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Technical

A Complex Cron Entry Explained

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2017/01/16/crontab-backtick-returncode-conditional-command/

A crontab entry I felt worth explanation, as it illustrates a few Unix concepts:

$ crontab -l
# m h dom mon dow command
*/5 8-18 * * mon-fri grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state && mkdir -p /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d` && fswebcam -q -d /dev/video0 -r 1920x1080 /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/%Y%m%d/%H%M.jpg ; file /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d/%H%M`.jpg | grep -q 1920x1080 || fswebcam -q -d /dev/video1 -r 1920x1080 /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/%Y%m%d/%H%M.jpg

That is a huge gob of text. Let me un-pack that into parts:

*/5 8-18 * * mon-fri

Run weekdays, 8AM to 6PM, every five minutes.

grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state &&
mkdir -p /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d` &&
fswebcam -q -d /dev/video0 -r 1920x1080 /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/%Y%m%d/%H%M.jpg

Check if the lid on the computer is open by looking for the word “open” in /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state AND
(… if the lid is open) make a directory with today’s date AND
(… if the directory was made) take a timestamped snapshot from the web cam and put it in that folder.

Breaking it down a bit more:

grep -q means grep “quietly” … we don’t need to print that the lid is open, we care about the return code. Here is an illustration:

$ while true; do grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state ; echo $? ; sleep 1; done
state: open
0
state: open
0
# Lid gets shut
1
1
# Lid gets opened
state: open
0
state: open
0

The $? is the “return code” from the grep command. In shell, zero means true and non-zero means false, that allows us to conveniently construct conditional commands. Like so:

$ while true; do grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state && echo "open lid: take a picture" || echo "shut lid: take no picture" ; sleep 1; done
open lid: take a picture
open lid: take a picture
shut lid: take no picture
shut lid: take no picture
open lid: take a picture
open lid: take a picture

There is some juju in making the directory:

mkdir -p /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d`

First is the -p flag. That would make every part of the path, if needed (Dropbox .. webcam ..) but it also makes mkdir chill if the directory already exist:

$ mkdir /tmp ; echo $?
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/tmp’: File exists
1
$ mkdir -p /tmp ; echo $?
0

Then there is the backtick substitition. The date command can format output (read man date and man strftime …) You can use the backtick substitution to stuff the output of one command into the input of another command.

$ date +%A
Monday
$ echo "Today is `date +%A`"
Today is Monday

Once again, from the top:

grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state &&
mkdir -p /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d` &&
fswebcam -q -d /dev/video0 -r 1920x1080 /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/%Y%m%d/%H%M.jpg ;
file /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/`date +%Y%m%d/%H%M`.jpg | grep -q 1920x1080 ||
fswebcam -q -d /dev/video1 -r 1920x1080 /home/djh/Dropbox/webcam/%Y%m%d/%H%M.jpg

Here is where it gets involved. There are two cameras on this mobile workstation. One is the internal camera, which can do 720 pixels, and there is an external camera, which can do 1080. I want to use the external camera, but there is no consistency for the device name. (The external device is video0 if it is present at boot, else it is video1.)

Originally, I wanted to do like so:

fswebcam -q -d /dev/video0 -r 1920x1080 || fswebcam -q -d /dev/video1 -r 1920x1080

Unfortunately, fswebcam is a real trooper: if it can not take a picture at 1920×1080, it will take what picture it can and output that. This is why the whole cron entry reads as:

Check if the lid on the computer is open AND
(… if the lid is open) make a directory with today’s date AND
(… if the directory was made) take a timestamped snapshot from web cam 0
Check if the timestamped snapshot is 1920×1080 ELSE
(… if the snapshot is not 1920×1080) take a timestamped snapshot from web cam 1

Sample output from webcam. Happy MLK Day.

Why am I taking these snapshots? I do not really know what I might do with them until I have them. Modern algorithms could analyze “time spent at workstation” and give feedback on posture, maybe identify “mood” and correlate that over time … we’ll see.

OR not.

Feedback Welcome


Linux, Technical, Technology

Duct Tape Ops

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2017/01/27/duct-tape-ops/

Threading specification, via Wikipedia

Yesterday we tried out Slack’s new thread feature, and were left scratching our heads over the utility of that. Someone mused that Slack might be running out of features to implement, and I recalled Zawinski’s Law:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

I think this is a tad ironic for Slack, given that some people believe that Slack makes email obsolete and useless. Anyway, I had ended up on Jamie Zawiski’s (jwz) Wikipedia entry and there was this comment about jwz’s law:

Eric Raymond comments that while this law goes against the minimalist philosophy of Unix (a set of “small, sharp tools”), it actually addresses the real need of end users to keep together tools for interrelated tasks, even though for a coder implementation of these tools are clearly independent jobs.

This led to The Duct Tape Programmer, which I’ll excerpt:

Sometimes you’re busy banging out the code, and someone starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments … your eyes are swimming.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid … they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.

“At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”

jwz wrote a response in his blog:

To the extent that he puts me up on a pedestal for merely being practical, that’s a pretty sad indictment of the state of the industry.

In a lot of the commentary surrounding his article elsewhere, I saw all the usual chestnuts being trotted out by people misunderstanding the context of our discussions: A) the incredible time pressure we were under and B) that it was 1994. People always want to get in fights over the specifics like “what’s wrong with templates?” without realizing the historical context. Guess what, you young punks, templates didn’t work in 1994.

As an older tech worker, I have found that I am more “fad resistant” than I was in my younger days. There’s older technology that may not be pretty but I know it works, and there’s new technology that may be shiny, but immature, and will take a lot of effort to get working. As time passes, shiny technology matures and becomes more practical to use.

(I am looking forward to trying “Kubernetes in a Can”)

Feedback Welcome


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