The DF Lab

So, for the few people that have read my musings thusfar, there may (or may not) have been note that I’ve had a rather prolonged lull, particularly given the Mid-Atlantic CCDC round that intended to write about, but probably can’t now because my memory’s fading.

In any case, the reason for this lull has been, aside from my laziness and Team Fortress 2, my schoolwork. In particular, my Senior Design project, Shallow Frost, has finally been “finished.” It’s finished in the sense that I’ve turned in everything and I’m done presenting on it, but I’d say it’s far from finished as a software project.

In any case, in lieu of describing it here, I’ve posted my final, public presentation on YouTube (in two parts):

Part 1
Part 2

If any of you actually watch to the end of part 2, you’ll notice my demo… well… it didn’t exactly work. How embarrassing! And I had done a final test on that very podium 10 minutes prior. *sigh* Well, in any case, it’s over now. I swear, that was the first time it just up and broke (without me prodding it) in months. Oh well, what’s done is done, and no one seemed all that upset other than me.

If I actually decide to do anything more with this (unlikely, because of how it’s built, it won’t ever really go into the kernel), I’ll surely post updates and such. Thanks for reading/watching!

linux

Tonight, I’ve been poring over a rather large data set that I want to get some useful information out of. All the data was originally stored in a .html file, but after some (very) crude extraction techniques, I managed to pull out just the data I wanted, and shove it into a comma-separated file. Earlier, I had given up on my tools at hand and typed up an entire list of row headings for my newly-gotten data. So I had two files like so:

headings.txt
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie

values.csv
1,2,3,4
5,6,7,8
9,10,11,12

I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to combine the two columns into one file with what I knew, but none of my tools could quite do it without nasty shell scripting. It took me a while, but I eventually found this post that cracked the case for me. The pr command, ostensibly for paging documents, has enough horsepower to solve my problem in short order, like so:

$ pr -tm -s, headings.txt values.csv

The -t tells the program to omit headers and footers, and -m tells it to merge each line. The -s, tells it to use commas as field-separators. My desired result, like so:

headings.txt
Alpha,1,2,3,4
Bravo,5,6,7,8
Charlie,9,10,11,12