The tide turned in Armdale Cove...

[David Potter-7]

Sailors will know that within this province, from harbour to harbour and cove to cove the time of low tide varies - sometimes significantly from other parts of the province.


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[Daryl-19]

David Potter wrote:

>
> Sailors will know that within this province, from harbour to harbour
> and cove to cove the time of low tide varies - sometimes significantly
> from other parts of the province.
>
> For over 10 years I've had a linux box under my desk performing
> various server and other specific tasks, and a Windoze box that I
> 'needed' for one reason or another on my desktop.
>
> Over the weekend I installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 to replace Fedors C6 on the
> server, and last night after using Ubuntu for a couple of days I moved
> Ubunto  to my desktop and the Windoze box went _under_ the desk. This
> is exciting! (for me... ;-)
>
> David
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> nSLUG mailing list
> nSLUG@...
> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>  

Welcome to the wonderful world of Ubuntu :) I've been using Ubuntu since
version 6.06 and it just keeps getting better and better with each
release, can't wait to see what 8.10 has in store for us
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[J. Paul Bissonnette]

And another one bites the dust.
I haven't used Windoze since XP came out.

Daryl wrote:

> David Potter wrote:
>  
>> Sailors will know that within this province, from harbour to harbour
>> and cove to cove the time of low tide varies - sometimes significantly
>> from other parts of the province.
>>
>> For over 10 years I've had a linux box under my desk performing
>> various server and other specific tasks, and a Windoze box that I
>> 'needed' for one reason or another on my desktop.
>>
>> Over the weekend I installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 to replace Fedors C6 on the
>> server, and last night after using Ubuntu for a couple of days I moved
>> Ubunto  to my desktop and the Windoze box went _under_ the desk. This
>> is exciting! (for me... ;-)
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nSLUG mailing list
>> nSLUG@...
>> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>>  
>>    
> Welcome to the wonderful world of Ubuntu :) I've been using Ubuntu since
> version 6.06 and it just keeps getting better and better with each
> release, can't wait to see what 8.10 has in store for us
> _______________________________________________
> nSLUG mailing list
> nSLUG@...
> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>
>  

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[Jon Watson-2]

Great news :)

J. Paul Bissonnette wrote:
> And another one bites the dust.
> I haven't used Windoze since XP came out.

I stopped using Windows...lemme see....2004 I think. I've found that
over time that's not necessarily a good thing because my Windows skills
have faded entirely. Like you, I haven't used it since XP and I no
longer remember where anything is. That has the net result of making me
look like an idiot most of them time when talking about computers in
casual conversation that is invariably with Windows users. Conversation
usually goes something like this:

Other Person: "So, what do you do?"
Me: "I run an IT consulting firm"
OP: "Oh, you must know a lot about computers, then."
Me: "Sure"
OP: "Maybe you can help me then. I don't know how to install a printer
on my computer. How do I do that?"
Me: "I have no idea. I don't know anything about your computer"
OP: "But, how do you help people if you can't even tell me how to do
something simple like install a printer?"
Me: "Well, we don't use or support Windows. We only support another
operating system called Linux"
OP: "Oh, I've never heard of it. Do many people use it?"
Me: "No, not really. A lot of servers run Linux, but there aren't too
many desktop Linux users"
OP: "Oh, well, your business must be poor, then, no?"
Me: "We do OK"
OP: "But if you only support an operating system that nobody uses how
can you make money doing that? Why don't you support an operating system
that everybody runs? Wouldn't you make more money that way?"
Me: "Good point. My business model does suck..."

