Following the example of the Saviour may sometimes seem a daunting prospect, with the whole “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) and all. Fortunately we can take it one thing at a time.

I appreciate that in Alma’s sermon on the Seed of Faith, where he says “Now, we will compare the word unto a seed” (Alma 32:28), and after “ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow” (Alma 32:33), he asks “And now, behold, is your knowledge perfect?” (Alma 32:34) and gives a qualified answer: “Yea, your knowledge is perfect in that thing” (Alma 32:34; emphasis added). Our knowledge is not, and indeed need not yet be, perfect in all things.

This reminds me of the man born blind who after being healed by Jesus was questioned by the Pharisees and answered:

“Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” (John 9:25)

And the teaching of Isaiah:

“For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little” (Isaiah 28:10).

stdout is nice–it let’s you see what’s going on. But what if you want to see what’s going on and also do something else with the same output.

tee is useful for redirecting stdout to a file, but what if you want to send the same output to another command too, like mail?

You disguise the command as a file, that’s what. Through process substitution you can say things like

echo "hello world" | tee >(mail -s "notice")

and have the message go to stdout and your mail program. You can chain process substitutions to do as many different things with the same output as you want.

Process substitution is supported in bash and friends, but not, as far as I can see, in sh.

Personal Package Archives make it easy for anyone to make software available through the apt system without the need to be accepted into the official repository. You can simply create a PPA and other people can add, or subscribe to them. Updates pushed to a PPA show up in users Update Managers alongside all of the official updates. Ubuntu 9.10 makes PPAs easier than ever before. To add the PPA for Ubuntu Chromium – Dev Channel, just say

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/dev

A few PPAs I like are

• PPA for Ubuntu Chromium – Dev Channel
• PPA for Shutter Team