What is a Pipe Good for? (2010/07/24)
The underlying philosophies of UNIX seem long forgotten except in rare gems such as Plan9. Aside from the wonderfully creepy rabbit, Glenda, I am going to focus here on the idea of |.
So what is this mysterious |? It's the pipe character. For you curious stoners out there, #! is a hashbang, ! is a bang, and... well... I will leave the rest up to your imagination... [edit: #|]
In the old days of UNIX - the alleged summer of love in 1969 followed by the alleged moon landings - which I am often pissed to have missed, and trying desperately to relive through the use of Plan9 and the occasional giggle at the little dot ls -d prints out... but here I am getting distracted...
In the old days of UNIX, the shell was the way to interact with your box. A terminal was a physical device, and it looked about like what a terminal emulator looks like now in its window. That was it! No windows! And the terminal, like other devices, was represented by a device file. These exist in /dev usually. Let's not get carried away with tradition, though. One could put a device file in /tmp or /asldkjhasdlkjh or rewrite the kernel to change the directory delimiter to # and put it in #dev. Who would do ANYTHING like that!? Eh? Plan9 guys, speak up if I'm getting this wrong. Remember, obscurity is security! Security can be fun I guess, but I am saddened it is so emphasized in the modern world. I sometimes wish people would just be responsible... fuck I'm distracted again.
In the old days of UNIX, everything was a file, and programs were simple. To list the contents of a directory, one would simply type ls into the shell, and a small program would list the contents to standard output. To use a printer, one would type lp and input what they wanted to print, pressing ctrl-d to signal the end of the input. To print a list of the contents of a directory - this is where it gets interesting - one could pipe the output of ls to the input of lp. That would look something like this:
ls | lp
So, what IS a pipe good for? Well, it turns all these ingeniously simple programs into one big program, like Legos. Or at least, the idea was originally to keep the programs ingeniously simple... but that's a rant for another time ☺
What can one do with this Lego-like system? Well, the possibilities may not be endless, but they are very vast. The original point of this post was to outline a process for sound-generation using the command line, but I have clearly gotten into the underlying mess that needs explaining before Ubuntu squashes us all. The end is near.
One final thing I'd like to mention is file redirection. Like | connects two programs, < and > connect a program to a file. So, cat is a program that outputs a file to the terminal, right? Yes, it is! So:
cat file | program
is the same as
program < file
and
program > file
puts program's output into file. The end.
Please enjoy these Legos responsibly.
News From Websiting Committee (2010/04/10)
Fanclub,
I have been playing with werc again. I realized I could enable dirdir, the wiki app, for an entire site... It made some things very easy to do, though werc still needed a push or two in the right direction to be user friendly enough for the application, granderonde.tv. A site which, by the way, my mother likened to a 'drug trip.' All in all, I think it has potential. I may even work on my own site more now that it's easy like blogging! As my mother would say, "as your lawyer I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top. Don't forget a coat."
-Eli
Site update (2009/09/14)
Hello, a few things to mention to all of my fans out there: I set up http://echoline.org to work better. I also added some javascript, much to some of your chagrin, I know. Near the upper right corner of this window you should see a box where you can type a color, a link where you can pick a color for the box, and a link where you can set the middle header bar's background color to the color in the box. It uses cookies to save the setting for other pages on this site.
Why did I do this? Well I wanted the previously orange part to be green as it is now unless you've set it to something else. So I changed it. Then someone wanted it orange again. So I made this thing to change it. lol.
I know no one reads this. (2009/09/03)
It took me until past my mom's deadline to move all of my stuff out of her house I was living in, but I'm finally done. All this stuff is taking up too much room.
Neoturbine has a new real channel, other than the self-titled #neoturbine and various support channels. I hope they choose to stay.
My cat won't stop drinking out of the toilet.
My main desktop seems to have broken, and I am using a Windows 7 PC. Although I have been Linux user for most of my life, I have always found myself on a different computer from time to time or wanting to try something different out at home. When I heard Windows 7 had a free release candidate, I decided to install it and try it out. It isn't that bad, I guess...
Alice (2009/08/05)
I started working on a new AIML interpreter for my alicebot interfaces. I have written all these programs that talk using AIML, like the one on this page, but they have always used someone else's interpreter, and mostly someone else's AIML. This program seems like a challenge more suited to me at this point in my life than writing drivers, especially without datasheets.
Ils E'taient Une Fois (2009/07/20)
Let's see, what's new... Still in the process of moving. The peekpoke method didn't work. And I've been busy. In fact, I am still busy. So I will keep this short. The end.
