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Monday, March 26th, 2007

🦋 Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock is one of my very favorite musicians. And yet I'm not familiar with much of his later work. My knowledge of Hitchcock is: "Black Snake Diamond Role", "Eaten by Her own Dinner", "I Often Dream of Trains", "Element of Light", bits of "Globe of Frogs", "Queen Elvis" and "Eye". Suddenly I am feeling very interested in getting to know more of his music.

Last Monday, I was listening to Irene Trudel's show on WFMU, and heard Hitchcock playing "Adventure Rocketship", which I had not heard before. The DJ came on the mic and said Hitchcock will be playing next Wednesday at the Knitting Factory. Well ever since then I've been in a state of high excitement -- I ordered my tickets and have been playing Hitchcock on my internal stereo ever since. And I'm listening to some of his more recent tracks on YouTube (especially loving Birds in Perspex; and if you have not watched this radio performance, well you really ought to) and his genius is shining through the poor sound quality.

posted morning of March 26th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, March 16th, 2007

🦋 Titles for xterms

Here's something handy: I keep a lot of xterm windows active on my desktop; if I lose track of one it's nice to have an easier way of finding it than to click on every "xterm" icon in my taskbar until I find it. So I give them titles.

The first thing I did was to give each a title with the machine name and the current directory. You can do this by adding to your .bash_profile the following:

PS1='\[\033]0;'`hostname`': \w\007\033[32m\]{\u@\h}\033[0m\] $ '

or to your .cshrc,

set prompt="%{\033]0;%m: %~\007%}%{\033[32;40m%}{%n@`hostname`}%{\033[37;40m%} > "

This just tells your shell to echo escape characters every time it draws the prompt that will force xterm to update its title bar.

Some applications -- generally every application that takes over the prompt, like for instance gdb -- I would like to know they're running just by looking at the title bar. For vi, all you have to do is use vim and include the line "set title" in your .vimrc. For other applications, I created a script called xtitle, which echoes the escape characters:

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "%{\033]0;"`hostname`": $*\007%}"

and alias the application names, like

alias gdb 'xtitle gdb \!*; \gdb'

(this is a csh alias, it's trickier in bash because I don't know how to echo the parameter list with bash aliases.)

posted evening of March 16th, 2007: Respond

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

🦋 Home fries

A recipe I've been playing around with for a couple of months in various combinations bore fruit last night, when Ed and Nina came over for dinner. I cooked something I'm calling "home fries" for want of a better word, even though it's not particularly descriptive, and it was one of the nicest potato dishes I have ever made.

• 4 or 5 smallish yellow onions, chopped roughly
• about 1 T. fennel seed
• several cloves of garlic, minced
• one pear or apple
• 1 ½ lbs. red potatoes or Yukon gold potatoes in moderate-size dice

In a skillet, heat a couple of T. olive oil and the fennel seed. Cook the onions and garlic with salt over low heat about half an hour, adding the fruit midway through. When onions are deep golden, add the potatoes and stir to mix. Cover the skillet and allow to steam for about half an hour, until potatoes are quite soft. Stir occasionally, scraping the bottom of the skillet when you do. Serve with roast chicken.

posted evening of March 11th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Interval

Here is a bash script to determine the interval between two date/times. Parameters are two dates, specified using any format the date utility can recognize; if the second parameter is omitted, "now" is assumed. Output is the number of seconds between the two, followed by "d h:m:s" format.

 #!/bin/bash
 
 if [ $# -eq 0 ]
 then
         echo Usage: `basename $0` \ \[\\ default \"now\"\] >&2
         exit -1
 fi
 
 start=`date +%s -d "$1"`
 if [ $# -eq 1 ]
 then
         fin=`date +%s`
 else
         fin=`date +%s -d "$2"`
 fi
 
 res=`expr $fin - $start`
 if [ $res -lt 0 ]
 then
         res=`expr 0 - $res`
 fi
 
 echo $res sec
 d=`expr $res / 86400`
 t=`expr $res % 86400`
 h=`expr $t / 3600`
 ms=`expr $t % 3600`
 m=`expr $ms / 60`
 s=`expr $ms % 60`
 if [ $d -gt 0 ]
 then
         echo -n $d day
         if [ $d -gt 1 ]
         then
                 echo -n s
         fi
         echo  -n \
 fi
 if [ $t -gt 0 ]
 then
         echo -n $h\:
         if [ $m -lt 10 ]
         then
                 echo -n 0
         fi
         echo -n $m
         if [ $s -gt 0 ]
         then
                 echo -n \:
                 if [ $s -lt 10 ]
                 then
                         echo -n 0
                 fi
                 echo -n $s
         fi
 fi
 echo
  

posted evening of March 11th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

