Comments(1)agrep - find stuff - FAST
I have no idea how often I used Windows Explorer’s “Search …” option to try to locate files with a certain keyword in them. Right-click on a directory, select “Search …”, fill in filename as “*.*” and then provide the search text. Explorer is going out and looking at all the files in the specified directory and its sub-directories and quite often returns with an empty search result: it claims that none of the files in the directory tree contained the keyword I was looking. However, I *know* that there’s at least one file that contains the keyword, otherwise I would not be looking for it.
Today I (re-)discovered “agrep”. “Agrep” is a variant of the Unix-utility grep. It adds some nifty features over the standard grep and there are versions for virtually every platform. To look for the string “revisionHistory” in all files and sub-directories, you would enter the following in the starting directory:
c:/some/directory/> agrep -r revisionHistory *
Pretty quickly, agrep will spit out a list of all the files that contain the keyword (unlike Windows Explorer’s “Search …” function).
What sets “agrep” really apart from the other search/grep-implementations: it can do “fuzzy” searches, which means that it will also find words that are close to the one you’re looking for. Add a “-number” argument and will also find matches that are “number” characters away from the word you specified. So if I specified “-2″ and somebody had a typo in a file turning “revisionHistory” into “revisionHitsory”, agrep will find it and spit it out as well.
The wikipedia-article above will bring you to all the places where you can download a version of “agrep”. It’s old, but it’s still as useful as it was a few years ago.
Der Spiegel: Goodbye George!
A few days ago I read an excellent article on Germany’s “Der Spiegel” dissecting what’s going on in the West Wing and how our president is losing support left and right. Today the translation of the article went up on the international version of the site. Head on over here to bid farewell to the chief!
9-23 - Happy Birthday, Bill!
Bill Manns (with his horse Cody above) turned 60 on Sunday 9/23. Of course I only find out after the fact, however I want to use the opportunity to send belated Happy-Birthday-wishes this way! If you see him on his horse you would think you’re looking at a man half his age … hope to you see you doing the rope trick on the back of the horse at 65! And, call me, I’ll be taking photos to prove it to the world!
Santa Fe’s own UFO
As noted in the “News in brief” section of the Santa Fe New Mexican: lots of people noticed a high-flying balloon over the area yesterday. It was quite a sight to see the balloon next to the moon when the sun set last night. At noon today I took the 400mm lens and snapped a photo of the object. You can get more details about the nature of the balloon under the New-Mexican link above.
Explosion at the airport?
I just took the dogs for a walk to pickup my mail. The moment I walked out of the house I see a huge smoke cloud on the horizon. I believe it was close to the airport, most likely at the military portion next to the airport. Some pieces seemed to shot a few hundred feet into the air. I wish I had my big lens with me, but instead I took a photo with the iPhone about 10 secs after I saw the smoke-cloud (yes, I did not think about using the phone’s camera initially - duh!). Below is a crop of the bad photo from the phone. I’m talking about the white ball below the clouds in the center of the frame. Really wonder what it was … anybody else see it?
Carbonite just saved my …
A few months ago I grew tired of constantly mirroring my local non-work hard-disks to other disks in the house. My backup solution consisted of multiple copies of the same data on different disks in my home. On a regular basis I would run tools like rsync or robocopy to mirror contents from my main hard-disks to other disks.
For work-related stuff I am subscribed to an online backup solution that would automatically send files compressed and encrypted from my hard-disks to a data-center somewhere in the cloud.
I decided it was time to also have an online backup solution for my private files. I signed up with Carbonite and purchased a two-year subscription at $89.95 (that translates to $3.75 every month). After installing the Carbonite backup client I selected the files and folders that I wanted to have monitored and backed up. The initial backup took 16 days!!! Since then Carbonite has been monitoring my changed, added files and automatically backs them up without any manual intervention. The application is small and unintrusive and I have not had any problems with it since I installed it.
This morning Elan called and told me that I delivered a wrong file for one of the jewelry shots that’s supposed to appear in a magazine soon. I went back to my source files and discovered that I had cleaned up too much and that the file in question was missing from my local hard-disk. Ouch!
I used Carbonite’s Restore option to find the missing files on the backup-server and within minutes I had the files back on my hard-disk. I actually also had copies on one of my rsync/robocopy disks, but I wanted to test the Restore option of Carbonite in this case.
If you’re not doing online backups yet, I suggest you start looking into it right away. $3.75/month is nothing compared to losing invaluable files …
Oh and if you are on MacOS, I have heard good things about Mozy as well.
California’s Minimum Sentencing Laws and a Veteran
Wayne sent me a note the other day with a story about one of his high school friends, Sargent Binkley.
Sargent Binkley committed two robberies in 2006. These crimes were desperate attempts to obtain the painkillers he became addicted to after sustaining injuries while serving abroad. These injuries were repeatedly misdiagnosed and mistreated by the military medical system, resulting in Sargent’s downward spiral of addiction. He harmed no-one, took no money, and turned himself in. Under California’s minimum sentencing law, no judge can commute his sentence to one more in proportion to his crime. Sargent has been in jail for over a year and a half and potentially faces final sentencing on September 20th, 2007, in Santa Clara County.
Twelve years for a handful of painkillers? Wow, that’s just way too harsh in my opinion. Head on over to http://supportsarge.org/ and see how you can help to avoid this harsh sentencing.
Horsing around …
Pia is ready for some more activity. She has way too much energy and she needs an outlet for all of it. I can’t count how often a day she climbs on me and tries to do back-flips while I’m holding her arms. She’s way too strong and flexible for her age.
Weeks ago I contacted some people to get her on a horse, because I think it would be a good weekend-/evening-activity for her. We tried the stables at Las Campanas, but you either need to be a member (means: having a home in Las Campanas) or know somebody who could sign you up as a guest. That path failed and so we picked somebody from the phone-book.
On Sunday morning we went over to the “Little Hoofprints Stables” off Highway 14. We met with the owner of the business who was supposed to give Pia a 30-mins riding lesson. Pia helped to brush the pony, saddle up and getting it ready for a quick ride. The owner took her on a 20 minute stroll around the stables and taught Pia the correct posture. She needed to be adjusted several times, but she had fun doing it.
FT graphic: a scary view of the sub-prime turmoil
Financial Times: Credit Crunch - an interactive graphic that shows what has happened since June’07 in the sub-prime credit market. Too many orange/red dots for my taste …