The following script searches through any specified text file for text before and after the ubiquitous email "@" symbol and outputs these as a csv file through use of grep, sed, and sort (for neatness). If the input or the output file are not specified, it exits after echoing the error and provides the correct exit code (1), to indicate error.

A couple of days ago I scambled together some notes on Backup and Synchronisation and spoke of the need to exclude certain directories (e.g., .gvfs, .wine) from synchronisation. Well, it turns out I ate my own dogfood. Backing up a desktop machine to a central server I discovered that I had did not exclude a .wine directory; it hadn't been used for a long time, I had uninstalled the program and frankly, I had forgotten about it. Well, a few hundred gigabytes later.

The following is a brief introduction on how to write up a simple backup script in bash that takes advantage of the date command, and the use of rsync to produce a synchronised mirror, which could also be used for backup purposes.

Backup with bash

From their website. "Geant4 is a toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter. Its areas of application include high energy, nuclear and accelerator physics, as well as studies in medical and space science."

From their website: "The CLHEP (Class Library for High Energy Physics) project was proposed by Leif Lönnblad at CHEP 92. It is intended to be a set of HEP-specific foundation and utility classes such as random generators, physics vectors, geometry and linear algebra. CLHEP is structured in a set of packages independent of any external package (interdependencies within CLHEP are allowed under certain conditions)."

The GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations (GROMACS) is a molecular dynamics simulation package that is very fast and has support for different force fields. It is notable for being used for protein folding at Folding@Home. In most recent versions it has changed the build tools from requiring a somewhat detailed configuration script to a cmake system. In this scenario, builds are done outside of the source tree. The following serves as an example installation process.

According to Wikipedia, Linus Torvalds once said "The future is open-source everything". However the original link from that page is broken. Thanks to some investigation by John Vanderberg, the original quote was placed in the page January 2005, by Stirling Newberry. One can also find the quote in several books including Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, 2008., Prasidh Mishra's Managing Electronic Resources, 2011., Steven Heller and David Womack's Becoming a Digital Designer, 2011., among many others. Even Cambridge University publishes the remark.

However, try as I might I could not find an original source for the quotation. Keith Curtis, who included the quote in After the Software Wars, 2009., readily admitted to me that he "didn't bother to always find original sources for many quotes". So did Linus Torvalds actually say this or not?

As he often does, albeit with a slight element of surprise for many attendees, Linus Torvalds attended Linux Conf AU. I caught up with him after the presentation Dirk Hondel on developing a subsurface diving log. As is well known, if you actually have sensible to say, Mr. Tolvards is quite approachable. So I asked him whether he made such a remark. After all, one should go a primary source whenever possible.

Meeting Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a little like meeting Johannes Gutenberg in recognising an inventor who has fundamentally changed the way we engage in engage in communication and provide information. As a person who has been interested in the pragmatics, phenomenology, and political economy of such technologies for more than two decades, the lure was two strong, listening to his speeches at both ANU (for LCA) and the University of Melbourne, where he spoke on various contemporary developments especially on the legal circumstances surrounding the suicide of Aaron Swartz.

To get one issue out of the way, as many have remarked, TBL is not a great public speaker. He speaks quickly, tangentially, and without a conventional narrative - not unlike his own invention. But that's a rather trivial concern for who we're dealing with here. Anything more than a passing criticising of the inventor of the world wide web for poor public speaking skills is not unlike criticising Martin Luther King Jnr, for not inventing the world wide web. It should be added that on one-to-one questions and answers that he is able to focus his knowledge exceptionally well.

OpenCV (Open source Computer Vision) is a library of algorithms and code for computer vision with extensive documentation and books.