Mr Peabody and Sherman …. history rocks !

 

Just finished watching the DreamWorks animation movie Mr Peabody and Sherman. For once, it is a fun ride through history, and the movie rocks ! The story of the highly intelligent dog adopting a orphan boy was a little disturbing at first. But the story rewinds through various important points in recorded human history, and all the characters , the puns and modern references add oodles of fun. It was also nice to see how far humans have travelled from ancient Egypt to present time.

Favourite parts? : Agamemmon: “I did not see that coming !”. Beethoven playing the dance video game…and “hey Einstein..cross the road !”

Cosmos - This journey is awesome !

 

Today I finally started watching the new Cosmos series, downloaded from the net. The original Cosmos TV programmes had inspired and motivated me during my own school days. I had watched re-runs of the programme on regional channels, and then was able to watch the series on youtube. I was sure it was the greatest piece of scientific programming there was, and that no other show could beat it, in terms of sheer grandeur, and scientific temper.

Thankfully, I was mistaken. The new Cosmos reboot has taken the show to the next level. Astronomer Neil Dygrasse Tyson is as good as Carl Sagan, if not better. Who else to guide you on the journey through the Cosmos than the student of Carl Sagan himself ?

 

The series has also triggered viewer’s interest in Science again. Take a look at Wikipedia Stats for Fraunjoffer, interest in this page peaked just after his episode on light was telecast.

10 Fun Linux Commands

 

One can never say it enough: the terminal is a very powerful tool, and is probably the most interesting part in Unix. Among the plethora of useful commands and scripts that you can use, some seem less practical, if not completely useless. I’ve selected for you a couple of commands that are useless because they are funny, but not funny because they are useless (or maybe the other way around for some). If you are searching forASCII art, random math curiosities, or various (in)utilities, this is the best of the useless.

1. cal

Few people know this, but any Unix system comes with a built-in calendar. To access it, you can simply type:

This will display the current month. However, you can select the precise year that you want as an argument, and even the month. And to be fully useless, the option “-j” displays Julian days (the number of days from January 1). To sum up:

2. time cat

You can use this command as a built-in timer. It will run in the background until you stop it, and will then report the time elapsed between the start and the end of its process. As useful as it may seems, it is actually quite unpractical because you cannot check its value unless you stop it. I suppose it can become handy in a very specific situation but I have trouble imagining which one exactly. To launch just type:

and to kill, use the combination “Ctrl+c”

3. yes

A very peculiar command with only one ability: repeating a string until its process is killed. Again, I don’t picture where it can be useful, but who knows? The syntax is straightforward:

4. rev

This command is for reversing any input (as its name suggests). When I say reverse, it means that if the input is “Linux”, the output will be “xuniL”. Pretty strange, I know.

You will enter an interactive mode. You can quit it by using the shortcut “Ctrl+c”. But rev can also work to reverse an entire file with

5. factor

It’s time to do some Maths. Let’s begin easy with the command factor which can decompose a given number into prime factors:

factor [number to decompose]

I haven’t tested the limits of this command yet, but it seems pretty powerful. As a side note, prime numbers and the decomposition into prime factors is actually the basis for modern cryptography and Internet security. Knowing a little bit about them is always interesting. If you want to learn more, take a look at the RSA encryption.

6. Multiplication Tables

This is actually more a script than a command but it is impossible to ignore it when talking about funny stuff you can do in a console. By using

for i in {1..9}; do for j in $(seq 1 $i); do echo -ne $i×$j=$((i*j))\\t;done; echo;done

The terminal will display the multiplication table, nicely ordered in columns. Incredibly useless, and pretty long to remember, but you have to admit that it looks good.

7. PI

A bit more complex, you can calculate an approximation of pi through commands using

seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l

This combination of commands is a little bit harder to understand, but if you really want to know, seqgenerates the sequence of 4/1, 4/3, 4/4 until 4/99999 (without 4/2), paste merges these lines using a delimiter, and bc does the final approximation using a math library.

8. figlet

Figlet is a command for those who love to write in ASCII art. It greatly simplifies this task as it automatically transforms any given string. It comes with a bunch of fonts, by default at /usr/share/figlet/fonts/, and you can of course add yours.

figlet [-f path to the font] [string]

Note: You will need to install “figlet” before you can use this command.

9. cowsay

cosway is very famous in the Linux world, but this command is not always present by default in every distribution. In Ubuntu, install it with the command:

sudo apt-get install cowsay

It displays a cow in ASCII art saying whatever string you want. It comes with a couple of other characters and you can add your own. The default directory for them is /usr/share/cows/. The syntax is:

cowsay [-f path of another character] [string for the cow]

10. fortune

fortune displays a random sentence, in the same spirit as fortune cookies. It is not always installed by default so you may want to add it. In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install fortune

It comes with a very handy option: “-s” for short, which will limit to fortunes composed of one sentence or less.

Combinations

The fun part is now to combine the previous commands for a funnier result. A famous combination is fortune and cowsay, which creates a cow in ASCII art telling you a random fortune:

My personal favorite is a random character from cowsay telling you a random short fortune:

cowsay -f "$(ls /usr/share/cows/ | sort -R | head -1)" "$(fortune -s)"

To explain briefly, it is the same as earlier: a random fortune is pushed into cowsay, but I added the option “-f” for selecting a character. The path given is a combination of listing the files from within the default directory for the characters, random sorting of this list, and keeping only the first line.

But I suppose that you could also do something like

in order to repeat a piece of ASCII art, or even

cowsay "$(seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l)"

to have a cow telling you the approximation of pi.

As always when exploring the console, there are a lot of things that can be done (even if doing them seems very useless).

7th Day - Good Thriller

 

Watched the new Malayalam Movie 7th Day at a Multiplex in Bangalore. The media has been going on and on about Prithviraj playing a cop’s role again. You will be pleasantly surprised when you watch the final suspense revealed at the climax of the movie.

There are  lots of twists and surprises in the story. The cast is full of new comers, all of them with little acting experience. But for a change, it was good to see that everyone has done a good job when it came to playing their roles on screen.

The screenplay is good. The direction, better. But I felt the real hero of the movie was the cinematorgraphy, by Sujith Vaasudev. The camera moves in ways different from what you usually expect. There is a lot of aesthetically captured scenes, and lots of slow motion captures as well. I specially liked the scenes on top of the waterfall, during the actual crime was in progress.

Slick packaging. And good background music & score to accompany. This movie stands out.

Wolf of Wall Street - Worst movie I watched in 2014

 

Yesterday,  I watched the torrent DVD rip of the Oscar nominated movie – The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. And by far, this is the worst movie I sat down for this year.

Maybe it was because I did not agree with the morality of the story depicted. Or maybe it was the huge amount of profanity and nudity shown on screen. But nothing positive stood out.

Crap story.

Crap acting.

Crap direction.

Leo was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for this movie ? For what ? All he does is grab nude girls and mouth profanity. And he was not even playing a mafia or drug lord. Any Hollywood A-lister idiot could have done that.

Thank God Leo did not win Best Actor , and Martin did not win Best director for this movie. Cause they are not worth it. The whole thing is one long ad for hookers and drugs.

 

 

I still think Leo’s best acting, was in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. And I still watch Martin’s Departed.