To do list--done

[altivo]

Succeeded in upgrading the console firmware on the DS10 this morning. As with many Alpha things lately, success was based on advice from experienced users. The instructions provided by HP did not work, and failed to mention any of the methods that do work.

This afternoon, dug up 64 sq. ft. of garden, preparing for the strawberry plants. Hauled the hardware cloth cages to cover them out of the woods where Gary stashed them after the last time they were used. They'd been there a while, small saplings had grown up through the half inch squares, requiring some effort to get the things loose. We need those cages, though, or the neighbors' chickens will surely scratch all the young plants out of the ground before they have a chance to get established properly.

Convinced Gary that he'd be better off learning to use awk and sed for a data preparation he has to do than if he tried to write a C program to do it. Dug out my old Sed & Awk manual from the O'Reilly UNIX Power Tools series for him and then scared up a pair of archive CDs of the old SIMTEL archives that have gsed, gawk, egrep, and perl for MS-DOS on them. (Since there's no chance he'll use Linux for this, he will need versions of the utilities that run on a Windoze box.)

It's only 9 pm and I'm done for. I think it's the digging that did it.

Comments

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Since there's no chance he'll use Linux for this, he will need versions of the utilities that run on a Windoze box.

Cygwin is your friend.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Cygwin seems quite nasty actually. But since we're only talking about command line stuff, and since he's an old MS-DOS junkie and before that mainframe CMS and TSO, there's no need for anything so extreme. Plain old grep, sed, awk, and perl are all readily available for the DOS command line, and DOS even supports piping one to the other just as UNIX does.

What he wants to do is take a bunch of DOS directory dumps and reformat them into a database file with multiple search indexes.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Sounds like what you are doing is way beyond my comprehension at the moment so I think I will skip to the rest... *worships the unix guru horsie* :P

Mmm... Strawberries *peeks over your shoulder* Can I has one strawberries? *cute little zebra foal eyes*

What Gary is doing sounds like a "fun" project. With some scripting wizardry (which my brain is completely an utterly incapable of), it might be able to make the database support search by file attribute or change date. :)

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

It may be worth picking up Python for this sort of thing, actually. It's easy enough to install on Windows, and a lot more flexible than batch scripts.

What's he after, exactly? I may be able to give you some pointers.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sure you can have strawberries, if there are any. It may take a year, though. Right now the plants look more like little dried octopi or something. We're supposed to keep taking any flowers off until July, so they put their energy into roots and leaves.

What Gary has is a whole directory tree full of MP3 files, all folk and traditional music. He wants to catalog them all so he can search by key word, lyrics, performer, provenance, time period, etc.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

See above for brief description. He has accumulated a very large number of MP3s of folk and traditional music, most with matching sheet music and text lyrics. He wants to build a catalog database that can search by keyword, performer, actual text, title, provenance, and so forth. Obviously, some of that must be done by hand, but some can be automated based on the ID3s and the directories, since he's almost anal retentive about how he names stuff.

Python didn't come to mind because I don't use it, but I did suggest Perl. He's out of town at the moment, but I've left him books on the mentioned utilities, including Perl, and resource CDs with Windows/DOS compatible versions of the tools.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thankies ^)^

Oooh, Mp3s even? That is a massive task to undertake indeed, trust me, I know. I have "some" too. The thing is that not even half of them are properly tagged so I would have to work on it non-stop for months to get it all sorted out.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Ooh, if you're trying to do something like that it might be worth looking into using SQLite for the index. It's easy to interface with, either from a command-line client or from code, and it makes the searching bits really easy. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I know he's going to want to use Access, even though I urged him to try MySQL and use PHP to make a web style interface. I'll take a look at that though.

O_o

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

It's only 9 pm and I'm done for. I think it's the digging that did it.

What only after digging 64 square feet? :P

Re: O_o

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm considerably older than you, kid, and had already worked a full day. About half of that had not been dug out for several years and was full of roots and stuff. Our soil is heavy clay silt, so if it isn't worked frequently it solidifies like brick.

Re: ^_^

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* You misunderstand, hoss. Actually, I'm impressed you dug that much- and thanks for confirming it was clay, I thought it might be ;)