Categories
Academics Interests

Wikipedia

So, I was wasting some time reading this article about the Fibonacci Sequence.  Interesting enough I suppose, I’m not going to argue the validity of article.  However, as I was reading the comments I noticed that several people were referencing wikipedia as a source to validate their argument.

Now, I’m not a researcher, but I work with folks that their primary job is to help people with research.  And, I’m quite certain that every single one of them would be screaming “wikipedia is NOT a PRIMARY resource!””.

Come on folks, even the idea behind wikipedia should tell you that.  ANYONE, and by anyone, I mean anyone with internet access, can access and add to wikipedia.  Of course, there are people out there reading through perhaps checking the validity of what’s being posted, but really, there are limits to what can be checked.  Would it really be that hard to try to find an article from, oh, I don’t know, maybe an encyclopedia, that stated the origin of the Fibonacci Sequence?

I suppose the joke “of course it’s true, I saw it on TV” will soon be replaced with “of course it’s true, I read it on Wikipedia”.  And there starts the downward spiral….

Categories
Interests

It’s a web out there!

It’s a web out there.  A web of information that is.  Some of it good, some of it bad and some of it there merely for it’s own existance.  Any time I need to do something that I can’t remember exactly how to do off the top of my head (that happens so rarely, so I’m sure you can understand why I would be writing about this) I turn to google.  Yeah, sure, it’s the beast out there and it’s probably gathering information about me that I don’t really want it to, but I can usually find what I want.

What I’ve come to realize is that there is really very little original content out there.  In fact, this couldn’t be made clearer than my current RSS feeds.  I see a headline, followed by three more headlines that reference the first headline.  Of course, that’s how people find out about things because you might follow what “Joe” writes about, but not what “Joan” writes about.  And both of them follow “Bill” and rebroadcast what he writes about.  But “Bill”, he follows “Thad” who follows “Joan”……

Hmm… now I’m thinking, could this turn into some kind of critical neverending information overload loop?  Where’s the escape clause?  ARRRRGHH!! suddenly I’m having flashback of programming in assembly and crashing the mainframe!

OK, so where was I?  Oh yeah, I could tell you how to find files on a linux box and run a script on them, I could tell you how to grep for occurances of a phrase within a file or batch of files, but really, chances are someone else already has that information out there.  So, with that, I present to you two pages I found today that may or may not be of interest.

ars technica’s page on grep more of an intro, but gives a pretty good feel for the power of grep

technibble – this site looks (at first glance) like it might be a goldmine for information for those in the IT fields.

Categories
Interests Professional

Cleaning up

For whatever reason, there comes a time in life that a person needs to tidy up.  In this case, it happens to be a linux based web server that has miscellaneous files strewn throughout.  Some from editing with emacs/vim/vi which tend to leave backup files (those annoying files with a ~ after them or other marker depending on the editor).  So, here’s what I did to do some cleanup.  Your mileage may vary.

First, determine the kind of files you want to remove and how you want to remove them.  Me, I’m going to use find and I have files ending with ~ and beginning with a ._ that are left over from editing.  So, to make sure I don’t delete anything I don’t want to, I’ll do a check first.  I do this by running “find -name ‘._*’ -print“.  This will find all files beginning with ._ and print them to the screen.  I can then do a check to make sure everything is what I expect it to be.  Once I am sure I want to delete the files listed, I run “find -name ‘._*’ -delete“.  I continue this process for the other files I need to eliminate.

This same process can be ran to match file date, file size and many other attributes. To see the full options under find check out the man page at http://linux.die.net/man/1/find or just google for it.  Find also allows a person to run an individual script on each file found which could be really useful for processing text files.