The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged command line
Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Jun 24th
As of now I’m not quite done this book, but it is one of the few fictional stories that I’ve ever gotten into. (Without revealing secrets) This book opens with the announced death of a software giant/genius dyeing after a long battle with brain cancer and seemingly unrelated events and people converge on what could be considered a turning point in history: when it is possible to murder someone from beyond the grave (as quoted from the book) "When you’re safely dead".
On Audible this book is in a half-dramatized, half-narrated story with different characters voice by different actors or actresses, which conveys nicely because this book can be downloaded using Audible’s new ‘E’ format (which bring the file size for this book to about 500MB). This is one of the best applications of the audiobook medium yet; the high quality, great narrators, and a great story. Keep in mind that this book is a significant investment of time, at 15 hours and 57 minutes.
If you like this book, it’s author has a sequel premiering in 2010, Freedom. You can take a look at free chapters on the authors site, here.
Get this book for $31.47 or 1 credit on Audible.
Or get this book in dead-tree format for $16.98 from Amazon.
**PS With credits this book can cost as low as $7.49, or using a sponsored trial (such as from TWiT) you can get it free (with new signup)**
(Publisher’s Summery)
Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can’t always be said for the people who design them.
Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer – the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans aren’t the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol’s secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it’s up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy – or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .
Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.
©2009 Daniel Suarez; (P)2009 Penguin Audio
Adventures in Linux: Day 12
Jun 2nd
I know these posts for documenting my adventures in Linux (Kubuntu, to be exact) and it’s because I’m not encountering as many questions in operation as I did almost two weeks ago. Today I have something to add for those with iPhone/iPod Touch, specifically those who have applications such as Discover or other remote file access applications that are accessible via FTP or WebDAV. In Kubuntu I don’t have any FTP programs installed and therefore could only use a built-in tool… like cURL! cURL is an *amazing* open-source internet-download/upload-do-anything-you-need-to-do tool which is command line only (unless you use a GUI implementation, but that’s not as powerful).
The basic cURL syntax is curl and then the arguments. For example to download the TWiT Video using curl you would use curl http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/twit/live/high -ooutput.flv (note that the -o or output tag doesn’t have a space between it and the output file name.) However for uploading the command I used was the -T, or upload. This is what I used curl -T ~/Desktop/SN-039.mp3 http://192.168.1.113:8888/sn39.mp3 this incorporates the source filename (and path) and the destination path (and destination file name, this is required).
This post is mostly for my future reference, if it’s useful then I’m happy, if you’re new to this whole idea of putting files on your iPhone/Pod Touch then I welcome you to this new world. If you’re curious why I would put an MP3 file on my iPod without going to through iTunes, consider the times that you don’t have time to update your iPod, specifically if it’s an MP3 file that you can’t get through the iTunes podcast store (I do not encourage music piracy, even if this could be used very effectively for it).
Remember, if you’re using Mac OS X then you have cURL already. (It’s shipped with OS X since version 10.2, if I recall, otherwise you will have to download it using the command apt-get install curl, but that’s for another day.)