🦋 Trout and cabbage

I wouldn't have thought of this combination off the top of my head or anything; but that's what was in the fridge. And it came out pretty tasty.

• 1 yellow onion cut in thin slices
• Several cloves of garlic chopped fine
• About ¼ head red cabbage, chopped thin
• 2 filets trout

Cook the onion and garlic with olive oil and salt in a skillet over medium-low heat, until the onion is golden. Add the cabbage and continue cooking about 5 or 10 more minutes, until the cabbage is soft and hot through. Remove to a bowl, put some more olive oil in the pan, and cook the trout. I served this with soup and some goat cheese. I think, though I did not do this, that you could make a pretty good sauce by deglazing the skillet with beer and cooking the beer for a minute or two.

posted evening of March 7th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, March second, 2007

Oh, one other quick thing about Cygwin: did you know you can access your entire local registry as a file system? It's true -- look under /proc/registry. This seems to me like a potentially radically useful thing, though I have not yet made much use of it.

posted afternoon of March second, 2007: Respond

🦋 Using cron inside Cygwin

I set up some cron jobs on my NT computer today. Googling "cron cygwin" was kind of helpful but information was scattered around pretty freely. In the interests of collecting it in one place:

• In Cygwin setup, you need to select the cron package, which is under the Admin category.
• To start cron as a service, enter two commands: cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -D, and cygrunsrv -S cron. This appears to install cron as an automatic service, though I have not rebooted NT to make sure this is true.
• To access your crontab, run crontab -e. The format is the same as /etc/crontab, except you don't specify a user name with each entry. The entries will be started as the user whose crontab it is. (This might be obvious to people who know more about cron than I.)

posted afternoon of March second, 2007: Respond

Monday, February 26th, 2007

🦋 Dr. Borg

Watching Wild Strawberries tonight for the second-and-a-half time. At the opening scene I am hit by the realization that Dr. Borg is based (in part) on the same archetype which underlies Moominpappa's character. (I am rereading Comet in Moominland to Sylvia for bedtime stories this past week or so.) Also Sara reminds me of the Snork Maiden. Funny... I wonder how much Bergman and Jannsen are coming from the same place culturally.

posted evening of February 26th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

So last night I finished Against the Day -- I was really loving and getting in to the end of Part IV, but the brief Part V left me pretty confused. I mean I liked that the Chums were diverging from our historical reality -- that seemed to tie in with a lot of the rest of the book -- but them coming back into our history wasn't really set up properly. I'm glad that Kit and Reef and their families wound up together.

Also last night I met Nicholas, to whom I am indebted for his concise explanation of Novi Pazar's history. Thanks, Nicholas!

posted morning of February 20th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, February 18th, 2007

🦋 Tasty sauce

Sylvia and I were shopping yesterday and we thought dinner tonight would be pork chops with sautéed onions and mushrooms. When we were going downstairs to start making dinner (Sylvia learned how to clean and cut mushrooms, which she did very well), Ellen mentioned there was some applesauce in the fridge that would be good with the chops -- and I had an idea. The end result, an easy sauce that is very tasty with pork chops:

• 2 onions, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
• 1 lb. mushrooms, in bite-size chunks (roughly cut in quarters)
• 1 apple, chopped
• 2 tangerines

Cook the onions and garlic in about a Tbsp. oil over a low flame for about 20 min. Longer would probably work fine, too. Add the mushrooms and apple, stir, and squeeze in the tangerine juice. Stir, cover, and let steam for about 15 min., while the chops are cooking. Everything should be soft. Spoon over the chops with a little yogurt or sour cream.

posted evening of February 18th, 2007: Respond
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