Tim's Bits and Pieces

You'll notice I'm posting late again, for which I blame C.S. Lewis, and since he's dead he can't defend himself from this unfounded accusation completely serious and non-trivial explanation for my tardiness.

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Since I missed posting over the weekend I thought I'd share a little Linux one-liner that I found amusing. For those that don't know "load" in the Unix world often refers to the system load averages for one, five, or fifteen minutes. The system load average is the average number of processes in the "ready" state over the period in question. Processes in the "ready" state are normally waiting for a chance to use the CPU, but it also includes processes waiting for I/O, which the following one-liner takes advantage of to cause an artificial load spike:

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Tuesday's still the weekend right? ;-)

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Oops, completely missed posting last weekend, mostly just because I'm too easily distracted. Such is life, hopefully I'll do two or three posts this weekend to even it up.

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I recently wrote this simple script to allow me to set a random image as my background:

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I've noticed an annoying little problem with a couple of open source web browsers namely Seamonkey and Kazehakase. Both of them have the same problem when you run them the normal way, ie by entering they're name on the command line, they fail to do anything if you already have the program open nothing happens. I'd prefer if they instead opened a new window, so I've written scripts to "fix" this. Basically each of the scripts checks to see if the program is already open and if so simply open a new window, otherwise they start the program. Both scripts work slightly differently but accomplish nearly the same task (the Kazehakase one will not open a link in the new window).

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