Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

IBM has a nice article called UNIX productivity tips. The article mentions this one-liner, which shows the shell commands you use most often:

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
    471 sl
    222 cd
    217 csl
    155 vi
    140 ..
    112 ls
    106 cls
     70 rm
     64 mv
     58 xpdf

Gee, I didn't know I'm that boring...

Note how I mistype "ls" way more often than I type it correctly. Luckily my .bashrc fixes this for me :)

Update 2006-09-25: When I posted this, I didn't intend to start a meme, but it seems I did: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32

(via Lifehacker)

Linux seems to run on more and more embedded systems all over the place. Nice example I learned about recently: Linux running an ALDI "Pfandautomat" (German)... Yeah, I have no idea how to translate "Pfandautomat" (container deposit?).

There's a video (Flash) on the site. A screenshot is here.

One of the single most useful packages when it comes to PDFs in Linux is pdfjam.

From the website:

• pdfnup, which allows PDF files to be "n-upped" in roughly the way that psnup does for PostScript files.
• pdfjoin, which concatenates the pages of multiple PDF files together into a single file.
• pdf90, which rotates the pages of one or more PDF files through 90 degrees (anti-clockwise).

The installation is easy as always: apt-get install pdfjam

PDF is not exactly the most easily editable format out there, but these tools can save you lots of time and trouble. Just recently I needed to merge two PDFs into one (and I didn't have any source format of the files). A simple pdfjoin foo1.pdf foo2.pdf --outfile bar.pdf does the job in a few seconds.

Equally useful when you need to print huge documents is pdfnup --nup 2x2 foo.pdf, which sticks four PDF pages into one (thus drastically reducing the amount of pages you have to print)...

Update 2006-09-20: As was noted by several people, pdftk is very cool, too. It can do some other things such as split PDFs, encrypt/decrypt them, manipulate metadata and more...

Democracy Player 0.9.0 has been released yesterday, which has been announced in quite a number of places already, e.g. Boing Boing.

It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux; if you're on Debian unstable the installation is as simple as apt-get install democracyplayer (I uploaded the new packages yesterday, they should have reached all mirrors by now).

If you want to know what this is all about, but you're reluctant to install yet another program, check out this screencast (MOV, 37MB) which shows the basic functionality and user interface and discusses some of the new features... I think you'll like it.

You can use it for all kinds of video blogs and podcasts, it'll download and play almost anything with an RSS feed.

Situation: program foobar is running on a Mac OS box and on a Linux box. I verified that using "top" (I'm working in an 80x25 xterm btw). Now the funny part:

Linux:

user@linux$ ps aux | grep foobar
root [...] /usr/sbin/foobar --some-options --more --options --even --more --options

Mac OS:

user@macos$ ps aux | grep foobar

Huh? What's going on? I know the program is running on both boxes! Mind-boggling solution after a long time of swearing and wasting time:

user@macos$ ps auxww | grep foobar
root [...] /usr/sbin/foobar --some-options --more --options --even --more --options

WTF? I mean... WTF??? Mac OS sticks the physical output on the terminal — 80 characters per line — into the pipe (instead of the full content). That's why the grep for "foobar" returns nothing - the "foobar" part is beyond the 80 character mark...

So if I resize my terminal to 20x10, only 20 characters per line would go into the pipe?!? How stupid is that?

Do all BSD-type OSes do that?