Re: Shell game, and ick

Article: 8983 of alt.hackers
From: dilatush@condor.sccs.swarthmore.edu (Jeremy Todd Dilatush)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Shell game, and ick
Date: 3 Nov 1995 21:46:51 GMT
Organization: Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
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Hannu Kotipalo (nite@pc164153.oulu.fi) wrote:
: Jeremy Todd Dilatush (dilatush@condor.sccs.swarthmore.edu) wrote:
: : Well,  if you look at my post above, you find out that for me, too, the
: : group is no longer moderated.  But as I was posting for some time while
: : it was moderated (and I always remember my ObHacks), I think it's legit for
: : me to post.  (And yes, I used vanilla tin to do it then, too.)

: What post? Did not get here.....

Whoops.  Turned out, I forgot to add the necessary stuff to that post, so it
went out here, but didn't reach the sites where we're still
"moderated."

Here's a copy of the ObHack from that post for those sites that didn't get it:

ObHack:
	Implementing the mandelbrot set (including the complex arithmetic)
in PostScript.	In other words, computing it on the printer instead of the
computer.

ObSocialEngineeringHack:
	Getting my boss to not only permit, but _request_ that I use the
fancy color laser printer to run this program.	Tied the thing up for between
30 minutes and an hour (I left in the middle).	Got a rather cool picture out
of it.

The program is available in my WWW directory:

http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~dilatush/mandel.ps.txt
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~dilatush/complex.ps.txt

Note: I make no warranties about this program.	If you do try to print it,
it will tie up your printer for quite a while.


And since this is, at least to some sites, the repetition of an ObHack, I'll
add a new one:

ObHack:
	Hacking xbiff so I can run it on one machine and have it check to see
if I have mail on another.  I'm not 100% sure this qualifies as a hack, since
xbiff has hooks that seem to be designed to do just that sort of thing.
	What I did was, made a shell script that fingers me on the target
machine.  It then filters the output through 'head' and 'tail' to read the
line which, when I have no mail, says "No new mail."	If the line
is different
it reports (via exit status as described in the xbiff man page) that there's
new mail.  Xbiff has an X resource that can be set to a command to run to
check for mail (rather than looking at the mail file).
	Why do it?  2 main reasons:
	1. It's easier to run it on the machine I log on to, rather than
	bother to log in to the other machine when I probably don't have
	email.
	2. The machine I run xbiff on is shared with fewer people than the
	one I do email on, so I prefer to use resources here rather than there.

	The one big flaw of the script is that it can't tell the difference
between me having mail still sitting in the box, and new mail just arrived;
so it makes xbiff beep repetitively once I have mail.

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