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

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

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!

I’ve been trying to find (for entirely legit reasons*) a decent keylogger for linux. The pickings are surprisingly slim – as one upstart option puts it:

Novice users, however, are usually limited to a narrow set of the following tools:

lkl

from 2005,

uberkey

, which appears dead,

THC-vlogger

, made by a renowned group of hackers, and

PyKeylogger

. All these tools have their pros and cons. Lkl, for example, sometimes abnormally repeats keys and its keymap configuration is rather awkward for a range of users. Uberkey, which is just over a hundred lines of code, also often repeats keys and what is worse, it makes your mouse move abruptly, loosing any sense of control. PyKeylogger, on the other hand, while very feature rich, only works in X environment. Finally, there is vlogger, …umm…, about which I cannot say anything specifically, only that it is receiving low score all around the web and it only logs shell sessions.

I’d add that lkl managed to crash my system within 5 minutes of using it, requireing a hard reboot to get things back up. So I’m currently deep in thinking

surely it can’t be *that* hard?

• reason: I find it useful to have statistics on my activity. Counting keypresses is pretty useless as a direct way of measuring productive work — but it’s a pretty good early indicator of when I’m getting too sleepy or too hyper.

That TV series pilot we released last week? With the $6000 budget and the cast of unknowns? More popular than True Blood and Doctor Who combined.

yeah, ok, some obvious caveats apply