Code is Mandatory

Two of the most useful features on Mac OS X are the clipboard and the command line.

I am forever copying and pasting between applications using the clipboard. Select text in one application, press ⌘C, switch to the other application and then press ⌘V and the selected item appears in the application.

The beauty of the Unix command line is worthy of whole blog by itself. Utilities such as grep, find, sort, uniq, less, tail, head, cut are great.

Imagine being able to use these with the clipboard. You can! That is what the commands pbcopy and pbpaste do

Want to include disk space usage in an email? Open a terminal window and enter the df -H | pbcopy, switch to the email and press ⌘V to paste it in.

Want to take a list of names in an email and sort them? Select the lines, press ⌘C to copy to the clipboard, switch to the terminal window and enter pbpaste | sort | pbcopy. Then switch back to the email and pres ⌘V to paste in the sorted lines from the clipboard into the document.

Windows users need not fear. Install Cygwin and the putclip and getclip commands, part of utilities, and you can achieve the same effect.

Orientation. The last time I participated in a first year orientation was way back in 1977. This year, I am doing a couple of design papers at the design school at Victoria University. So I took a couple of hours today to attend orientation.

Some first impressions. Obviously everyone is young. As a work colleague said, it is possible that some of the students could be children of the students I taught back in 1982!! A sheet passed around requiring students to fill in their names and birth dates confirmed this. All were born around 1986 with one born in 1981.

Lots of computers, but all running Windows 2000. The Website seems to be serving ASP pages. No sign of any Apple computers. Maybe I am not looking hard enough <grin>

I couldn’t agree more with /\ndy’s Weblog about people finding workarounds to cumbersome, bureaucratic systems. As he concludes

The solution, of course, is to align the “official” system more closely with the needs of the people.

I like to Think Outside In. What is customer’s real problem and how can you help solve it? How can we do it without forcing our systems, processes or inefficiencies on them?