2009.07.05 - last edit >> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:06:26 -0400

Stars & Scripts

My OpenGL has decided to start playing nicely of late so I decided to make use of it this weekend. I've been tracking the weather over the past week to minimize my wetness on bike ride to school. Hitting the right time slot to make the trip is a bit of a challenge. Anyway, the weather cleared up near the weekend and the sky got a little less exciting so I decided to try my hand at mapping out the stars. That's where Stellarium comes in. It's a damn fine piece of software. I can now make out about half of the major constellations visible during this time of year. The other half of the sky was polluted with light from the moon and some lights in the parking lot next to this house.

When not out stargazing, I was fighting with bash to get some tasks automated. The blag script got a little more spiffy and I now have a chroot script so I don't destroy my system when scripting. Awk is no longer a mystery either, it is basically the one program that allows you to glue the programs in /bin together in bash scripts... aside from bash of course.

In the process of creating the chroot script(s), I hit some efficiency issues which were met with some new, simple C programs. I originally wanted to use scsh, the scheme shell, to do the scripting... after writing an scsh version of a recursive ls script, I dropped it. In one test, it took 2 seconds for scsh and .2 seconds for a bash script using ls and awk. This got me to learn awk... but a bit disappointed, being an avid fan of all things LISPy. Scsh could have performed better, but it would cost elegance - something scheme should not compromise... else it evolve into Common Lisp.

-- Alex