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 the output to remove unnecessary cruft.
3. an optional syntax file to provide highlighting and colours.

Here is what it looks like with a quick-n-dirty syntax rule set:

Sample output for "quick"

I use Vim for programming and it is great for that. I use it when I need to edit files on remote servers that I have ssh'ed in. I also use Vim for writing text because it is a great text editor. I am writing this in Vim, for example.

Often, one of the things you want when writing text is a thesaurus, which is the topic for today.

Why on-line

You download a thesaurus (the Moby one is common), point Vim to it and you are good to go. However, a thesaurus can consume a lot of memory. The Moby file is 24 MB, although to be fair Vim doesn't use anything like that. If you are using Vim remotely, you may not want to use any extra memory. For example, I have a remote VPS that has only 128 MB of total memory, so every megabyte is critical. This is especially true if you use the thesaurus only rarely; the trade-off is not worth it.

The bigger issue for me is that Vim does not handle a long list of alternative words very well. It is fine with a short list where you use it just like auto-complete, but it seems to get confused with a long list. Unfortunately, Moby often serves up a long list, and you frequently find you have inadvertently changed your perfectly good word to something completely different. You then have to Undo and try again.

In fact, I got so frustrated with the Vim/Moby combination I ended up unsetting the thesaurus feature in Vim after just a couple of months.

The good news is that there is an alternative, and that is to use one of the many on-line thesauruses.

I have set things up so that a script calls a command-line browser to dump the output from the online website, then parses it to remove extra cruft such as sidebars, headers and footers, and white space, and puts it into a scratch buffer in Vim itself for me to browse through and perhaps copy a word from.

Vim setup

Copy and paste the following into your .vimrc or wherever you prefer. I have it in a common.vim file in my ftplugin directory, where my various filetype scripts can source it if they want.

fun! ReadThesaurus()
   " Assign current word under cursor to a script variable
   let s:thes_word = expand('<cword>')
   " Open a new window, keep the alternate so this doesn't clobber it. 
   keepalt split thes_
   " Show cursor word in status line
   exe "setlocal statusline=" . s:thes_word
   " Set buffer options for scratch buffer
   setlocal noswapfile nobuflisted nowrap nospell 
     \buftype=nofile bufhidden=hide 
   " Delete existing content
   1,$d
   " Run the thesaurus script
   exe ":0r !/home/nickcoleman/bin/thesaurus " . s:thes_word 
   " Goto first line
   1
   " Set file type to 'thesaurus'
   set filetype=thesaurus
   " Map q to quit without confirm
   nmap <buffer> q :q<CR>
endfun
" Map the K key to the ReadThesaurus function
noremap <buffer> K :call ReadThesaurus()<CR><CR>

The script is fully commented for you to follow what is going on.

Notice I specified the location of the shell script that Vim is calling to be $HOME/bin/thesaurus. Change this to wherever you are going to put the shell script.

I call the scratch buffer "thes_" so that I have a name for it which means I can easily re-use the buffer again. Otherwise Vim would create a new buffer every time and go through buffer numbers like crazy. In the unlikely event you have an actual file called "thes_", change the script to use some other wacky name. I could have used the Vim function tempname() to generate a unique buffer name, but "thes_" is meaningful and easy to remember if you want to unhide the buffer later.

I set the status line to show the word I am looking up. Sometimes the website will return a different word, a near synonym, so the status line reminds me exactly which word I are looking up. An example is looking up the word "the" which returns the definition and synonyms for "histrionical". No, I don't know why.

I include a line to set the filetype to "thesaurus". Its purpose is to allow me to set up anything special for that filetype later on. A possible use would be to create a syntax file to do special highlighting or colouring. That will be the topic for the next post.

The mapping for K has a second <CR>. It eats up the "Press ENTER or type command to continue" prompt. There are other ways to do this, but they can mess up the display or have the side effect of applying globally instead of just this buffer.

By the way, in case it isn't obvious, the reason I split the functionality in to two—part- Vim and part-shell scripts—instead of doing it all in Vim is because Vim's scripting language, always an awkward beast at the best of times, would make it too hard. Best to use the good parts of each and combine them.

Thesaurus script

Originally I wrote a quick-n-dirty one-liner, but I decided the script might be useful outside Vim as well, so I tidied it up to be a useful script that you can call from the command line.

This is the shell script that Vim calls. Put it in the location you specified in the Vim script above. It is straightforward, apart from the sed call, and there are enough comments so you can see what is happening.

#!/bin/sh

# This searchs an online thesaurus, cuts as much cruft out as possible,
# and displays the definitions.

#URL='http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/'
URL='http://thesaurus.com/browse/'

# Display help, and quit.
function usage {
    cat << EOF_HELP
    Usage: $(basename $0) [-r][-h] word
    Display the parsed results of an online thesaurus search for <word>

    -r  Raw results; no filtering.
    -h  Display this help.

EOF_HELP
    exit 
}

# Check for a parameter.  Get the output from the website
function get_thes {
    [  -z "$1" ] && usage
    $(readlink -e $(which links)) -dump "${URL}$1" 
}

# Check for a -h parameter or absence of parameter.
[ "$1" = "-h" -o -z "$1" ] && usage

# If -r just get the raw output, otherwise pass it through sed.
if [ "$1" = "-r" ] ; then
    shift
    get_thes $1
else
    # Sed is doing many things: 
    # Print out "no results found for " and quit. 
    # Print out only the lines I'm interested in, which are:
    #   No results found for
    #   Main Entry:
    #   Definition:
    #   and all from Synonyms: to Antonyms:
    # Put a new line after Antonyms.
    get_thes $1 | sed -n -e '/No results found for/ {' \
      -e ' s|^[ \t]*\(No results .*\):|\1|p ; q} '\
      -e '{/Main Entry:/p ' \
      -e '/Definition:/p ' \
      -e '/Synonyms:/,/\(Antonyms:\)\|\(^$\)/p} ' \
      -e '/Antonyms:/ a \ '
fi    

I use thesaurus.com because I found it has a wider coverage than merriam-webster.com. If you want to use a different website, you will need to write your own sed script to parse it.

I separated the sed actions into discrete chunks above so you can get a clearer picture of what sed is doing, but they appear as one line in the actual script. That line is below, for you to cut-n-paste.

    get_thes $1 | sed -n -e '/No results found for/ { s|^[ \t]*\(No results .*\):|\1|p ; q} ;{/Main Entry:/p ; /Definition:/p ; /Synonyms:/,/\(Antonyms:\)\|\(^$\)/p} ; /Antonyms:/ a \  '

You are done. To use, move the cursor in Normal mode underneath the word of interest and press K.

I noticed once that the script loses permissions to a temporary file that Vim uses internally. It seems to only happen if a remote ssh session in screen is unexpectedly terminated, and not always then. Closing and re-opening Vim (yes, a pain) will fix it.

Additional Info for Windows Users

Summary

1. Install sed and links. It takes only a few seconds each to download and install. The default install is fine.
2. Create a batch file to get and parse the thesaurus data. The batch file will be an abbreviated form of the shell script above, tailored for Windows.
3. Point vim to the location of the batch file.

Install Links & Sed

Create DOS Batch File

@"c:\program files\links\links.exe" -dump http://thesaurus.com/browse/%1 | "c:\program files\gnuwin32\bin\sed.exe" -n -e "/No results found for/ { s|^[ \t]*\(No results .*\):|\1|p ; q} ;{/Main Entry:/p ; /Definition:/p ; /Synonyms:/,/\(Antonyms:\)\|\(^$\)/p} ; /Antonyms:/ a \  "

There are a couple of differences to the unix script. Sed needs double quotes surrounding its commands instead of single quotes. The paths to the executables need double quotes because of the spaces in the path. I put a '@' in front of everything to prevent DOS from echoing back the entire command. Finally, I put %1 instead of $1 for the DOS way to pass in the parameter.

It is probably worth opening a cmd.exe window and testing the batch file. Assuming you called the batch file "thesaurus.bat", run thesaurus.bat loose and you should get a listing back after a few seconds with all the synonyms of "loose".

