Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group

Title: "Using Unix command-line tools to be an unreasonable [person] (*)"

Speaker: Ian! D. Allen    idallen@idallen.ca    www.idallen.com
         Algonquin College
         National Capital FreeNet

(*) Literary Quote:

    "A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment.
     An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment
     to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the
     unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

     http://www.ag.wastholm.net/author/George_Bernard_Shaw

Summary:

    We will help you become a more unreasonable person by using the Unix
    shell and various command-line tools to fetch bits of data that make
    up your online world and recombine them the way you want them.

    Along the way, we'll review how the Unix command line works, including
    some of the "gotchas" that often trip up new users.

Rationale:

    Why use a command line instead of the GUI?

       http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/15/learnunixos.html

Details:

    Examples of things we might do using simple command line tools:

    - renaming digital photo files to be their internal date and time

    - count how many times words appear in a document

    - count the lengths of words in a document

    - grabbing the current weather

    - running programs with a preset list of options

    - creating a SPAM whitelist from a mail alias file and uploading it
      hourly to a POPmail server

    - on-the-fly conversion of Berkeley mail aliases to mutt format

    - suggestions from the audience ...

Speaker Biography:

    Ian! D. Allen <idallen@idallen.ca> currently has a part-time day
    job as professor of Computer Studies at the Algonquin College
    Woodroffe Campus.  At night, in between marking IBM JCL and Bourne
    shell scripts, he writes Perl and shell scripts to automate things
    on his Linux desktop and does volunteer system administration for
    the National Capital FreeNet.  He has an Honours BA in Psychology
    and a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo,
    where he spent most of his time doing amateur theatre and rewriting
    Troff and the C Shell instead of working on his thesis.  His first
    computer course was WATFIV (FORTRAN) on punch cards in 1974.
    His first email account was "idallen" on a Waterloo Honeywell 6050
    GECOS system in 1976.  He has been programming on Unix since 1976
    (V7 on a PDP-11) and the Internet since about 1981.  His first
    home computer was a VAXstation 3100 running Ultrix.  He acquired
    his first Intel computer (P166 Windows 95) in 1996 and his first
    Linux distribution (SuSE 5.2) at an OCLUG meeting a few years later.
    He currently has six computers on his home network running various
    Mandrake distributions.  He is married to midwife Jan Teevan and
    plays step-father to her three young adults (who are now all out of
    the home).  He has two favourite sayings: (1) Less code is better
    code; and (2) If this were easy, everyone would be doing it.