Shell Scripting

More L337 Translations

Dave continues with his shell-script L33t translator. In my last article, I talked about the inside jargon of hackers and computer geeks known as "Leet Speak" or just "Leet". Of course, that's a shortened version of the word Elite, and it's best written as L33T or perhaps L337 to be ultimately kewl. But hey, I don't judge.

Tackling L33t-Speak

How to script a l33t-speak translator. My daughter and I were bantering with each other via text message this morning as we often do, and I dropped into a sort of mock "leet speak". She wasn't impressed, but it got me thinking about formulaic substitutions in language and how they represent interesting programming challenges.

Analyzing Song Lyrics

I was reading about the history of The Beatles a few days ago and bumped into an interesting fact. According to the author, The Beatles used the word "love" in their songs more than 160 times. At first I thought, "cool", but the more I thought about it, the more I became skeptical about the figure. In fact, I suspect that the word "love" shows up considerably more than 160 times.

Watermarking Images--from the Command Line

Us geeks mostly think of the command line as the best place for text manipulation. It's a natural with cat, grep and shell scripts. But although you can't necessarily view your results from within a typical terminal window, it turns out to be pretty darn easy to analyze and manipulate images from within a shell script.

Manipulate Images with ImageMagick

In my last article, I had some fun looking at the children's game of rock, paper, scissors, writing a simple simulator and finding out that some strategies are better than others. Yes, I used "strategy" and "rock, paper, scissors" in the same sentence!

Sysadmin 101: Automation

This is the second in a series of articles on systems administrator fundamentals. These days, DevOps has made even the job title "systems administrator" seem a bit archaic, much like the "systems analyst" title it replaced. These DevOps positions are rather different from sysadmin jobs in the past.

Scissors, Paper or Rock?

In this article, I'm going to tackle a children's game that's extraordinarily complicated, with many variations, and the programming task is going to be quite tricky. Just kidding! Rock Paper Scissors (or RPS, as it's known) is pretty darn easy to simulate because there aren't really many variants or possible outcomes.

Is the Moon Waxing or Waning?

In my last article, I talked about the complications of calculating the phase of the moon and decided simply to scrape the same website that Google uses.

The Current Phase of the Moon

Ladies and gentlemen, we've left Mars. Well, at least I'm done with the Martian lander from my past few articles. I hope you had chance to experiment with it and find out that it's not too easy to land a craft on any planet!

Wrapping Up the Mars Lander

In my last few articles ("Let's Go to Mars with Martian Lander" and "Mars Lander, Take II: Crashing onto the Surface"), I've been building a variant on the classic video game Lunar Lander, with a few simplificatio

Let's Go to Mars with Martian Lander

This is the beginning of a series of articles where I develop a variation on the classic lunar-lander game themed around the planet Mars. To do this in three dimensions can be rather complicated, so in the spirit of the original arcade game (that I became rather obsessed with, I should admit), I'm going to tackle the simplified two-dimensional problem.

Dave Taylor and Brandon Perry's Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (No Starch Press)

The new second edition of Dave Taylor and Brandon Perry's classic Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, published by No Starch Press, features a smorgasbord of favorite scripts and 23 brand-new ones. Subtitled 101 Scripts for Linux, OS X, and UNIX Systems, Taylor and Perry's guide features a collection of useful, customizable and fun shell scripts