Jon

>
> Daryl wrote:
>> David Potter wrote:
>>  
>>> Sailors will know that within this province, from harbour to harbour
>>> and cove to cove the time of low tide varies - sometimes significantly
>>> from other parts of the province.
>>>
>>> For over 10 years I've had a linux box under my desk performing
>>> various server and other specific tasks, and a Windoze box that I
>>> 'needed' for one reason or another on my desktop.
>>>
>>> Over the weekend I installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 to replace Fedors C6 on the
>>> server, and last night after using Ubuntu for a couple of days I moved
>>> Ubunto  to my desktop and the Windoze box went _under_ the desk. This
>>> is exciting! (for me... ;-)
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nSLUG mailing list
>>> nSLUG@...
>>> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>>>  
>>>    
>> Welcome to the wonderful world of Ubuntu :) I've been using Ubuntu since
>> version 6.06 and it just keeps getting better and better with each
>> release, can't wait to see what 8.10 has in store for us
>> _______________________________________________
>> nSLUG mailing list
>> nSLUG@...
>> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>>
>>  
> _______________________________________________
> nSLUG mailing list
> nSLUG@...
> http://nslug.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nslug
>

--
Jon Watson, CD, Linux+
Computer Geek? Read This -> http://www.jonwatson.ca/book


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[Mike Spencer]

Jon wrote:

> ...I haven't used it since XP and I no longer remember where
> anything is.

But, hey, Windoes is *intuitive*.  Everything is, like, *obvious*,
right?  You don't have to learn all those complicated incantations
that aren't intuitive, right?  If you want to print something, you
just click on the thingie that looks like an open can of beans.  If
you want to go on the internet, you click on the thingie that looks
like a 4-barrel Holley carburetor and select "Other..." from the menu.
It's just soooo easy and obvious....

Er, sorry, I think maybe I've strayed into the wrong tent.... :-)

I confess to having one copy of Windoes 3.1 because it supports the
Kodak proprietary software that interfaces with my extremely simple
Kodak DC-40.  And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.  Otherwise I've been
all-Linux for nine years.

> ...net result of making me look like an idiot most of them time when
> talking about computers...

Yeah.  I remember once talking someone through a somewhat arcane
MS-DOS 5 problem, keystroke by keystroke, over the phone and getting
street cred as a Wizard.  Now I don't even know how to turn my wife's
Win 98 computer off in the correct way.

ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
(say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?  Is this what mktime(3) does
(assuming that you have tediously and explicitly filled in a struct tm
yourself)?  Not the current date, you understand, but any arbitrary
date string as one might appear in a log file.


- Mike

--
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~.
                                                           /V\
mspencer@...                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^


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[Rory-9]

date -d '2008-06-01 00:00:00' "+%s"


Mike Spencer wrote:

Jon wrote:

  

...I haven't used it since XP and I no longer remember where
anything is.
    

But, hey, Windoes is *intuitive*.  Everything is, like, *obvious*,
right?  You don't have to learn all those complicated incantations
that aren't intuitive, right?  If you want to print something, you
just click on the thingie that looks like an open can of beans.  If
you want to go on the internet, you click on the thingie that looks
like a 4-barrel Holley carburetor and select "Other..." from the menu.
It's just soooo easy and obvious....

Er, sorry, I think maybe I've strayed into the wrong tent.... :-)

I confess to having one copy of Windoes 3.1 because it supports the
Kodak proprietary software that interfaces with my extremely simple
Kodak DC-40.  And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.  Otherwise I've been
all-Linux for nine years.

  

...net result of making me look like an idiot most of them time when
talking about computers...
    

Yeah.  I remember once talking someone through a somewhat arcane
MS-DOS 5 problem, keystroke by keystroke, over the phone and getting
street cred as a Wizard.  Now I don't even know how to turn my wife's
Win 98 computer off in the correct way.

ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
(say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?  Is this what mktime(3) does
(assuming that you have tediously and explicitly filled in a struct tm
yourself)?  Not the current date, you understand, but any arbitrary
date string as one might appear in a log file.


- Mike

  

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[Aaron Spanik-2]

>
> From: mspencer@... (Mike Spencer)
> Date: 2008/08/28 Thu PM 12:39:01 EDT
> To: nslug@...
> Subject: [nSLUG]  Re: The tide turned in Armdale Cove...
>

> *snip* lots of non-linux stuffs
 
> ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
> to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
> (say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
> 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?  Is this what mktime(3) does
> (assuming that you have tediously and explicitly filled in a struct tm
> yourself)?  Not the current date, you understand, but any arbitrary
> date string as one might appear in a log file.

You mean like /bin/date?

aspanik@slappy:~> date -d "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008" +%s
1219939674

/bin/date will take a "-d" option and a STRING, which, according to "man date" can be fairly free-form:  /bin/date does it's best to do The Right Thing(tm):

> DATE STRING
> The  --date=STRING is a mostly free format human readable date string such
> as "Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:21:42 -0800" or "2004-02-29 16:21:42" or even "next
> Thursday".  A date  string  may  contain items  indicating  calendar  date,
> time of day, time zone, day of week, relative time, relative date, and
> numbers.  An empty string indicates the beginning of the day.  The date
> string format is  more  complex  than is easily documented here but is fully
> described in the info documentation.

Hope I didn't misunderstand something there, but I think that's what you're looking for.

Cheers,

/a

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[_budman_]

Mike Spencer wrote:

Jon wrote:

  

...I haven't used it since XP and I no longer remember where
anything is.
    

Last version I had in my house that I truly ran was win95, back in 98.
When I did receive win98, I never installed it, I was already 100% Slackware by then.

Later on, I had to install win98se to access the vpn at work, they wouldn't allow swan access.
So I ran win98 from a virtual machine - it was more stable than I ever remember windows being.
But it still locked up from time to time.  It was nice, hey look blue screen, click X, double click the app,
back up running win98 in a few seconds. :)

I think the stability was due to hardware issues being faked or fixed during the emulation.
The only two issues I had with Netraverse was timely kernel patch updates, and how they decided
to cut a product's support forcing you to upgrade.  My decision, seek a new vendor.

Often times, I had to convert kernel patches to newer versions, but that would work most of the time,
until the patches required internal fixes in win4lin code.  Netraverse did offer a new version that
didn't require kernel patching, but by this time I no longer needed the vpn support.

I confess to having one copy of Windoes 3.1 because it supports the
Kodak proprietary software that interfaces with my extremely simple
Kodak DC-40.  And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.  Otherwise I've been
all-Linux for nine years.

  

Try dosbox or dosemu - I can run a lot of the old msdos stuff from it.  Nostalgia mostly. :)

...net result of making me look like an idiot most of them time when
talking about computers...
    

Yeah.  I remember once talking someone through a somewhat arcane
MS-DOS 5 problem, keystroke by keystroke, over the phone and getting
street cred as a Wizard.  Now I don't even know how to turn my wife's
Win 98 computer off in the correct way.

  

ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
(say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?  Is this what mktime(3) does
(assuming that you have tediously and explicitly filled in a struct tm
yourself)?  Not the current date, you understand, but any arbitrary
date string as one might appear in a log file.

  

Check date command - %s for seconds,  that works in Linux and Solaris, but not Irix.




Rich


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[Joe Dunn-2]

>> And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.

Hey Mike, just wondering, doesn't work in wine? (i'm a huge Civ nut also)

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Mike Spencer <mspencer@...> wrote:

Jon wrote:

> ...I haven't used it since XP and I no longer remember where
> anything is.

But, hey, Windoes is *intuitive*.  Everything is, like, *obvious*,
right?  You don't have to learn all those complicated incantations
that aren't intuitive, right?  If you want to print something, you
just click on the thingie that looks like an open can of beans.  If
you want to go on the internet, you click on the thingie that looks
like a 4-barrel Holley carburetor and select "Other..." from the menu.
It's just soooo easy and obvious....

Er, sorry, I think maybe I've strayed into the wrong tent.... :-)

I confess to having one copy of Windoes 3.1 because it supports the
Kodak proprietary software that interfaces with my extremely simple
Kodak DC-40.  And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.  Otherwise I've been
all-Linux for nine years.

> ...net result of making me look like an idiot most of them time when
> talking about computers...

Yeah.  I remember once talking someone through a somewhat arcane
MS-DOS 5 problem, keystroke by keystroke, over the phone and getting
street cred as a Wizard.  Now I don't even know how to turn my wife's
Win 98 computer off in the correct way.

ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
(say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?  Is this what mktime(3) does
(assuming that you have tediously and explicitly filled in a struct tm
yourself)?  Not the current date, you understand, but any arbitrary
date string as one might appear in a log file.


- Mike

--
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~.
                                                          /V\
mspencer@...                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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[William Lachance]

On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 13:39 -0400, Joe Dunn wrote:
>
> >> And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.
>
> Hey Mike, just wondering, doesn't work in wine? (i'm a huge Civ nut
> also)

Wine emulates the win32 API. To run DOS programs, you really need a
virtual machine. The best one for playing old games is probably dosbox:

http://www.dosbox.com/
--
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[David Payne-4]

On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 13:39 -0400, Joe Dunn wrote:
> >> And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.
>
> Hey Mike, just wondering, doesn't work in wine? (i'm a huge Civ nut
> also)

Hi,

I really like Civilization also.  I'm sure you guys heard of it,
FreeCiv.  Why not play that?  I think I played more FreeCiv than the
original Civilization games.

David

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[Joe Dunn-2]

Hey David

I tried out FreeCiv a couple times, I dunno could never really get into it. I find its really rough around the edges. This was a couple years ago though.

Civ4 is just so pretty :) and with the expansion (Beyond the Sword) the futuremod is great.

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 1:54 PM, David Payne <david@...> wrote:

On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 13:39 -0400, Joe Dunn wrote:
> >> And DOS 5.0 for playing Civ I.
>
> Hey Mike, just wondering, doesn't work in wine? (i'm a huge Civ nut
> also)

Hi,

I really like Civilization also.  I'm sure you guys heard of it,
FreeCiv.  Why not play that?  I think I played more FreeCiv than the
original Civilization games.

David

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[David Payne-4]

On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 14:15 -0400, Joe Dunn wrote:
> Hey David
>
> I tried out FreeCiv a couple times, I dunno could never really get
> into it. I find its really rough around the edges. This was a couple
> years ago though.
>
> Civ4 is just so pretty :) and with the expansion (Beyond the Sword)
> the futuremod is great.

Hi,

Yea, it's a lot better now.  But I never played Civ4 yet, I'm sure it
doesn't compare.  But if you liked Civ2 and even Civ3 then I think
FreeCiv is a good replacement, or at least an alternative.  Not exactly
the same though, but still good.

David


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[Daniel Morrison-2]

2008/8/28 Mike Spencer said:
>> ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
>> to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
>> (say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
>> 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?

2008/8/28 Rory Bray <rory@...>:
> date -d '2008-06-01 00:00:00' "+%s"

That was too easy.

I've been searching for a while for a fast way to do the opposite, i.e. given
'1219939674', print the date longhand.

date -d '1219939674'

doesn't work.  The only thing I've come up with is:

$ perl -e 'print localtime('1219939674') . "\n";'
Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 2008

but that requires perl, and is a bit clumsy...

Ideas?  (remember the requirements are "straightforward, preferably
command-line", and I'll also add: without writing my own short C
program, because while effective, then I could only do it where I'd
compiled my program).

-D.
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[Ian Campbell-9]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 06:28:58PM -0300, Daniel Morrison wrote:

> 2008/8/28 Mike Spencer said:
> >> ObLinuxTech: Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way
> >> to convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
> >> (say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds since
> >> 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?
>
> 2008/8/28 Rory Bray <rory@...>:
> > date -d '2008-06-01 00:00:00' "+%s"
>
> That was too easy.
>
> I've been searching for a while for a fast way to do the opposite, i.e. given
> '1219939674', print the date longhand.
>
> date -d '1219939674'

ian@shadow:~$ date -d @1219939674
Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008

I doubt that's particularly portable though. It doesn't work on
FreeBSD.


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[Daniel Morrison-2]

2008/8/28 Ian Campbell <ian@...>:
> ian@shadow:~$ date -d @1219939674
> Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008
> I doubt that's particularly portable though. It doesn't work on FreeBSD.

Cool -- how did you learn that?  It's not in _my_ man page... !

