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Rainy weather expressions

Submitted by bill on Thu, 28/01/2010 - 20:48

Here is a list of expressions that people use to describe or talk about rainy weather:

  • A thunder woke me up last night
  • Be careful! The weather forecast mentioned sleet
  • I enjoy rain showers
  • It is a real toad choker
  • It is chucking it down
  • It is coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock
  • It is drizzling
  • It is foul weather today
  • It is hailing
  • It is pissing it down
  • It is pouring rain
  • It is raining
  • It is raining cats and dogs
  • It is raining hard
  • It is raining pitchforks and plowhandles
  • It is raining to beat sixty
  • It was a drizzly day
  • It was showery today
  • My umbrella was useless today
  • Nice weather for ducks
  • Not this drizzle again
  • Sometimes I enjoy sudden rainfalls
  • The buckets are coming down
  • This is a big storm
  • This is a thunderstorm
  • We are flooding

Porcupine Tree - Trains

Submitted by bill on Wed, 15/07/2009 - 22:44

Porcupine Tree - Trains



Train set and match spied under the blind..
Shiny and contoured the railway winds.
And I've heard the sound from my cousin's bed,
the hiss of the train at the railway head..

Always the summers are slipping away..

A 60 ton angel falls to the earth,
a pile of old metal, a radiant blur,
scars in the country, the summer and her..

Always the summers are slipping away..
Find me a way for making it stay..

When I hear the engine pass,
I'm kissing you wide..
the hissing subsides..
I'm in luck..

When the evening reaches here,
you're tying me up..
I'm dying of love,
it's OK..

How to terminate the execution of a process after some time in Linux

Submitted by bill on Fri, 27/02/2009 - 02:30

Suppose that you have to execute a Java program which is fairly unstable and sometimes hangs on and never terminates. Is there a simple way to make it terminate (actually by killing the process) after some time? Yes, of course. There is always a way for such things. Ways for everything do not exist though.

So, let's say you have a program.jar to execute but you want to kill its process after 5 minutes in case it does not terminate. A very easy way to do this is the following: 

#!/bin/bash

# here you set the time you want to wait before killing the process
time=5m

# then you run your program in the background
java -jar program.jar &

# you are waiting for the time you have set 
sleep $time

# some printing - for fun
termination="\nTerminating the process...!!\n"
echo -e $termination

# and now you are about to kill it
kill %1

You can create a script.sh file, just copy paste the code above, and then run the script.sh file (by using the command > sh script.sh).

Camel - Stationary traveller (live)

Submitted by bill on Thu, 08/01/2009 - 16:20

Camel - Stationary Traveller ... amazing! -:)

Hints on linux cron jobs - A quick tutorial

Submitted by bill on Wed, 10/12/2008 - 17:03

If you really do not know what a cron job is, then please have a look at the Wikipedia's article first.

Hint 1: Keep in mind that cron does not know where your home directory is OR does not see your directory structure. Be careful and specify the full path of the things you call (like /usr/java/bin/java etc.). This is not enough; in several occasions you have to add an extra line to your crontab file in order to define your HOME path. It might be something like that:

HOME=/
You have to write this inside the crontab file.


Hint 2: How do I edit my cron jobs? You have to open a file called the "crontab" and simply edit it. To do that just type:

>> crontab -e
Beautiful vi editor will open; now you can edit your cron jobs.


Hint 3: I hate vi. How do I open the crontab with an other editor?
You have to type three commands this time:

>> EDITOR=gedit (I pick gedit - you may pick another editor)
>> export EDITOR
>> alias editor=$EDITOR
Now run crontab -e again and the beautiful gedit will open (civilisation!).


Hint 4: Hmm, what else should I write inside the crontab file? What about the actual syntax of the cron jobs? OK, it is nothing special. You just have to type a command to be executed. Right BEFORE the command you have to specify WHEN do you want to execute this command (or how often). You will use 5 space separated text fields for that. This is an example of a line in a crontab file:

* * * * * /usr/java1.6_02/bin/java -jar /home/programs/tetris/dist/tetris.jar
This creates a cron job that will open a tetris java based game. The 5 stars mean that this thing will be executed once per minute (and after a while your computer will have a problem because this .jar is not a very light or smart application). Actually the first star controls minutes, the second hours, the third days, the fourth months and the fifth years. It is really simple. Is it? How do I set a cron job to run every two minutes? This is how: 
*/2 * * * * <your_command>
You just have to type a slash 2 right next to the first star!

 

How do I set a cron job to run every day at 21.00? 

0 21 * * * <your_command>
That's it... -:)


Hint 5: How do I avoid receiving this huge email with the cron job's output?

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