Point Vim

In Windows, $HOME expands to "C:\Documents and Settings\{user}".¹ However, it doesn't expand in a script if it is contained within quotes. So the vim script should be changed from

to

If you put the batch file in a sub folder, add that folder name in front of '\thesaurus.bat' like this: '\my_folder\thesaurus.bat'.

If it does not work, because you tested the batch file itself beforehand, the problem is almost certainly in how you specified the location of your batch file in the vim script.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=vim-thesaurus%21201202170802%21general%2Cblogging%2Cinternet%2Cprogramming%2Csoftware%2Cunix/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cpu-frequency-sleep-slackware%21201202050917%21unix http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cpu-frequency-sleep-slackware%21201202050917%21unix#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:17:00 -0700 Nick unix http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cpu-frequency-sleep-slackware%21201202050917%21unix/

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

hibernate_cpufreq()
{
  ( cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/
  for x in cpu[0-9]*; do
    # if cpufreq is a symlink, it is handled by another cpu. Skip.
    [ -L "$x/cpufreq" ] && continue
    gov="$x/cpufreq/scaling_governor"
    # if we do not have a scaling_governor file, skip.
    [ -f "$gov" ] || continue
    # if our temporary governor is not available, skip.
    grep -q "$TEMPORARY_CPUFREQ_GOVERNOR" \
      "$x/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors" || continue
    savestate "${x}_governor" < "$gov"
    echo "$TEMPORARY_CPUFREQ_GOVERNOR" > "$gov"
  done )
}

It is pretty straightforward: for each CPU, check if the governor is a scaling type and save its value if it is. (savestate is a function in another file that saves the current state in /var/run/pm-utils/pm-suspend/storage.)

Here is the corresponding function that restores the settings on wakeup:

thaw_cpufreq()
{
  ( cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/
  for x in cpu[0-9]*/cpufreq/scaling_governor ; do
    [ -f "$x" ] || continue
    state_exists "${x%%/*}_governor" || continue
    restorestate "${x%%/*}_governor" > "$x"
  done )
}

Again, straightforward: if there is a saved value for the CPU's governor, restore it.

So far, so good.

However, astute readers and anyone who read the summary at the beginning will realise that there is a bug for the userspace governor. First, a bit on governors.

Of the five available governors, convervative, performance, powersave, ondemand and userspace, userspace is the only one that does not have a default value(s) associated with it. The other governors come with reasonably sensible defaults, and some of them even allow you to change their values. Userspace comes with no defaults, which makes sense because the whole point of a userspace governor is that it is up to the user to control it.

Bug

It is kind of annoying to wonder why the fan suddenly is going at full blast. Then you check the CPU's frequency. Oh, it's at max, when I thought I had set it to a middle value. Oh yeah, I closed the lid earlier and put the laptop into sleep mode.

Fix

All changes to the pm-utils scripts should be done in /etc/pm otherwise they will be lost on any upgrade. Copy /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq to /etc/pm/sleep.d/. Edit the file to add the lines marked with "-->":

hibernate_cpufreq()
{
  ( cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/
  for x in cpu[0-9]*; do
    # if cpufreq is a symlink, it is handled by another cpu. Skip.
    [ -L "$x/cpufreq" ] && continue
    gov="$x/cpufreq/scaling_governor"
    # if we do not have a scaling_governor file, skip.
    [ -f "$gov" ] || continue
    # if our temporary governor is not available, skip.
    grep -q "$TEMPORARY_CPUFREQ_GOVERNOR" \
      "$x/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors" || continue
    savestate "${x}_governor" < "$gov"
--> # Save userspace governor's frequency
--> [ $(cat "$gov") = "userspace" ] && \
-->     savestate "${x}_frequency" < "$x/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq"
    echo "$TEMPORARY_CPUFREQ_GOVERNOR" > "$gov"
  done )
}

thaw_cpufreq()
{
  ( cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/
  for x in cpu[0-9]*/cpufreq/scaling_governor ; do
    [ -f "$x" ] || continue
    state_exists "${x%%/*}_governor" || continue
    restorestate "${x%%/*}_governor" > "$x"
--> # If frequency has been saved, restore it.
--> state_exists "${x%%/*}_frequency" || continue
--> restorestate "${x%%/*}_frequency" > "${x%%_*}_setspeed"
  done )
}

More bugs

This still does not save any parameters for other governors. It does not concern me because I mainly use the userspace governor and the others have sensible defaults anyway.

