On 11/30/06, Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu> wrote:
> Linux is the killer application. That being said, there
> are lots of things I like. Cron and the ability to do timed
> automation jobs is wonderful. I use cron, mplayer and a shell
> script or two to capture on-line "radio" programs like an audio
> Tivo. For anyone interested, the concept is to use mplayer in
> the dumpstream mode, sync your computer using ntpd, let mplayer
> start at the prescribed time in the background with &, and then
> kill $! N seconds later where N is the number of seconds to sleep
> while mplayer is dumping to the file. I can get really tight
> recordings as long as the source station is also accurate in its
> time and most are quite accurate.
>
> A Linux system makes a darn-good "tape recorder," so to
> speak. I have gotten good recordings, even at 44.1 KHZ sampling
> from a 250-MHZ Dell though it doesn't take much to make it too
> busy to record properly. At lower sampling rates, it is as good
> as anything.
>
> As I told one other person recently, if people knew how
> well even 250-MHZ systems do, there would be fist fights over
> them rather than people tossing out perfectly good equipment. On
> the slower stuff, more RAM usually s and not running X if you
> can it also frees more CPU cycles for the important stuff.
>
> As a computer user who happens to be blind, linux has
> been a life saver in my job. If not for Linux and also FreeBSD,
> I would be forced to run Microsoft Windows, deal with "Patch
> Tuesdays" and hope to goodness that each new patch didn't kill
> the screen reader. Trust me. It happens. Under Linux, there
> are several possibilities for screen-reader access, all free and
> all good in their own way. I simply feel like I am still in
> control of what the system is doing and only limited by my
> knowledge and imagination rather than what some suit in a far-off
> office thought I needed or should have.
>
> I am big on automation because those of us in networking
> work most efficiently when we can automate the donkey work and
> concentrate on the things that humans are best at. Cron, at and
> expect are true gems and the people who wrote them and made them
> available to all truly left the wood pile higher than they found it.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group

Gorgeous stuff... Shouldn't this kind of stuff be posted to some
advocacy site somewhere?


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