The Empirical Manifesto

drax0r is gone. My hetero-lifemate of 10-years has quit, and moved on. Not that I blame him, or that I haven't done the same to him. Not once, not twice, but three times. So I really don't have a leg to stand on. And even though our hours sometimes varied so wildly that we'd go days without seeing each other, it just feels different. Being here, knowing his either/or frumpy/jovial visage won't be walking down the hall to join me.

I mean, its not as if we don't live 4.3 miles apart in the same small town and still get together to work on all the other projects we have together. There's just something final about him no longer being here. And it feels wrong.

I met drax0r after we'd moved from Lewisville in 1999 to make McKinney the region's Glass House. We got along well enough, and I had him over to the house a couple of times for weekend LAN-parties, but it wasn't until we were both sent to Andover, Massachusetts for several months that we became fast friends. The rest, as they say, is history.

Godspeed, tiny dancer.

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I've never been exactly competent with sed and awk, which makes script writing one of my least favorite things to do. I always turned to drax0r for his advice since he's equal parts extremely lazy and extremely brilliant. He liked to make all his scripts single-lines using no small portion of pure, unadulterated magic. His script-fu is strong.

But since he's no longer here, I had to come up with something on my own. I couldn't find an inittab in ubuntu, so I couldn't place my vnc_start and vnc_stop scripts there, which meant I needed to put them in the init.d directory. The problem with that is that scripts are called with the syntax 'start' and 'stop' and the simple scripts I had written were simply command line syntax in an executable bash script. In other words, #vnc_start start and #vnc_stop stop would error out. Had I named the scripts any differently initially, I might've missed this easy solution, as it was, it played out wonderfully.

Several years ago I'd written a start-script for Big Brother which simply called:

sudo "/usr/scripts/runbb.sh $*"
sudo "/usr/scripts/runbb.sh $*"

The catch was, runbb.sh was a much more complex script, and would run using the 'start' syntax. In the spirit of drax0r, I simply replaced runbb.sh with 'vnc_' and placed the variable ($) adjacent the underscore. Now when the init script is called with either, it replaces the variable with either 'start' or 'stop' and runs the appropriately named script.

Hopefully, drax0r would be proud.