If you want to save parameters for the other governors, the fix is fairly easy. Check in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq (for CPU0; check the other CPUs too) for the parameters that the governor can set. They will be the files with write access. Modify the code to save and restore them.

Freedesktop.org

I have a love-hate relationship with freedesktop.org. I am grateful someone has taken on the thankless task of attempting to make a set of standards for Linux desktops. I really dislike some of their design decisions, and much of the xdg-mime stuff seems unnecessarily convoluted and obtuse. The complete lack of documentation is appalling. Try to fix an invalid mime association that has an incorrect default application and you seem to go round-and-round in circles.

Anyway, I was going to submit the small changes above as a bug fix. Then I noticed that there are minor bugs still outstanding from 2008, four years ago. Perhaps development has stopped completely.

I hope freedesktop.org has a future. Possibly the schism between KDE, Unity desktop and Gnome will resolve, otherwise those of us who use none of those desktops will be caught up in the crossfire of conflicting and different standards, to our detriment.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cpu-frequency-sleep-slackware%21201202050917%21unix/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tennis-melbourne-open-2012%21201201301212%21sport http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tennis-melbourne-open-2012%21201201301212%21sport#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:12:00 -0700 Nick sport http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tennis-melbourne-open-2012%21201201301212%21sport/ 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!

[Late news] The Age has a poll on "Is it time to crack down on shrieking", and 91% say Yes.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tennis-melbourne-open-2012%21201201301212%21sport/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=not-much-happening%21201201251000%21general http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=not-much-happening%21201201251000%21general#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:00 -0700 Nick general http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=not-much-happening%21201201251000%21general/ 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.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=not-much-happening%21201201251000%21general/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tumblr-blog%21201201171133%21general%2Cblogging http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tumblr-blog%21201201171133%21general%2Cblogging#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:33:00 -0700 Nick general blogging http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tumblr-blog%21201201171133%21general%2Cblogging/ 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.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=tumblr-blog%21201201171133%21general%2Cblogging/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=fun-with-crumpled-paper%21201201141113%21science http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=fun-with-crumpled-paper%21201201141113%21science#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:13:00 -0700 Nick science http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=fun-with-crumpled-paper%21201201141113%21science/ 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 operators you can think of such as integer maths, logical connectives and bit manipulation.

Input can be any of the usual bases of 2, 4, 8, 10 and 16, plus percentages, floats, datetime and IP dotted quads. You can mix and match within the one command. To see a number conversion, just enter a number and the list will display. Enter multiple numbers in different formats and with different operators to see the result.

Most valuable for me is that the output provides everything at once: hex, unsigned and signed decimal, octal, binary, ascii, and so on. You don't have to specify the output like 'print/x' (gdb's way of specifying hex output); it is all there in one list. Very useful.

64 bit original version

Example input shows addition of decimal + binary + octal + hex

You can build either a 32 bit or a 64 bit binary by using a compile option. I prefer the 32 bit one because I find 8 byte words hard to parse. It's probably what I am used to; those of you with 64 bit machines will probably want the 64 bit version.

I really like this tool. I have had it open in a spare xterm constantly while I go through the aforementioned tutorial. Very much recommended for programmers.

Changes

I would like to change a couple of things. Calcc uses fgets to get its input, which means unix users won't get command-line editing nor, importantly, a command history buffer (I hate having to retype a command with only one small change). Also, sometimes I want to find the hex for an ASCII char, so an ASCII table would be nice.

