That's Research?

This story isn't about software, either. The title is the only computer science reference in the whole thing. It reaches no conclusion. It likely does not even make any points that you haven't thought of yourself at some point, though if I'm lucky it hasn't been presented to you before in quite this way. It might even be offensive.

Consider two groups of people. The demographics between these groups are similar in every externally observable way: all ranges of age, all genders, all manners of ethnicity[1], some with good fashion sense and some without, some tall and some short, some bald and some quite hairy. If a member of one of these groups stood in front of you, you would not be able to classify them into either group even after detailed study, but after five minutes of casual conversation it should become clear to which group they belong.

We've been trying to hire a few more programmers to work on the learning tools provisioning service project. We passed over a great many who weren't what we were looking for at all. We had a few come in who were close but just not quite what we were looking for. So we're still looking. It's not going well.

Thanks to a bit of copy-paste from SpringSource Tool Suite and an answer on Stack Overflow, I was able to bash together a little plugin to filter Spring Roo ITD files from Eclipse's Package Explorer and Project Explorer. It's free to use for any purpose as far as I'm concerned, especially because I didn't write any of it. To use it, take the file attached to this story and drop it into eclipse/plugins.

(I probably could have taken the plugin from STS and dropped it into the standard Eclipse but it also has other features that I don't need.)

How do I make an init.d script wait for a startup/shutdown message to appear in a log file, but time out if it takes too long?

tail -f | grep -m 1 should do the trick. There are ways to make the tail -f time out. And (at least in my opinion) the tail should terminate with a broken pipe when the grep stops running, but it doesn't; the tail -f just keeps running.

Though it's likely I'm doing something wrong, I do have a workaround:

#!/bin/dash

(sleep 20 2>/dev/null)&
TIMER=$!

tail -n 0 -f log --pid $TIMER | \
    (R=`grep -cm 1 searchstring`; kill $TIMER 2>/dev/null; exit $R)

RESULT=$?

I've been thinking about how to get a handle on distributed administration and delegated authority for the integration system. It's just something I thought up without much consultation, so take it as what it is: the idle thoughts of someone in IT trying to figure out the business of academic units. And being a typical IT solution, it's based around the data that I can see in existing systems. I'll leave it up to the business to tell me if this makes any sense.