A more portable solution would be better, but in practice, 90% of my
time is in Linux anyway.  Solaris doesn't even allow the '-d' option
at all...

Thanks,

-D.
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[Aaron Spanik-2]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:39:14 -0300
"Daniel Morrison" <draker@...> wrote:

> 2008/8/28 Ian Campbell <ian@...>:
> > ian@shadow:~$ date -d @1219939674
> > Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008
> > I doubt that's particularly portable though. It doesn't work on FreeBSD.
>
> Cool -- how did you learn that?  It's not in _my_ man page... !
>

It's not in "man date", but it's in "info date" under "Date input
formats::" then "Seconds since the epoch::".  This documentation
suggests that it's standard in the GNU Coreutils package, which may or
may not match what you see under the *BSD family and almost certainly
not under commercial Unix excepting if the GNU utilities have been
installed.

/a


--
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a.spanik@...
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[Ian Campbell-9]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 06:39:14PM -0300, Daniel Morrison wrote:

> 2008/8/28 Ian Campbell <ian@...>:
> > ian@shadow:~$ date -d @1219939674
> > Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008
> > I doubt that's particularly portable though. It doesn't work on FreeBSD.
>
> Cool -- how did you learn that?  It's not in _my_ man page... !
>
> A more portable solution would be better, but in practice, 90% of my
> time is in Linux anyway.  Solaris doesn't even allow the '-d' option
> at all...

If you have gawk, it has a wrapper to strftime that you can use
instead.

... but that's not portable either, neither nawk nor whatever freebsd
uses by default have it.


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[Mike Spencer]

me> Is there a straightforward, preferably command-line, way to
me> convert one of the standard date formats produced by /bin/date
me> (say, "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008") to the canonical <seconds
me> since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC> format?

a.spanik> aspanik@slappy:~> date -d "Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008" +%s
a.spanik> 1219939674

Duh!  There it is, practically the first line of the manpage options.
That appears to do exactly what I want.  I don't know how many times
I've looked at that and simply misread it or somehow not read it at
all.  Cringe.  Blush.  Thanks.

a.spanik> Hope I didn't misunderstand something there, but I think
a.spanik> that's what you're looking for.

Yes, it is.

ian> ian@shadow:~$ date -d @1219939674
ian> Thu Aug 28 13:07:54 ADT 2008

Hmmm.  Cool.  Doesn't work on my Slack 10.1 distro, date-5.2.1. Ah,
well, slack 12 is sitting here on a USB HD, while I wait for a cable.

a.spanik> It's not in "man date", but it's in "info date"....

Ah, well!  No mention of the @epochal-seconds syntax in my version.
However, "info coreutils date" has something more that I've missed as
well:

     Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
     are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
     coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible.  Indeed,
     had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time,
     to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to
     sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have
     done better than handing down our present system.

...and more, attrib. to  Robert Grudin, `Time and the Art of Living'.

Indeed so.  I made a script to fetch current satellite weather images
from the CanGov site where the filenames are date- &
time-based. Figuring out how compose the filename for the most recent
image prior to present time, allowing for possible backup into
previous day, month and year and for AST/DST roll-over was a pain and
still fails once in, oh, 50 or so tries.

Thanks for the pointers, help and -- heh -- humiliation. :-)

- Mike

--
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~.
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mspencer@...                                     /( )\
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[Dop Ganger]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Mike Spencer wrote:

> Indeed so.  I made a script to fetch current satellite weather images
> from the CanGov site where the filenames are date- &
> time-based. Figuring out how compose the filename for the most recent
> image prior to present time, allowing for possible backup into
> previous day, month and year and for AST/DST roll-over was a pain and
> still fails once in, oh, 50 or so tries.

I was doing a similar thing a while ago and ended up writing a perl script
to do it from a cron job. This may or may not still work after EC's web
page shakeup, but you're welcome to take a prod at it:
http://www.fop.ns.ca/radarimg.pl.txt

Radar station names are hard coded to the ones for (if I recall correctly)
national radar, Atlantic Canada, and Halifax.

Cheers... Dop.
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