I modified calcc to use the GNU readline library. It comes with various command line editing shortcuts and has a history buffer built in, with which any Bash user is familiar. I also added an ASCII table and a 'quit' command, plus I tidied up the output to suit my personal style.

32 bit version with my changes

Output

Let's look at the output (for the 32 bit version) and see what it provides.

unsigned dec	hex	octal	binary
signed dec	ascii	exponential	base 4	I.P. address
base32	base64	date/time
float	double

Notice the IP address and datetime fields. You can do arithmetic on those types too. See the help for the full list.

Grab the diff

You can grab the diff file here. Put it in the same directory as the source code and patch it with patch < calcc_changes.diff

Drop me a line if you find it useful. Thanks to Luigi for producing a useful calculator for programmers.

Colourized diff

Here is the diff with syntax highlighting for those who want to read it first.

--- calcc.c
+++ calcc.c
@@ -18,8 +18,28 @@
     http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
 */
 
+/* NJC 01/11/12  
+* ====== Compilation ==========
+*
+* The printed output can be in words of either 4 bytes or 8 bytes, depending on compile-time options.
+* If you have a 32 bit machine, you may prefer the 4 byte output as it takes less screen space
+* and is easier to scan.
+* 
+* Change "my_calcc" to whatever you want to call the binary.
+*
+* 32 bit output
+* gcc calcc.c -DBITS32 -O2 -lreadline -lncurses -o my_calcc
+*
+* 64 bit output
+* gcc calcc.c -DBITS64 -O2 -lreadline -lncurses -o my_calcc
+*
+*/
+
 #include <stdio.h>
 #include <stdlib.h>
+// NJC 01/10/12   Changed input from fgets to use the readline library
+#include <readline/readline.h>
+#include <readline/history.h>
 #include <string.h>
 #include <stdint.h>
 #include <ctype.h>
@@ -30,8 +50,6 @@
 typedef uint32_t    u32;
 typedef uint64_t    u64;
 
-
-
 // #define BITS32   // uncomment to enable 32 bits
 // #define DEBUG    // uncomment to enable the step-by-step visualization
 
@@ -80,13 +98,17 @@
 char *showtime(NTI num);
 char *showchar(NTI num);
 char *showbase(NTI num, int size, int sign);
+// NJC 01/11/12 
+char * rl_gets ();
+void print_ascii();
 
 
 
 static const u8 b64_table[] = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/";
 static const u8 b32_table[] = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ234567";
 static const u8 hex_table[] = "0123456789abcdef";
-
+// NJC 01/11/12 
+static char *line_read = (char *)NULL;
 
 
 int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
@@ -99,7 +121,7 @@
     int     op,
             len,
             slen;
-    char    buff[READSZ * 9],   // should be enough
+	    char    buff[READSZ * 9],   // should be enough
             tmp[NTSZ + 1],
             *data,
             *pl,
@@ -109,12 +131,12 @@
 
     setbuf(stdout, NULL);
 
-    printf("\n"
-        "Calcc "VER" (%d bits version)\n"
-        "by Luigi Auriemma\n"
-        "e-mail: aluigi@autistici.org\n"
-        "web:    aluigi.org\n"
-        "\n", NTSZ);
+    // NJC 01/10/12 removed extra \n's to make vanity header appear on one line
+    printf( "Calcc "VER" (%d bits version) "
+        "by Luigi Auriemma "
+        "e-mail: aluigi@autistici.org "
+        "web:    aluigi.org "
+        "\nType help or ?\n", NTSZ);
 
     if(argc > 1) {
         p = buff;
@@ -127,7 +149,10 @@
         goto do_it;
     }
 
-    while(fgets(buff, READSZ, stdin)) {
+    // NJC 01/10/12  while(fgets(buff, READSZ, stdin)) {
+    while(line_read = rl_gets()) {
+	if (line_read)
+	    memccpy(buff, line_read, '\0', READSZ - 1);		// copy readline's buffer to ours, stopping at first \0 (EOString for readline),  or sizeof buff.
 
