Isocracy, Work Matters, Misc.

[tcpip]

Another edition of The Isocracy Newsletter has been put together by yours truly, noting changes of government and elections in Sri Lanka, Hungary, Northern Cyprus, Poland (by default) and the revolution in Krygystan Revolution. International news refers to violence in Pakistan, the 'Red Shirts' in Thailand, the Iranian Non-Proliferation Conference, the Naxalite-Maoist Ambush in India, and, for something positive, free health Care in Peru, and (finally) mandatory childhood education in India. To follow this up I have just posted an article on Online Activism and Political Involvement.

Last night was Russell S's last day at VPAC. Laszlo provided some fine palinka to aid in the farewell. Co-worker Markus also mentioned that he'll be leaving for greener pastures as well. Both these employees were seconded full-time to ARCS, which surely must raise an eyebrow there. More personally, I've been transferring material from our internal TWiki for an internal Drupal site. Because TWiki has a lot of inline style formatting (ugh), the opportunity has come to write a mini-tutorial on cleaning code for tables using sed and AWK. I really should expand on this at some stage to a more complete collection of examples and tutorial, because sed and AWK are truly awesome.

In other news, I conducted the service last week at the Unitarian Church with Professor Rob Watts talking on poverty. The Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet concert was excellent; so much so that I've finally activated by Rocknerd account and posted a review. As promised I have put up two photos of Fufur the guinea pig that I rescued last week from certain doom. The little fellow has settled in very well into his new home and caseopaya has lavished him with the attention that she is particularly good at giving.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

It's always nice to be surprised by a Rocknerd post occurring :-D

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I've been feeling somewhat guilty about not posting after getting the account. This was too good an opportunity to miss.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

That piggy looks like a couple of the ones I had for pets back in the 90s. :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's a bit of an emo hair-style isn't it?

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

When some of them grew a bit older, their fur kept growing. They were like tribbles, or walking toupees. If I didn't trim the fur and give them a sort of Beatles look, you might have a tough time telling head from rear and they would probably not be able to see where they were going. But when young they had that messy fresh-out-of-bed look, yes.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I really shouldn't have googled "long-haired guinea pig". It's too early in the morning for that... Trimming their hair is sensible advice. Looking like an emo-kid is fine, looking like a toupee is just silly....

[zey.livejournal.com]

Good old Sed and Awk, kings of the command-liners. They're kings in that realm.

The oddest thing was when I was working for an energy industry company with rather conservative views on IT (at the time, though they were in the process of modernising). Scripts written in Awk because Perl was 'untrustworthy GPL muck and it might not be installed on a particular hypothetical Solaris 7 box' ;)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Sed and AWK are indeed kings. True, I can imagine even a python script engaging in the fairly trivial example I gave, but it would be a bit trickier.

So... If the certain energy industry company thought that Perl was untrustworthy GPL.. I take it you didn't ask the question what license they thought sed and AWK were? :)

[zey.livejournal.com]

I take it you didn't ask the question what license they thought sed and AWK were?

The original Awk (BSD license, IIRC) came with the core Solaris OS. The GNU version's "gawk" (GNU awk) is a different code base and was a reimplimentation of the original from scratch.

The practical difference for an energy company back then was that using a language unsupported by the vendor was considered risky in that they could potentially turn around and tell you "not our problem" if you ran into problems. Highly silly though (vendors who do that sort of thing to big business don't stay vendors for very long), but, managers are managers and big company managers are particularly risk averse.

Well and truly different times now, of course. And those times were on the way out even at the time I was there.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

But.. but Perl's a scripting and interpreted language. It's not as you're looking at something like the Intel or PGI versions of C++ where vendor support is justified.

Although, I'm also sure if they offered to pay Larry Wall...

Did they seek vendor support for sed? :S

[zey.livejournal.com]

But.. but Perl's a scripting and interpreted language. It's not as you're looking at something like the Intel or PGI versions of C++ where vendor support is justified.

It was a very different management culture back then. Don't worry, all the IT staff were uniformly derisive of the restrictions (particularly, everyone hired in), and things did change. Sun Microsystems themselves were extremely helpful that way when they began including FOSS software in bonus CDs in their media kits.

Did they seek vendor support for sed? :S

Sed was supplied in Solaris by Sun, so it was a non-issue there. I believe it's the same situation as with Awk: it originally written as a BSD license utility, later reimplemented by the GPL crowd. Solaris used the original variant by default.

(That sort of split happened a lot, and you can still see it today. If you've got Solaris, you've got tar and gtar. The tar supplied with Solaris has (had?) a terrible filename length limit, so people were strongly recommended to use gtar exclusively.)

FWIW, I doubt many places ever contacted their vendors over Awk in practice, and even fewer over Sed. I can imagine Perl would have generated a lot more support contacts though, given some of its buggy and difficult modules — particularly back then.