David Dakota Blair

Table of Contents

  1. About
  2. Projects
  3. Fun bash one liners
  4. Readings:

About

This is Dakota's tilde.club page. It is meant to be a fun exploration of the web as it could be with a little more semantic markup, separation of concerns and ASCII art of course. Look ma, no <div />s! If you are interested in how it's done you can check out the repo on github. Thanks to TAAG for all the text art fonts and inspiration. Many thanks to ~ben and ~deepend for keeping the lights on. Thanks to Tom 7 for being generally awesome and inspirational. Finally, thanks to Jankenpopp and crew for Windows 93, where I originally discovered tilde.club (and so much more) in the first place.

About Dakota

I'm just a guy with a much greater than average like of mathematics. I grew up in Texas, finished my PhD in mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center, married my incredible wife Abigail Myers (Two time Jeopardy! Champion, NYC Marathon finisher, NaNoWriMo author, National Board Certified teacher, the list goes on.) and welcomed our beautiful daughter Junia to the world. I now work as a software engineer, but web technologies and the original hopeful promise of the internet have been dear to my heart for most of my life which might explain why I would make a silly page like this in my spare time. After all, a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest kin.

I like programming concepts and the languages that implement them, and I think that is neatly summed up in this haiku: 

   Python and SQL:
     Functional, declarative
       The fine tools of thought.

Links

I have other websites on the internet that serve different purposes, and here are some links to them:

Preferences

Projects

These projects are my latest attempts at advancing the shared quest to build awesome web pages. I hope you find them entertaining, if not useful. If you do find them useful, or have suggestions to make them better, please pass them along to me!

The Periodic Table
This project shows a familiar friend in a new light. It presents the familiar periodic table as a spatial object, invoking the method of loci. I hope it serves as an aid to learn more basic facts about these chemical elements.
Lambdabot on tilde.chat
Lambdabot is a development tool and advanced IRC bot. I am running an instance on IRC as a way to run some Haskell and learn a bit more about functional programming. Let me know if you want lambdabot to join your room.

Fun bash one liners

Remove all tab characters
tr -d '\t'
Find lines containing literal tabs
awk '/\t/'
grep -P
Join files with a tab separator
pr -Jmt file1 file2
paste file1 file2
Join files with a tab separator on a common field
join -t $'\t' file1 file2
A simple awk for isolating columns
awk '{print $2}'
Redirect stderr to stdout for use in pipelines
cat -c 2>&1 >/dev/null | sed 's/./☃/g'
Simple system benchmarks
yes | sed '=' | sed '/y/d'
time seq -n 1e6
Print a few random numbers
od -d < /dev/random | awk '{ print $2 }' | head
What shell am I using?
lsof -p $$
See which processes are listening to a $PORT
netstat -pntl | grep $PORT # linux
lsof -nP -iTCP:$PORT | grep LISTEN # os x
Useful flags for rsync
rsync -h --progress --stats --verbose
Recover files from a slightly corrupted tar archive
cpio -ivd -H tar < file.tar
{{readings}}