Posts Tagged ‘kill’

7 Software Utilities I Need for Real Life

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We as humans have designed software to make our lives easier. My life is so ingrained in software that sometimes I find myself wanting to just type a simple command to make things easier myself. In fact, some days I even know what utilities to use and exactly how I would script common tasks in my life. Here are a few of the utilities I’ve wanted to use for the physical world:

grep – I’d be a rich man if I had a quarter for every time I wished I could do something like this in the physical world: ‘grep -R car_keys /home’. Unfortunately, this would probably allow me to be even more unorganized since I could just search for what I need rather than actually organize things so they are easy to find.

rsync – I’ve always wanted to be able to take a set of knowledge that someone has and just copy it over to me. Using rsync, I could easily transfer all data or a set of data from someone else’s brain to mine. But, alas we couldn’t be that lucky.

Xgrid – Whenever a task is too large for me to comprehend or accomplish in a given amount of time I really wish I could just hand it off automagically like Apple’s Xgrid. Delegating tasks tends to be a pain. You have to transfer the information (which we just discussed) and then give an explanation on how to accomplish the task. Using Xgrid, I could just hand off tasks (this would’ve been useful in college) and get the results back.

snapshots – We’ve all been there. We think “wow, that wasn’t my brightest moment”. It’s times like this where I wish I could just fall back to a point in time. We can make volume snapshots or virtual machine snapshots, mess up a machine beyond repair, and fall back to a previous running state. This would have been especially helpful that time that I tried closing that garage door by putting my fingers between the panels and pulling down. Doh!

rm – The human brain remembers a lot of things (though it seems not the things we want it to). Some days I’d like to be able to just wipe bad memories from my mind using rm.

kill – Don’t worry, I’m not looking to kill anyone. What I really need is a way to kill off processes. You know, when you’re lying in bed at night and you just can’t stop thinking about that latest article on whatan00b.com? Wouldn’t it be nice to just to just kill off the process? I know I need that some days.

SSH – Some days I know exactly what I forgot to do or want to preheat the oven on my way home or just change my laundry while I’m at work. SSH would be perfect for that, but sadly enough, no such luck. (note: The oven thing would actually be possible, though a little bit ridiculous at this point.)

Software running in the human world would definitely be helpful and help me accomplish a lot more in a day. What’s really sad is when I know exactly what command to use.. Now, I need to get back to grepping searching for my keys.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2008