PenguinREPORT

I have to say that for all my love of computing, there’s still nothing in life quite like the sound of an 1100 cc engine firing off for the first time in nearly seven months. It’s not so much the sound as the promise - a promise of wind and speed and the pursuit of the perfect lean in a tight corner. It’s a liitle behind schedule, but summer has officially begun.

In stuff that’s more related to computing (I promise not to kill you with the details of every summer ride!), I’ve gotten some interesting email tips and corrections in the past few days. Let me share some of them with you.

From Devren Bennett, this note about hard drive failure and data recovery:

Just thought I would offer a quick tip. At a time of Hard Drive failure you
can get the drive working long enough to retrieve (usually) your data. Put
the drive in the freezer for a couple of hours. In the mean time prep a new
drive or backup medium. Install the drive and it will work like new for
about 45 minutes. Plenty long enough to retrieve any needed data.

Fortunately, in my recent HD failure, I didn’t need to resort to this, although I’d been told that it worked. I can’t imagine my wife’s face as she opens the freezer for ice cream …

Scott Morizot, author of Easy Firewall Generator, featured in yesterday’s Penguin Shell, sent me a quick note:

Well cool. I didn’t send in the pointer to Easy Firewall Generator, so
someone else must have thought enough of it to submit it.

Hopefully your readers will find it useful.

They don’t have to install the software, although anyone is welcome to
the code (up to version 1.05 now).

My site runs a fully functional installation for those who just want to
generate a script.

http://morizot.net/firewall/gen/

Anyway, I had to comment when I saw it listed.

This really is a very nice firewall generating script. And, it’s always good to feature programs writtem by Penguin Shell readers.

I got this comment from Benjamin Pulkkinen regarding the piece on renaming multiple files:

While I was reading the “GnomeCORE - Renaming Multiple Files” section of
“20020528 Lockergnome Penguin Shell” mailling list and I noticed your
regular expression in your sed command might cause some confusion with
readers.
Your command:

t=`echo $a | sed ’s/.shtml$/.phtml/’`

to search and replace “.shtml” uses an unescaped dot “.” character. The dot
character in regular expressions is a wild card that matches any single
character, so the dot in your sed expression will match any character. If
you want to search spcifically for the “.” character, it needs to be escaped
with a backslash like this:

t=`echo $a | sed ’s/\.shtml$/.phtml/’`

Your expression will still work to rename the files but readers trying to
learn how to use sed and regular expressions may get into trouble if they
don’t realise the dot character is a wildcard character and needs to be
escaped.

Good point, Benjamin. It’s one well-taken and duly passed along.

And this, from an unnamed Penguin Shell reader during last week’s hiatus:

hey-

you o.k.?

Yup. But I love that you asked.

Have a great Wednesday.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison