Martello

Australian online magazine PC Authority have published a list of the top 10 most disappointing technologies that never changed the world. The list (in brief below) has many that I’m familiar with but some that I am not and I’d go along with much of the reasoning behind it.

10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative search engines
8. Voice recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista

They even gave an honourable mention to Biometrics and Ubuntu, with the latter being somewhat contentious. That said, I have agree that while Ubuntu has come on a long, long way, it’s still not quite there in terms of mainstream desktop/laptop use.

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!

Triskit is a fascinating project that takes the form of a self-generating toy system. If you own (or have access to) a mini laser cutter or acrylic sheet stock then you can use the Triskit software to design pieces for your very own toy system (called a Triskit). You can use the data that is produced by the software as input data for your laser cutter and the result is your very own, custom-made toy part.

One of the benefits of this is that, if you are trying to build a toy and find that you don’t have a particular part that does what you need, you can just make one to suit your needs. With the likes of LEGO and K’nex, you are limited to what pieces came in the original box.

On a recent visit to Wales, Joe Cashin took a great photograph of a Volvo Car Sales showroom in the town with the longest name in Britain

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Whilst I had heard of this town before, I did not realise that it holds the record for the longest Internet domain name in the world, which is:

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.co.uk

Upon visiting this site I learned that the longest domain name supported by the Internet (excluding the suffix) is 63 characters and amazingly the above domain name has exactly this many letters. However, if you look closely you will see that the domain name above actually contains and additional 5 letters (uchaf). This is because the domain represents the upper/older part of the village and “uchaf” is the Welsh for “higher” or “upper”.

It’s just a shame that they didn’t put a little more effort into the website.

The IPv6 debate has been rolling on now for several years with no definitive end in sight. However, for my money, the addition of several IPv6 addresses to a number of the root DNS servers earlier this week is another significant step in the right direction for IPv6.

For those of you fortunate enough not to be involved in the debate, this report by the BBC Technology website includes a simple (and brief) overview of what IPv6 is and why it is required. It’s well worth 2 minutes of your time if you have a passing interest in computing or technology generally.

Source: SlashDot