[Leaplist] Putting my time where my mouth is, give me the applications you use -- WAS: Free alternatives

[Jim Hartley]

I agree with Steve here on "one-offs". I have a directory, $HOME/bin 
which is in my $PATH and **full** of little goodies ... a lot of them 
are very short bash scripts driving one or two awk programs. I don't 
worry about maintenance, in general if I need to change something I just 
write a new one (but starting from the old code).

Example: To count the words in a directory of text files, wc is 
available. But when I went to OpenOffice and needed to count words in a 
bunch of .odt files, I wrote "odtwc", nested bash scripts using awk plus 
unzip and grep. Doesn't have the full power of wc, but has enough, and 
was much faster to construct than digging into the source for wc would 
have been.

It's a great way  to get things done.

Jim Hartley

Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 December 2008 09:10:10 am Patrick wrote:
>> Bryan J Smith wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 21:57 -0500, Bryan J Smith wrote:
>>>> Sorry to continue in another post here, but I think this proves several
>>>> things I've said over the years ... I'll list my biggest three (3) ...
>>>> 1.  Reference things by technologies, not product names.  It will force
>>>> you to understand what you're doing, not marketing.  ;)
> 
> [clip]
> 
>> Why re-invent the wheel?  Could this project accept the hundreds, nay,
>> thousands, of man hours already invested in the huge area of FOSS vs
>> Proprietary products?
>>
>> such as:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_software_packages
> 
> There's another wrinkle to this whole thing. Unix being Unix (every program 
> does one thing and does it well), "power users" like me often cobble things 
> together to do the task exactly how they want it to be done. No listing of 
> open source apps would be complete without listing known, tested components 
> from which custom apps can quickly be assembled.
> 
> One example is my text based music playlist player:
> 
> http://www.troubleshooters.cxm/lpm/200801/200801.htm
> 
> Probably nobody else would like it -- the pickers use VI keystrokes, for 
> heaven's sake. But it works for me.
> 
> Or my backup system. Nobody else would want it, but I just make one UMENU 
> selection, type in two ssh key passwords, and bang, I get backed up to my 
> daughters machine. When the time comes to burn the backups to DVD, my 
> daughter's (Linux) machine has a best fit program whose informational output 
> gets piped into a program to convert it to a script that constructs the .iso 
> files.
> 
> When I fill an Ebook order, I run a script that personalizes and watermarks 
> the Ebook. When I get a courseware order, I run a script that personalizes 
> and watermarks the Powerpoint and PDF portions. The Powerpoint is a C program 
> that binary writes the customer name into the file.
> 
> Check out my Troubleshooters.Com Linux subsite's front page:
> 
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/index.htm
> 
> It's a nice, quick hierarchy of perhaps 100 links. Its source is an outline, 
> and I run a Ruby script to turn it into that page, which I then FTP up to the 
> server. Theoretically I could have used that Ruby program as CGI on the 
> server, but all other things being equal I prefer my online content static.
> 
> My computer's menu system is UMENU. The menu system's hierarchy runs over 600 
> programs, and has menus 6 deep. The menu system's structure and content is 
> kept in an Easy Menu Definition Language (EMDL) file, and converted to menus 
> via a Ruby program. The EMDL itself is maintained via VimOutliner, because 
> EMDL is a specialized subset of tab indented outlines.
> 
> All of these one-offs are accessed through my UMENU system, so when I use my 
> computer, I can be a dumb user. 99% of the time I'm as computer literate as 
> your Great Aunt Mildred -- only when I have a new functionality to accomplish 
> do I put on my IT hat and make a new one-off.
> 
> Like I say -- these are all one-offs that appeal to nobody else, but everyone 
> has their own one-offs. I find time and time again, my one-offs are 
> constructed from the same usual suspects: Umenu, VimOutliner, awk, sed, ruby, 
> tr, cut, grep Postgres/psql, latex, tex, wc, bash and the like. No listing of 
> apps would be complete without a list of known, tested components with which 
> to quickly assemble your own apps.
> 
> SteveT
> 
> 
> Steve Litt
> Recession Relief Package
> http://www.recession-relief.US
> 
> 

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