the coming back

Unfortunately not much happening on this front for the last year or so, life has a talent of kicking you in a lower/higher gear every now and then. Luckily, I still get more ideas that I can chew at one time, so expect to see them floating again here.

Now I wish I had some Siri with me, maybe next time...

told you

so

Old News

The Symbian Foundation is kaput.

ASL as an Introduction

There's a time in your life when ASL means: Age, Sex, Location... (a sort of "Hi!" on the IRCs :)

But then you grow up, settle down and engage in OO programming practices that will override some of your initial methods. In our case, that's ASL which nowadays means: American Signing Language.

You might throw away those Baby Einstein DVDs, even if a few of them are quite interesting (i.e. "Meet the Orchestra"), but Signing Time is a keeper :-)

Plus, they're introducing this year the Sign of the Week: free flashcards for you to download (and print at home), short teaching videos for each sign. Thank You Rachel & co !!

The story behind the Signing Time program is moving, but most important are the results. Still, it makes you stop and wonder why the signing language is not standardized (worldwide) and the ones who need it most face another communication barrier. Yeah, the world we live in is (still) a jungle...

the wrap up

I'm wrapping up an interesting year, with just a few highs and several lows 'll need to work on for quite some time. Interestingly enough, the average might be comforting, but maybe one would wish for more (clustered? :-) average values rather than highs and lows :-)

Lets see how 2010 would be... Happy holidays and A Happy New Year! :-)

feel the pain

via xkcd

how to automatically create/extract multi volume TARs

For the past year(s) or so I've been running into situations where I have created some code snippets to help me out with my (hobby) projects, only to lose them later from .bash_history :-)

This is about to change now, thanks to the great hints I find evey now and then via Jeremy's linkblog and the inspirational "splitting large files with TAR"

First, we need to introduce the following TAR helpers

move.sh

link.sh

Then, we create (i.e. 1MB) TAR multi volume/part archives on the fly

Extracting is again, almost painless :-)

PS. I hope the gist is showing ok, Blogger's preview is blind to it :-(

PPS. The above code was successfully tested on Debian/Ubuntu, on some other platforms (i.e. RedHat) --volno-file might start counting from... 2 (stupid!). You can always modify move.sh to use its own increment scheme (same as link.sh). Take care!