Tee'd off

Recently I was trying to figure out how to output text from a command to both a text file and the console. My twitter friends weren't sure how to do this but fortunately a friend of mine reminded me of a handy little tool named tee.

from the tee man file:
tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files

A simple example of using tee:
`cat somefile.txt | tee output.txt`

So next time you need to write to both the console and a text file don't get so Tee'd off! (cheesy I know)

Discipline

I don't know what super fuel Nine Inch Nails has been running on lately, but it sure seems like they have found a new creative well to tap. They keep coming out with more of everything in less time. Definitely not the typical four-to-five-years-between-albums Nine Inch Nails we have been used to. I just Downloaded their new song Discipline and its amazing! It gets me wondering what they are up to now that Robin Finck has joined the Nine Inch Nails fold yet again.

Oh yeah, and they are going on tour.... soon.

If you haven't clicked the link earlier, go download Discipline now. If you are musically inclined, you should go to remix.nin.com and get the multitracks of Discipline in the Mix section.

Git on Cygwin

Lately I've been trying out Git and I have been very impressed so far. I enjoy how Git doesn't impose any set method on how to do things, instead it lets me write code how I want to and forget about my version control. I did run into one annoying problem with Git on Cygwin though. Apparently, the default install for Git enables _all_ the pre-commit hooks for Git. The Linux version, on the other hand, *disables* all the pre-commit hooks. This kept me running into an annoying problem where Git wouldn't let me commit files because of bad whitespace in a couple files.

Fortunately I found a solution to the problem here. Its a simple 'chmod a-x .git/hooks/pre-commit'.

Now that I have that out of the way, I'm going to try Git some more and compare it to my experiences with Mercurial (which I think is another great version control system).

Ghosts Film Festival

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails keep the punches rolling with his newest album Ghosts I-IV. From my last post about Ghosts, I talked about how Trent Reznor has an amazing grasp of how to use the internet as an artist in our age of "piracy." After previously feeling "disheartened" about his experience releasing Saul Williams amazing album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, Trent has a renewed faith in us:

First of all, a sincere THANK YOU for the response to Ghosts. We are all amazed at the reaction for what we assumed would be a quiet curiosity in the NIN catalog. My faith in all of you has been restored - let's all go have coffee somewhere (my treat)!

He has taken the remix culture and Creative Commons idea one step further and is actively encouraging participation in Nine Inch Nails art.

it's meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship.

I'm very happy to see that he has learned from his experiences with Saul Williams and is experimenting with how an artist can make a living in this growing world of music post-RIAA. His call to the community to participate and become involved in the creative process puts Nine Inch Nails in a much more intimate and rewarding environment. Nine Inch Nails is taking fans who were once content on passively watching and putting them into a whole new world of participation with Nine Inch Nails.

Not only is it taking fans from being observers to participants, it is also changing peoples views on music and its worth as art. The current music industry has taken the art of making music and turned it into a cold, mechanical world of commodity. By asking for fan participation it reinforces the value of music as a piece of artwork. When people have personally invested time and creative effort into a piece, it is much more important and valuable to them.

Fans want art, not crap. We want to see real artwork both musically and visually. We also want to see the art treated with respect as Nine Inch Nails has done with the multiple formats Ghosts is available in. When the art is respected, we are more than happy to pay $300 for an amazing boxed set of artwork. Thank you Trent and Nine Inch Nails for opening up this new and exciting world of creativity.

Google Profiles

While messing with Google Reader today I decided to update my Google profile information and got to thinking. When is Google going to show us the different ways they are going to integrate the Google profile? Right now, your profile information is being used in Google Reader, Google Shared Stuff, and Google Maps. So when are they going to integrate with Blogger and the rest of their applications? I'm interested to see how Google plans on consolidating their applications in a more social way like they are doing in Google Maps.

Currently, there is a very minimal amount of profile information that is actually being shared between Google Reader, Google Shared Stuff, and Google maps. Here is what I get to consolidate between those three apps:
















Step it up Google! I want to see what you are planning on doing with the social integration sooner than later! Give me a dedicated profile page that can link all my apps and make it easier to navigate to. No more ?id=12312312 junk in the url. Make it easy like http://www.google.com/profiles/merrell.sam. Hopefully we will soon be seeing the fruits of Googles social labor.

Nine Inch Nails Carries the Radiohead Torch to New Heights

This Sunday, Trent Reznor and crew quietly released Nine Inch Nail's newest album (actually a 4 volume set, so far) Ghosts I - IV. Trent Reznor's growing grasp of the Internet and how to harness the large Nine Inch Nails community continues to astound me. Nine Inch Nails relevance in the music world continues to become more and more important as he is pioneering new ways for artists to distribute their music independently and use the internet to their advantage.

Not only has Trent Reznor released Ghosts as a free download, it is also licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license! This is probably one of the best moves I have seen in the music industry. Trent Reznor has been cultivating a remix society around his work through his Remix portion of nin.com, and it was only a matter of time before he took the final leap and released his creative works into the wild for us to enjoy and be inspired by.

I salute you Trent Reznor, please keep up the amazing work you are doing and stay in inspiration for all musicians out there. Hopefully more will follow in your footsteps.

Twitter

Yes, I know. I'm not one of the early adopters or "alpha geeks" that adopted Twitter as soon as it came out, but I just recently signed up for Twitter mainly to maintain my online reputation as Lifehacker suggested and I actually find that Twitter could come in handy in many different ways.

My Top 15 Commands

After some searching I found the command to list your top 10 (or any other number you wanted) commands in the terminal. So here is the command:

history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 15 | sort -nr

and here are my top 15 commands:

85 ls
36 vim
34 hg
32 find
30 cd
16 java
14 pd
14 hist
10 stat
8 zip
8 rm
7 screen
7 scp
6 history
6 echo

Writing Commitments

It has been a long time since my last actual post here and I have been on and off with my blogs since I started. Today I've decided I want to renew my commitment to writing and improving my skills as a writer. One problem I had imposed upon myself with this blog was that of a format. Being a programmer, I had decided that this blog's format was going to be focused on programming and related thoughts. Obviously, this hasn't been working out so well since I haven't had the time/energy/willpower to write a good technology related post.

So, I have decided that I'm going to remove my self-imposed format and write about whatever I feel is worth writing about. Since this is a new/mostly inactive blog I don't have anyone to upset with this so that won't be a problem. And as I improve my writing skills and learn what I like to write about, I imagine that my posts will become more focused over time.

So with that, I hope to start writing at least weekly about whatever comes to my mind. Hopefully anyone who comes across my writing will find some value out of it and I'll find plenty of value in simply writing anything.

What's in your PS1?

My friend John found an interesting discussion on Reddit about PS1. His PS1 can be found here.

Mine is:
PS1='\[\033[34m\]\u@\h (\t) \[\033[36m\]\w\[\033[37m\]\n\$ '

Which looks like:
samerrel@ravenholm (12:00:47) ~
$

and colorized: