Pick up the car today

Roo bar, fully sick flood lights, lifted suspension.

Geek Post

Tidying up XML with HTML tidy.
to tidy an XML file in the unix world use the following:

$tidy -xml -i -m --wrap "80" file.xml

in the windows world:

C:/program files/path to tidy/tidy.exe -xml -i -m --wrap "80" file.xml

Geek post

I'm having a problem at work. Students using a ADSL2+ with TPG (an ISP) are experiencing slow connections when downloading recordings (pod casts) of their lectures. Some students have submitted problem tickets to the database we maintain to help diagnose exactly this type of problem.

I need to provide TPG with details of the students who have this problem to help them sort out what is going wrong within their network. When the students submit their problem we record their IP address. Anyway, here is a useful little unix bash shell script I wrote which will read through a list of ip addresses and then do a whois lookup on each one and will print out all the ones from a particular provider.

#!/bin/bash
# script that iterates through a list of ip's in a file provided through stdin 
# does a whois look up on each of them and then prints out all the ones with
# a particular ISP - in this case TPG
#
#

FILE=""    # variable to hold the file name
if [ "$1" == "" ]; then  # if there is no file as an arg
   FILE="/dev/stdin"  #   then get it from stdin
else
   FILE="$1" 
   if [ ! -f $FILE ]; then 
   echo "$FILE : does not exists"
   exit 1
   elif [ ! -r $FILE ]; then
   echo "$FILE: can not be read"
   exit 2
   fi
fi



cat $FILE | while read LINE # pass the file line by line
do
 ISP=`whois $LINE | grep netname | awk '{print $2}'`
 if [ "$ISP" == "TPG-AU" ]; then
  echo "$LINE" 
  sleep 2
 fi
done

I always find examples like this found on other peoples blogs useful when searching the web for snipits of tested code.

Slug love

On the neighbours wall

Ol skool

I went to Warrawee Public School way back in the 70s' About a year ago I was driving past on some errand or another and pulled over, jumped the fence and sat on some of the old seats that I used to sit on at lunch when I was 6 or so.

I have few really clear memories from childhood, one of them is sitting on those seats, paper bag containing a carrot, Vegemite sandwich, a block of cheese and a packet of chips in hand wondering what I would look like 'when I was a man'. I remember what I was wearing, what the bark chips and dirt underfoot smelt like, the feel of the waxed paper wrapping. I remember who was next to me, and what other kids were doing, I remember how I felt. I remember staring at my knees and trying to make a photo in my brain that I would be able to see when I was a man. To know me now.

So I sat there on what looked to be the same wooden seats thinking about the life that stretches back. Back to that same seat, a third of a century ago. Of just how unimaginable life is to a kid and I want to ruffle the young me's head and tell him that it's pretty good. Don't worry so much, Oh, and you probably shouldn't put all the lizards and cicadas in Mrs Woolstencroft's draw because you will get the cain.