Using `cal` and plain text to track things, Part II

Mon 27 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

Back in September, I posted about using the output of cal and plain text to track things. Here is the example of that format I listed in the post:

     August 2023    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       .  2  3  .  5
 .  7  .  .  .  .  .
 .  .  . 16  .  .  .
 .  .  .  .  . 25  .
 .  .  . 30  .      

2023/08/02 326 45 3.0 1/1 ell
2023/08/03 Swimming ~30 minutes
2023/08/05 Swimming 50min med diff
2023/08/07 393 50 3.48 2/1 elliptical
2023/08/16 345 50 3.29 2/1 elliptical
2023/08/25 1 hour intense swimming
2023/08/30 333 44 3.00 2/2 elliptical

I got so much great feedback from some "FediFriends"* immediately after that post that the next day, I came up with a script to automate the process of creating the "filtered" cal output automatically: fcal.

* post about what that means (for the uninitiated) coming soon

The core of the script is only roughly* 20 lines of shell (glorious things can be done in 20 lines of shell, my good fellow!!), half of which processes command line options (I could never get into using getopt/getopts), the other half of which constructs a sed one-liner to do the actual filtering.

* not counting spaces, comments, individual if/do lines, and super-simple functions like warn() and die()

Feeding the same data printed manually above into fcal yields the following:

~ $ fcal -o Aug 2 3 5 7 16 25 30
     August 2023    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       .  2  3  .  5
 .  7  .  .  .  .  .
 .  .  . 16  .  .  .
 .  .  .  .  . 25  .
 .  .  . 30  .

Nobody ever said shell was beautiful, but dang if it isn't insanely useful and quick to construct basic things!

Don't use what works for you

Sun 26 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I was watching a youtuber I rather like, and he closed out his video talking about his pragmatic approach to operating systems. He said he used multiple OSes (some FOSS and some non-FOSS), and he summed up his approach with "Use what works for you."

This is not a polemic …

UNIX is "dead," Part II

Sat 25 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I was re-reading my UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX article, and I realized something that helped me better classify the various types of UNIX OSes:

I see OSes like the BSDs as UNIXes, while I view MacOS and many Linux distros (particularly the Gnome-oriented ones, more about that later …

UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX

Sun 12 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I remember once watching a video of presenter at a Linux conference boldly proclaim, "UNIX is dead."

As someone who worked on UNIX systems for over a decade, and who's played with UNIX variants off and on for three decades, that is a pretty incendiary statement.

With apologies to Sophocles …