Dammit Jim!

I just added a new book to the Darwin du Jour site. A Naturalist’s Voyage Round The World (also known as Voyage of the Beagle) is Darwin’s log of his travels on the H.M.S. Beagle. I just started reading it myself but it looks like a pretty interesting look at the history of the regions, the old methods of biology and, of course, how Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection. Project Gutenberg again provided the base text (html in this case) although I had to do a bit of conversion to make it look decent.

I’ve been meaning to read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species for quite a while. Unfortunately, I’m always busy. I came across The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci RSS which seemed nice although it’s a little unfulfilling to read a sketchbook in plain text. This got me thinking that that would be a nice way to read other books. Project Gutenberg has Origin of the Species (and many other books) available for free download. I thought converting this text into RSS might provide a nice way to read books a bit at a time. Since I just got the fancy new sherrillmix.com domain name I thought I could practice a little php and make something useful for myself and possibly for others. So if you’ve never read The Origin of Species and want to have an educational RSS feed please visit Darwin du Jour.

I’m writing this post for Xiaofen, my girlfriend. She has the cooking skills but being a second language English speaker, her writing would be even harder to read than mine. Today she cooked bacon shrimp fried rice and we thought we’d post the recipe.

I guess this is obvious to most people but it took me quite a while to dig it out on the internet. I wanted my bash script to be able to read from standard input like cat sourcefile.txt|bash myscript.bash. It turns out the standard input can be read from /dev/stdin. So if I wanted to sort the standard input, myscript.bash would look like: sort /dev/stdin

I think this is probably basic UNIX knowledge but I’m not a programmer.