"SCRUZIA" ... a very infrequently updated weblog ...

2008-11-01

Latest sunrise of the year

This year, because the end of daylight savings time was pushed into November, the date of the latest sunrise was this morning, 1 November 2008. I went to the US Naval Observatory site here, entered Mountain View, California, and it said that today's sunrise was at 6:34 am PST. That is, 7:34 PDT. Tomorrow, Daylight savings time ends, so tomorrow's sunrise is 6:35. And the sunrise for the week or so after the winter solstice is 7:23.

2008-10-29

zsh: missing end of name

I run zsh at work, and was puzzled by an error message I got today:
zsh: missing end of name
The command line was something like this:
echo J Random Guru (rg@example.com) is an email address.
A brief web search led to this old zsh source file, which helped to explain things a tiny bit. Based on it, I tried a slight modification:
echo J Random Guru (rg@example.com@) is an email address.
and got a much more satisfying error message:
zsh: unknown group
It turns out that zsh's parenthesis-based file filtering (called "Glob Qualifiers" in the man page) has some features I never new about. 99% of the time that I use it, it's for a command line something this:
ls -ld *(/)
which does a long ls of all of the directories (and not their contents) in $PWD. Next most common are *(^/) which is all non-directories, and *(*) (executable plain files), which I confuse with *(x) (owner-executable files). The reason that this is relevant to the puzzling error message is that two of the possibilities inside the parentheses are "u" for userid and "g" for group id. These take a numeric user or group id, or a matchable delimiter! So a slight modification of my pattern (*(rg@example.com@)) should match any files that are owner-readable (the "r"), and have group-ids matching the group named "example.com". Of which there are none. For reference:
$ echo $ZSH_VERSION
4.2.5
$

2008-10-10

AX LOTL

License plate of the day. See this wikipedia entry, I guess. I'd seen the word "neoteny" before, but not "neotenic".

Reminded me somehow of my wife's favorite Latin faux-blessing. Imagine having a nice satin robe and miter, so you look like a pope, and saying "Dasypus novemcinctus". Sounds plausibly like some kind of blessing, but ... well, you can look it up.

2008-04-18

Not my baby