Weak notes - II

Work was pretty hectic this week, and I almost would have ended up sleeping the entire weekend away if not for an unexpected invitation for playing badminton. I somehow still misjudge the height of the shuttle, whenever it is floated up, eventhough in the other phases of the game, I am playing pretty well.

This week I ran into some very useful tools during work. Some of them were new and some of them were new use cases for tools I was already using. I feel like I should dedicate this post to my lord and saviour, jq. Every now and then, I am surprised how many things it can do. This is one of those tools which actually make a huge difference to a developer like me. Recently I realized that for all the bash function I write to automate stuff in my machines, I can actually start returning json return values instead of printing random stuff. This way, I can just parse whatever I want from the caller, and discard the useless stuff. No more tedious reformations of folder path etc.

Another tool is m4. I am still learning how to use this, but I am making do with the basic string replacement it provides me. One could argue, I could have used `sed` instead of a specialized tool for this, but somehow I feel I wont regret investing my time on m4. All templating languages are tied to languages or libraries, but m4 provides me a way to do it through a command line tool.

Another find of this week is shuf. Reading about this lead me into a rabbit hole into coreutils, and I was shocked to see so many unexplored tools like tsort etc. This is going to be a fun week.

Olympics has wrapped up this week. I learnt 2 days back, that "Breaking" has been added as a sport in this olympics. Breaking as in break dancing.! How ridiculous.! But then, what can or cannot be a sport can't be decided by random people like me. My issue is, why is something so subjective considered a sport? I know gymanstics, diving and all those sports are based on subjective scoring, but this one for some reason breaks all reason for me.

Track of the week

I have been a huge fan of Lena raine, mainly because of Celeste. But the minecraft ones just sound very special to me, as the contrast is very apparent. Also, eventhough she is an established artist, I somehow feel happy my niche favourtie artist, makes a mark in a established game.

Video of the week

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-JsBt6p2IM/

I can't embed instagram videos here ! Starts a planned obsolescence explainer and quickly shifts to a surprisingly insightful video about death and its importance in evolution, but near the end quickly shifts to tomfoolery back again. So much within so little time.

Honourable mention: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-Qh9cWScIc/