Martello

Wellboy at Up The Deise has truly outdone himself this time with this hilarious skit on the (likely) reaction of Waterford City Council to an objection submitted against the proposed new shopping centre on Newgate Street in Waterford City.

Some of you may have already seen a (cruder) variation of this same video based around Cristiano Ronaldo’s on/off move from Manchester United to Real Madrid (not for the faint hearted or easily offended though).

Gizmodo is back with another amazing LEGO exclusive and this time he has been afforded the opportunity to explore (and film) inside the LEGO factory itself. His report includes several short videos showing the LEGO manufacturing process as well as some astonishing footage of how the bricks are stored in massive silos where no humans are allowed.

Some interesting facts and statistics I took from this are:

• The plastic granules from which LEGO is made are a by-product of Diesel.
• The LEGO machines produce 600 pieces per second (36,000 per minute, 2.1 million per hour or 19 billion per year).
• The LEGO factory processes 60 tons of plastic  granules every 24 hours.
• The plastic granules come in 70 basic colours, from which all other colours are derived.
• The moulds that produce the LEGO pieces are retooled after 5 million uses.
• Decorating the pieces is the most expensive part of the process.

Having spent a number of summer months working at an Injection Moulding company in a past life, I recognised much of the machinery and processes used but it is clearly off the radar in terms of scale, with pretty much everything controlled by a mainframe computer system.

Source: SlashDot

Consider a shell script that counts the number of lines in a file. There are a number of ways to do this and I initially chose the following method:

NUMLINES=0
cat /tmp/file.txt | while read LINE;
do
NUMLINES=`expr $NUMLINES + 1`
done
echo "Number of lines was $NUMLINES"

However, using this approach the value of NUMLINES was always zero after the while loop has ended, even though when I printed out its value inside the while loop it appeared to be incrementing just fine.

The problem turned out to be the use of the pipe at the beginning of the the while loop. This causes a new sub-shell to be created, which in turn creates a new local version of the NUMLINES. Thus, the original copy of the NUMLINES variable (outside the while loop) is never actually changed. Here is one solution to this that eliminates the use of the pipe (i.e. replace the piping of the file in the while with a redirection from the file at the end of the while statement):

NUMLINES=0
while read LINE;
do
NUMLINES=`expr $NUMLINES + 1`
done < /tmp/file.txt
echo "Number of lines was $NUMLINES"

This worked for me!

Computer hard drive manufacturer Seagate have just announced the worlds first 1.5TB (terabyte) desktop hard drive. That’s 1,500 Gigabytes or 1.5 million Megabytes to you and me. Their latest technological advancement, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) has enabled them to increase the recording density of the drives by up to 3 times.

It’s not that long ago that I can remember taking delivery of their first 1GB 3.5″ hard drive, the first in the Barracuda family. If my memory serves me correctly, it was around 1997.

And they thought the hard disc was a thing of the past. I think not…

Source: SlashDot

Still don’t know what to get the Geek in your life for their birthday?

Geek Panties to the rescue, courtesy of Michele’s the link.