Moving Day(s) (2009/07/17)
The cat is upset about the move. I'm not finished moving yet, so I'm going to go get some more boxes of crapola with which to fill my new life.
Drivers (2009/07/08)
I made a typo in the last post. It's gpio-based I2C. Big difference, to some of you, I know. My driver-writing skills are simply not up to par. I may just use the "peekpoke" method...
Skaara out on the Town (2009/07/06)
After battling for hours with piles of crap kernels that didn't work, and a company-supplied kernel that also didn't work, I tried something rather unorthodox. I whipped out a hex editor. I haven't used one of those in a while. It worked surprisingly well. I edited the TS-7350 binary kernel to output on a console that I actually have hardware for, and I'm fucking elated... IT WORKS! Unfortunately this gets me nowhere with the gpio-based SPI. Ah well, one issue at a time :)
Ubloatu (2009/07/06)
00:59 * echoline just woke up screaming "how the FUCK is that possible!?"
00:59 < echoline> i left a kernel compiling and it took up 4 gigs on a usb drive and ran out of space
Four gigabytes. I'm not shitting you. That's several orders of magnitude larger than my first harddrive. Maybe next time I will just be a Neo(turbine)Luddite. I would continue writing in this post, but suicide is not a joke.
Bloatware (2009/07/03)
Every time I run into bloated software I hate it more and more. Right now I'm trying to get gpsdrive to work correctly, and it's so bloated this just isn't worth it. I have a 4 gigabyte hard drive in my netbook, and I would have liked a megabyte or two left over when I'm done. It never ceases to amaze me how people can take something so nice (like linux) and turn it into gigs and gigs of such crapola (like gpsdrive and its dependencies).
Rhyming with Malice (2009/07/02)
I am sitting at work waiting for a kernel to compile. I tried just making the module I needed. It failed to load! Bummer. So I guess that means I sit here and wait... These robots are sure stubborn. I took some pictures of the robots which I'm going to put on facebook. I forgot who I was talking to when I made a joke that they are probably plotting to take over the world, because their inability to work correctly is clearly tainted with malice. Anyways, may God help us all if they get out of the lab :) I think we should name one of the robots Alice and it should be their spokesrobot. I should put a chatterbot up on this site again... Well, back to waiting.
Thanks, Mom. (2009/07/01)
Well I decided I could use some moral support at Ranch-N-Home Rentals, and asked my mom to come along. I really need to learn not to do that, because she proceeded to - at the very least - embarrass me, and possibly to fuck it up entirely. Being a tad paranoid, I thought maybe she had done this on purpose to teach me a lesson about asking her for moral support.
I suppose I have mom to thank for my existance. Thanks, mom.
LOL (2009/06/30)
I'm moving out, finally. I think this server is going to move to my mom's house. I may not have a connection for a bit...
The robot research is going well, but there isn't much to say I guess.
In other news, I'm trying not to type "lol" so much.
Nightmares (2009/06/27)
I said to a priest, "I think about computers too much, I almost said threads instead of thoughts," and he replied, "that's not good!" The dream went downhill from there. At a steep grade.
Neoturbine Convention 2009 (2009/06/25)
I'm missing the convention this year :(
As the day draws nearer I am more and more bummed out about it.
I stayed up all night. (2009/06/24)
Why, oh why, did I do it? Amazingly I didn't get sick. I've been adding more content to my site, moving stuff over from a (possibly infected) Slackware disk. Let's see, what else is newsworthy...? I am now running a Glendix kernel. I don't know why, it isn't really that cool. Glendix is basically a set of patches for the Linux kernel which allows it to run some Plan9 executables using the binfmt stuff. It's not very far along, but seems like an awesome idea... Also, their site, http://www.glendix.org, also runs werc. I just realized that totally wasn't newsworthy... oh well...
I am working on a driver for Plan9. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with that project, but if anything comes of it I will be sure to blog about it ad nauseum.
Werc (2009/06/23)
Well, as you may or may not have noticed, I am now using the "werc" web framework. This is my first web framework, and it still isn't quite working correctly. It was touch and go to even make this post correctly.
I have recently gotten back into Plan9 and its software (including the aforementioned werc) which has been fun and gratifying. The user community still hasn't spat me out this time around, and I think that it has something to do with the fact that I actually read some of the papers so that my questions would be somewhat less stupid.
I've been making some major life changes and using Plan9 more is one of them...
And I could go on and on and on... but who cares?
By: aninterestedbystander (Sat Sep 19 16:01:47 PDT 2009)
Eli, you should lighten up on your mom. She really is pretty reasonable. It may be about time for you to grow up and get your act together.