Possibility and Probability

12/28/2004

Upgrades

I just finished updating my home system. Why can't I have an OS update/upgrade go smoothly? Personally I'm starting to think I'm cursed.

This upgrade (from Mandrake 9.2 to 10.1) seemed to go smoothly but then as I played with the system I discovered that while it did upgrade everything, not everything is working. Example: The system keep looking for the floppy drive which was removed a while ago.

Also, apparently the new version of XEmacs is prett different from the older version I was using. As soon as I started it up it started screaming bloody murder about my custom.el, apparently there's a lot of crap in there that isn't working right now. Big surprise, I've been thinking for the last year or two that it needed to be overhauled. Looks like the time is now... ugh.

Comment on this post [ so far] ... more like this: [unix, xemacs]

wget

Most everyone probably already knows this, but I've just recently discovered wget is the coolest utility I have come across in a while. For those of you who don't know about it, its a unix util that is used to pull down files from web ot ftp sites.

I recently used it to help me upload some files. I had a directory that was full of junk files (images that had been resized, backup files, etc.) and I didn't want to manually dig through it to figure out what to upload to the web server. Using wget I just changed directories to a temp dir, pointed wget at my work directory (specifically the index.html file I was working on) and specified the recurse option. About 10 seconds later it had copied only what was refrenced by the html files over to my temp dir. That was a big time and space saver, I had over 500megs of junk in the first directory, wget helped me whittle that down to the 11 megs that were necessary.

Comment on this post [ so far] ... more like this: [unix]