ImperialViolet

Back in London. I was only loafing about at home, so I might as well loaf about someplace with a better connection. I'm sure the monkey running the ticket till over charged me (23.50 for a single to London) but the pricing structure for the railways is so damm complex you can't tell. Also, the train didn't even advertise that it was stopping where I wanted it to. I just got on and hoped that that Railtrack wasn't fibbing to me (they weren't, but it's still crappy).

I've just rsync'ed Gentoo - crap there's a lot of new stuff. I wish Gentoo had a way of only upgrading stuff which has jumped in upstream release number.

Over the Xmas break I've had a cluster of P4's in the Imperial labs generating keys for coderman who (I guess) wants them to test this idea. By the last count he had 150000 keys and was winding up, so I'm giving the lab computers a break now. A couple of things that I'll probably end up looking up later:

• Don't bother reading the screen manpage for how to start a detached session - it doesn't work right. Instead do: screen /bin/sh -c "screen -d ; cmd ; cmd ; cmd"
• Padding a number with zeros in a shell script: `printf "%02d\n" $x` (that pads to length 2)