 do_it:
         mytolower(buff);
@@ -159,6 +184,12 @@
             help();
             *buff = 0;
         }
+	else if (buff[0] == 'a') {
+	    print_ascii();
+	    *buff = 0;
+	}
+	else if (buff[0] == 'q' || buff[0] == 'Q')
+	    goto quit;
 
         for(;;) {
             data = buff;
@@ -314,12 +345,13 @@
             showbase(tot, 32, 0), showbase(tot, 64, 0), showtime(tot),
             totfl, totdb);
     }
-
+quit:
+    putchar('\n');
     return(0);
 }
 
 
-
+// NJC 01/12/12 added a, q/Q/ctrl-D/ctrl-C
 void help(void) {
     fputs("\n"
         "Input types:\n"
@@ -331,7 +363,8 @@
         "  y  = year                            t  = time hh:mm:ss (0 for current date)\n"
         "  ,. = float/double numbers (is not possible to make operations on them)\n"
         "     = decimal (default)\n"
-        "\n"
+        "  a  = print ASCII table               q,Q,ctrl-D,ctrl-C = quit\n"
+	"\n"
         "Operators and priority order:\n"
         "  ~  = complement                      !  = not\n"
         "  << = shift left                      >> = shift right\n"
@@ -667,7 +700,7 @@
 char *showtime(NTI num) {
     struct  tm  *tmx;
     time_t  datex;
-    static  char    buff[32];
+    static  char    buff1[32];
     static const char   *day[] =
             { "Sun","Mon","Tue","Wed","Thu","Fri","Sat" },
             *months[] =
@@ -677,14 +710,14 @@
     tmx = gmtime(&datex);
     if(!tmx) return("none");
     sprintf(
-        buff,
+        buff1,
         "%s %02d %s %d %02d:%02d:%02d",
         day[tmx->tm_wday],
         tmx->tm_mday,
         months[tmx->tm_mon],
         1900 + tmx->tm_year,
         tmx->tm_hour, tmx->tm_min, tmx->tm_sec);
-    return(buff);
+    return(buff1);
 }
 
 
@@ -746,4 +779,80 @@
     return(o + i);
 }
 
-
+// NJC 01/11/12  from the readline library guide at gnu.org.
+/* Read a string, and return a pointer to it.
+   Returns NULL on EOF. */
+char *
+rl_gets ()
+{
+  /* If the buffer has already been allocated,
+     return the memory to the free pool. */
+  if (line_read)
+    {
+      free (line_read);
+      line_read = (char *)NULL;
+    }
+
+  /* Get a line from the user. */
+  line_read = readline (" > ");
+
+  /* If the line has any text in it,
+     save it on the history. */
+  if (line_read && *line_read)
+    add_history (line_read);
+
+  return (line_read);
+}
+
+// NJC 01/11/12 Print the ASCII table
+void
+print_ascii() {
+    u8 i, j, x;
+    char  a[10] = "" ;					// wide enough to hold ascii representation of non-keyboard chars like DEL etc.
+    for (i = 0 ; i < 20 ; i++  ) {			// print in columns, 10 cols wide == 20 rows to hold 127 data points.
+	for ( j = 0 ; j < 128 ; j += 20 ) {		// each new column is +20 from the one to the left.
+	    x = i + j;
+	    if ( x > 127 )
+		break ;					// no more ASCII chars after decimal 127
+	    switch (x) {
+		case   0: strcpy(a, "NUL"); break;
+		case   1: strcpy(a, "SOH"); break;
+		case   2: strcpy(a, "STX"); break;
+		case   3: strcpy(a, "ETX"); break;
+		case   4: strcpy(a, "EOT"); break;
+		case   5: strcpy(a, "ENQ"); break;
+		case   6: strcpy(a, "ACK"); break;
+		case   7: strcpy(a, "BEL \\a"); break;
+		case   8: strcpy(a, "BS \\b"); break;
+		case   9: strcpy(a, "HT \\t"); break;
+		case  10: strcpy(a, "LF \\n"); break;
+		case  11: strcpy(a, "VT \\t"); break;
+		case  12: strcpy(a, "FF \\f"); break;
+		case  13: strcpy(a, "CR \\r"); break;
+		case  14: strcpy(a, "SO"); break;
+		case  15: strcpy(a, "SI"); break;
+		case  16: strcpy(a, "DLE"); break;
+		case  17: strcpy(a, "DC1"); break;
+		case  18: strcpy(a, "DC2"); break;
+		case  19: strcpy(a, "DC3"); break;
+		case  20: strcpy(a, "DC4"); break;
+		case  21: strcpy(a, "NAK"); break;
+		case  22: strcpy(a, "SYN"); break;
+		case  23: strcpy(a, "ETB"); break;
+		case  24: strcpy(a, "CAN"); break;
+		case  25: strcpy(a, "EM"); break;
+		case  26: strcpy(a, "SUB"); break;
+		case  27: strcpy(a, "ESC"); break;
+		case  28: strcpy(a, "FS"); break;
+		case  29: strcpy(a, "GS"); break;
+		case  30: strcpy(a, " RS"); break;
+		case  31: strcpy(a, " US"); break;
+		case  32: strcpy(a, "space"); break;
+		case 127: strcpy(a, "DEL"); break;
+		default:  a[0] = x ; a[1] = '\0';
+	    }
+	    printf("%6s %3.0d %2X\t",a,x,x);
+	}
+	putchar('\n');
+    }
+}

