Regular Expressions

From time to time I just really fall in love with Unix (well, Linux for you purists)…  In windows it can be very difficult to get a quantity.  A click here, a click there, install update, reboot…  Then well at least 5 more clicks.  Well, Unix to the rescue.  The power comes from the ability to combine several different small programs in ways that the original programmer had not even thought of to get a result.  Case in point…

egrep ‘.*(nan|bweight.*[^.]).*’ analysis_trigger_nocuts.out | egrep -v ‘[.]‘ | uniq -c | awk ‘{ print $1; }’ | grep 2 | wc -l

Here I needed to know how many events in my analysis had returned two “nan”’s (one for each jet).  I will not go into detail about what the above line really does, I just dont have time for that right now, but sufice it to say the answer is 484.  Add that to the number of events that gave me a zero weight for my btagging and then you have 1794…  The total number of nan lines in my output.  So, everything adds up.  That is nice.  The point is this…  The power of unix comes not from huge programs that try to do everything, but from a combination of seemingly small programs that do small tasks well.  Seems like almost anything can be done with combinations if grep, egrep, awk, sed, wc, uniq, sort, and cut…

Dear World….

Today I have been though a gauntlent of dissapointment.  I have received a email from my advisor last week telling me that she wants me to be on my own more and to start looking for a job.  Now, this is a good thing since that means that she is starting to think that I am getting ready for the “real world”.  I have been trying to get stuff to her for the past week and a half and nothing is working correctly.  When I submit jobs to the batch queue’s to get results they just crash.  And on top of that I can not seem to get the corretions into my Monte Carlo all the way due to these batch issues.  Ok, so besides some other dissapointing news I thought that I had this batch issue solved where I come in this morning and find out that I had submitted with the wrong config file last night.  Worthless computing time wasted.  Now I have to resubmit but the computers at the experiment are being upgraded so the batch queue’s are offline.  Now to supliment this…  I have been needing to get some code together to make a plot for my work.  I have been putting it off since it was a hastle.  The other day I finally got around to getting this code written and it was awsome.  It did everything I needed it to, had cross-checks in the code, and the plot was great looking.  Today in an effort to back it up I accedentally removed it!  Now I must start over from scratch.  Now I know that it was only about 400 lines of code but…  Now on top of all this I need to be editing a paper.  I have been trying to get to it but things keep getting in my way.  For one I can not update the efficencies untill I have the corrections in the Monte Carlo (which I am waiting on batch jobs to be available again since they are required to get this to work.)

I dunno World…  Guess I just needed somebody to rant to.  Now to settle down and recover from my morning…  Possibly a trip downtown would help me to recover…

Quarter thiefs…..

Ok, as young growing adults out of the home we have from time to time the lovable task of doing laundry.  Now, I know that there are some that find this to be a fun and exciting task (you are all weird), for me it really is the last thing that I want to be doing.  My post here is not really about the act of doing laundry, but what one has to go though to get it done….  Putting quarters in a machine.  In this day and age it is really rare for me to carry cash, and an even less probability that I will be walking around with the eleven quarters it takes to wash and dry a load of laundry at my apartment complex.  Now, I really am not bent out of shape about the money it is just that I have to have quarters.  Can the companies just not get with the times.  I would be totally cool with switching to laundry tokens and have a token exchanger avail so that I could put 1/5/10 dollar bills into to get the tokens.  Or even better just swipe my credit card and have it issue me x number of tokens.  Really.  This definitely falls into the category of rant.  Lets get on the ball Mr laundry machine coin thief decider person.   (Ok, I think that is out of my system now P-) )…

Taco Hell….. (ohh, I ment Bell)

Today, I will write to you the reader with a new drive, a rejuvenation of desire to spread the silly things that happen to me on a daily basis.  To who do I owe this burst of energy to…  Stacie, the always bubbly and always fun to talk to girl that you wish you had more time with.  So many things have happened since my last posting.  Obviously too many to really talk about.  Now, just in case you thought this post was going nowhere…(and quickly)…  I will turn this around and set the stage at Lawrence’s premier late night restaurant, Taco Hell…  After I had met with some friends for the evening I decided to make a stop at the Taco Bell to grab some late night grub.  If you thought that your evening was entertaining before your stopped at the border, then you have a whole new surprise coming your way.  I have found that sitting in the drive though lane in a college town at 2:00 am in the morning always has its moment where you think to yourself, “Why would he do that…” or more common “What an idiot…”  So, after about 5 minutes in line a very large black pickup truck decided it was time to get out of there and proceeded to drive around the other cars to leave.  What the driver failed to do was realize that truck was not going to fit around all the cars and of course clipped the front end of the car making the order at the super wicked cool display that always shows what you ordered, but not necessarily what you will get.  The person making the order immediately got out of his car to confront the other driver, in a non-aggressive fashion of course, and was welcomed with a driver side window being rolled up as fast as possible.  This is where things started to get a little out of hand.  The guy opens the driver side truck door in an effort to further confront the driver.  I mean wow…  To just open the door of the other vehicle.  I could have sworn that there was going to be a confrontation ending in some form of bloodshed.  Well, at this point the ruck driver pulled away and left nothing behind but an aggravated and taken advantage of soul.

Now being the person that I am, I try to place myself in the other person’s shoes (usually cause they have better shoes, seriously, I need to glue the toe on my Vans back before it gets even worse).  When I do this I normally see some sort of justification for the action, but not this time.  I will go ahead a make the guess that the driver of the truck (who was female) was probably drunk and just could not handle a confrontation with the police, hence the hit and run.  I really hope that somebody got the plate of the truck.  It really sucks when your car is damaged and there is no way to get it fixed (this happened to me years ago in the University of Kansas parking lot).  Well, Mr Angry Damaged Car still kicking tires person, I feel for you.  I wish that I could do more to help but I think this is decidedly out of my hands.  If you were that driver, and you end up reading this post then let me know and I will buy you a drink.

Ok, so what can we all take away from this tale…  When bored and it is 2:00 am, just make a run for the border, there is always drama to be seen in the drive though….   (and yes one night I did see somebody get out of one vehicle in line, walk to another on in line and then piss on the tire.  Again, could have swore that was going to end up with blood there somewhere)…