting much because   a) it is as hot as hell, too hot to use my overheating laptop; and   b) I've been involved in a couple of projects that have been overheating my laptop, and I will post about them soon.

I wanted to try out Tumblr to see how easy it was. Turns out it is pretty easy. Actually, I'm (surprisingly, perhaps) pleased with how seamless the whole thing was.

Even from the limited number of posts so far, the tumblr blog gets more feedback, which always gives an incentive to write more. I think that applies whether you are driven by vanity or not.

I'm not sure whether I'll keep the tumblr blog going or not, nor how I am going to split content between the two.

I usually blog in two distinct categories: general stuff which includes science, and unix and programming stuff. For the time being, I guess I will just post to which blog seems more suitable.

You can check out the tumblr blog here.

Here is a fascinating factoid about crumpled paper. Take a piece of paper and crumple it, then place it over another piece of paper. Some point of the crumpled piece is exactly over its corresponding point of the other piece.

No way, you say.

It is true. You can prove it intuitively. If you stand somewhere in your city and place a map of the city on the ground, one point on the map will be exactly over its corresponding physical point. It has to be, since the map is nothing but the city shrunk down. If you are at the corner of A Street and B Street and place the map on the ground, the map's A & B corner is right over the actual corner.

Similarly, the crumpled paper is, in a sense, the paper shrunk down. If you place the crumpled paper over another, there must a point on the crumpled paper that is over its corresponding point on the other piece of paper.

I have been going through James Malloy's tutorial on writing your own operating system¹ , which involves some assembly and quite a bit of bit twiddling with shifts and masks in C.

I haven't written any assembly or done any serious bit manipulation for years. I can do simple (i.e. 1 byte) hexadecimal addition in my head, but nothing more complex than that, so I needed a quick calculator that showed me the results from doing things like bit shifts, rotates, masking, and so on.

A bit of googling found one contributor to Stackoverflow recommending calcc by Luigi Auriemma. A quick download of a small zip file and there it was, GPL'ed source code and pre-built binaries for unix and MS Windows.

It is quick and simple to use and has the usual unary and binary     [continued...]

If you are wondering where Simon O'Donnell is in The Cricket Show, it turns out he will be the host for Nine's Sunday Footy Show. O'Donnell is leaving because he has commitments outside Channel Nine and would not be able to do both shows.

I like O'Donnell's presentation style. He had an easy conversational interview style and he had the knowledge that comes from being a former Test player. With his relaxed nature, he was able to get past the formulaic plastic face of PR spin and get his interviewees to really talk about themselves and their game. His tips and answers to young viewer questions about their technique was insightful.

All in all, it was an enjoyable way to spend the lunch break and get some of the background and culture of cricket.

Michael Slater is taking up the reigns from O'Donnell and, from his efforts so far, is doing a pretty good job.

ABC3 is the ABC TV's station for young viewers, mainly pre-teens. It closes around 9pm each night. Then they play some music and display a "We will be back tomorrow" image.

Over the last few months, I have occasionally miscued the remote and landed there. Surprisingly, or perhaps not given the time of night, the music is not kiddies' music. Sometimes it is really great.

Last night, for example, appeared to be Funk night, with some great tunes from the 80s and 90s and including some bands you have never heard of like The Soul Seven who were mainly a session band and who only put out two singles.

I don't know if they are using Rage's producers to draw up their play list, but whoever did certainly knows their music.

Last night I cancelled my TV viewing, cranked up the volume and listened to some good music courtesy of ABC3 Childrens' Channel.

As long as I can remember, Slackware has used Dillon's cron dcron as its cron daemon. Dcron is a lightweight cron with an emphasis on a solid secure codebase which, while missing a few esoteric features found in bigger cron daemons, is great for most users.

Since 13.1 and continuing with 13.37, Slackware has had an updated version of dcron that introduced some very handy features that make it especially suitable for laptops, or indeed any machine that spends much of its time in sleep mode. The features give dcron some of the characteristics of anacron.

Somehow I managed to miss the changes until now, almost two years later. (I must have been in a personal sleep mode.) Here I am going to explain the features and why they are great for laptops, and give a couple of examples.

Sleep