For ages I'm using
Xplanet as an animated background on my desktop, displaying a nice view of the earth.
Xplanet has a nice feature: You can download a (nearly) up to date map of the clouds and use it with Xplanet (see this
screenshot). Two download scripts are listed
here, but I wasn't too happy with them (although I did use the one written in Python for a long time). What nagged me about them was their irritating behaviour to download even the "file not found" page if there was no cloudmap available. So I wrote my own download script which checks if it has really downloaded a cloudmap before replacing the one in use.
That means that you may end up with an old one, but you have always nice clouds for xplanet.
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I've updated a new version of
sm_watch. The update is just addressing one glitch: When too many messages have to be processed (say you inserted a scratched CD),
ccze is driven crazy. Can't help it, but at least I can start it with the highest possible nice value.
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This is my favorite hack, in daily use here on my box. I copied the following passage from the script:
Shell program to display changes to "/var/log/messages", "/var/log/mail" and the "From:" and "Subject" lines of new mail to root and his normal user account via "root-tail" windowless on root window of your desktop and/or in a terminal via "tail" colorized with "ccze".
You will need
root-tail and
ccze for the script to work.
Here is a screenshot from the terminal window:
The next one shows what root-tail is doing. The text is displayed in the lower right corner.
The following is an enlarged view of the text.
This link shows what
sm_watch and xsnow are doing together.
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Wednesday, January 3. 2007
Over here at withouthat.org, we have access to a ftp server for storing data. I wrote a simple bash script for doing backups of our webpages. I copied the following out of the script:
Shell program to backup specified directories as gzip'ed tar archives on certain days on a ftp server, keeping a number of older archives of the directories there (max is 10) and removing superfluous ones. Additionally, the list of packages on a Debian system is archived.
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Wednesday, January 3. 2007
Among the scripts at
LinuxCommand.org I found the "new_script" script which can be called to create a new script skeleton/template interactively. After using it for a while, I wrote my own skeleton, based on the output of new_script.
I like it and all my newer scripts are based on it. It has one nifty feature: If you do your editing with Emacs, it supports the "outline-minor-mode" which creates a menu for jumping to functions defined in your script. I created the following screenshot:
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