Is Link Journalism any different to the majority of reporting?
February 26, 2008 – 9:41 pmReadWriteWeb has an interesting but not exactly deeply thought-out piece on Link Journalism. I think the point they miss is to question how much journalism done for mainstream media channels is nothing more than repitition of the day’s news agenda - it’s not a coincidence that most journalists’ bosses are called editors.
Haven’t you ever noticed how many news channels at any given time are just churning through the same few Reuters or AP stories as everybody else? This can be potentially, if not in fact usually, less “original” than more obviously link-based journalism as there is inevitably less freedom and multi-lateralism in the sources.
Then again, I went to art college I have even read Death of the Author so I guess I’ve been a bit brainwashed.
Split and Rename text files from the Bash command line
February 26, 2008 – 9:17 pmI occasionally read text files (usually downloaded from the Gutenberg Project) on my mobile phone. This is not the best user experience, but bearable and very useful at times.
The most annoying issue is the incredibly slow management of very large text files (sometimes greater than 1Mb) that my phone displays - so i decided to rename them.
Using my mac, I came up with this couple of commands to do the work for me, between them they will split all text files into 1000 line chunks, and assuming an original filename of “somefile.txt” also rename them to “somefile_XX.txt” where XX is actually two letters denoting the part, starting at aa, ab, ac, etc.
The first command is dead easy and splits the files:
for file in *.txt ; do split $file $file ; done
This will split the files and turn “somefile.txt” into “somefile.txtaa”, “somefile.txtab”, “somefile.txtac” etc. which is obviously not great - so we need the next step:
for file in * ; do mv $file `echo $file | \
sed 's/\(.*\)\.txt\([a-z]\{2\}\)/\1_\2.txt/’` ; done
Now you should have all the files nicely named “somefile_aa.txt”, “somefile_ab.txt”, “somefile_ac.txt” etc.
You might prefer numbers rather than letters, in which case just check out the man page for the ’split’ command.
Am I a Twit
February 26, 2008 – 8:58 pmAm I a twit for using twitter?
The Real Threat
July 26, 2007 – 9:40 pmAlong the lines of my recent post about car-related deaths versus terrorism-related deaths, see this graph representing the amounts of deaths related to different issues.
I may have to steal the ‘Saint Pete for Peace’ moniker.
Nuisance buttons
July 17, 2007 – 9:21 pm
This excellent old intercom was removed from our flat recently to be replaced by a boring old phone. The thing I’ll miss most insthe ‘Nuisance button’ that I was never brave enough to press.
Car Crashes Killl 400 times more people than international terrorism
July 3, 2007 – 9:31 pmAccording to a study in the latest issue of Injury Prevention, car crashes kill 400 times more people than international terrorism in the 29 (developed) member countried of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) between 1994 and 2003.
From the InfoWars article on the study:
… the number of Americans who avoided flying after 9/11 and were subsequently killed in car crashes was higher than the total number of passengers who died on the four 9/11 flights.
Should we have draconian new laws and fundamentally change the way our society works as a result? The changes would save vastly more lives than stop-and-search routines at airports and train stations.