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.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cricketsimon%21201112290958%21sport/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=abc3%21201112210922%21entertainment http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=abc3%21201112210922%21entertainment#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:22:00 -0700 Nick entertainment http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=abc3%21201112210922%21entertainment/ 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.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=abc3%21201112210922%21entertainment/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cronslackware%21201112181115%21unix http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cronslackware%21201112181115%21unix#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 11:15:00 -0700 Nick unix http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cronslackware%21201112181115%21unix/

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

ID and FREQ

The FREQ keyword specifies how often you want cron to check if the job ID has run in order to reschedule it if it has not. In the case of my weather script, the crontab entry looks like this, with the original entry first and the improved entry second (in case it is not obvious, I deleted the first entry in the real crontab):

With the second entry and ignoring the ID and FREQ keywords for the moment, the script runs every 10 past and 40 past the hour for the hours of 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 o'clock. Obviously I do not want it to run at each of those times and this is where the FREQ keyword comes in. The FREQ entry says to run the job only if it has been at least 4 hours since it last ran, and to check on this every 30 minutes.

Take this morning as an example. I opened the laptop at 10:15am. The last time this entry ran was yesterday morning. Upon wakeup, dcron checks this entry and notices that job ID of weather last ran more than 4 hours ago, so it is good to go. At 10:40 (the next available slot), the job ran. Since then, it has not run again because before 14:40 it is less than 4 hours since it last ran, and after 14:40 it is outside its scheduled times of 7-11.

Most of my personal crontab entries now use this method.

You can see why this type of crontab entry needs an ID, because dcron needs some way of tracking how recently a particular job ran. Rather than use an internally-generated ID, it gives you the ability to specify your own. A side benefit is that the cron emails use the ID in their subject header (which is why I use meaningful words rather than a number).

Scheduling

If I want a job to run every day, I should not specify FREQ=1d. Say I had a range of 7-11 hours, and the job ran at 11:40. The next day I open the laptop early and, at 7:10am, the job would not run because it had not been 24 hours since the last run. This is not what I want. If I specify FREQ=12h, the job would run at 7:10am.

Conversely, I should not specify FREQ=2h because then the job would run at, for example, 7:10am, 9:10am and 11:10am if my laptop was open early, again not what I want.

The FREQ should be long enough so that the job cannot run again within the same time period, but short enough so that if it last ran at the latest time it can next run at the earliest time.

Other Features

• FREQ can re-run a job if it did not exit cleanly (use exit 11 to signal this).
• A job can depend on another job(s) such as "run job2 only if job1 (and job0 and … ) has already run". Use the keyword AFTER.
• You can now use the keywords of @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly and @yearly, which users of other crons have missed in dcron.

Summary

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=cronslackware%21201112181115%21unix/feed/