Category: Uncategorised

While loving both

The Parallax View

and

All the President’s Men

, I’d somehow never realised that they had a forgotten sibling. Klute is the first member of what came to be known as director Alan Pakula’s

political paranoia trilogy

. One to watch.

mysql file output is efficient — but needs the FILE permission, which mysql turns off by default for most users:

mysql> select foo into outfile '/tmp/bar.txt' from sometable group by foo;

what is the ø in infinite thøught? Merely the philosophical counterpart to the Heavy Metal Umlaut? Or are we in the equally-depressing land of subtle and pointless theoretical in-jokes?

Search for files containing some text, open them in vim (one per tab)

 grep -l foo ./* | xargs vim -p

Alternatively, to get a single-line list that can be edited and then copy-pasted to a command-line:

grep -l foo ./* | xargs echo

There are more heavy-duty ways of removing lines in output listed here, but I see little reason for using them.t

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EU Observer, via Crooked Timber:

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

er…

Yes

. Yes, we really, really should.

FWIW, Louis Michel is also a former Belgian foreign minister, and has been deeply involved with the Congo at a national and European level.

on that keylogger thing….seeks the showkey utility will do everything I need, with considerably less faff and higher reliability. yay!

Yet another linux trick I keep on forgetting…

To display a notification on the desktop from the command-line:

# apt-get install libnotify-bin

$ notify-send “hello world”

obv. “from the command-line” really means “from a script”, unless you’re in some Evil Dead situation of independently-mobile hands

[reason for looking: trying to get xmonad+dmenu to notify me when I mistype a command, rather than just failing silently]

Since I’m spectacularly dim, it never occured to me that I can run markdown from

within

vim. Select your text, run !markdown, and wham! bam! everything is replaced by its technicolor HTML twin.