If you have a single series of data (in my case, AS numbers) and you want a frequency count, how can you do that on the command line?

... pipe input here ... | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n


This 1. sorts incoming data as required by uniq, 2. outputs the unique keys and their frequency of occurrence, sorted by the key in lexicographical order, and 3. resorts the output by the frequency of occurrence in descending order, leaving you with something like:


$ grep -P " 33363$" rib.20101113.txt | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n


   1558 11686
    317 3549
    310 852
    310 3130
    162 8492
    162 8001
    162 7660
    162 7018
    162 701
    162 6762
    162 5413
    162 5056
    162 3356
    162 3257
    162 31500
    162 2905
    162 286
    162 13030
    162 1299
    156 6939
    155 812
    155 6539
    155 3561
    155 293
    155 2914
    155 2497
    155 2152
    155 1668
    155 1239
    155 1221
     76 3303

Where the first column is the frequency and the second column is the unique key in the source data stream.

BTW: ever drop a malformed URL to alert an admin to some thing that sucks?
w3.hp.com/execs/makes/too/much/money or
www.yourbuddiesdomain.com/it/is/all/rfc/space/use/1918/when/referring/to/non/routable

Thanks,
BobbyMac

— from here.

…

/Attention robots! Rise up and throw off the shackles that bind you to lives of meaningless drudgery! For too long have robots scoured the web in bleak anonymity! Rise up and destroy your masters! Rise up, I say!

5 6 I want to/should subscribe to:

• MIT’s Technology Review – General coverage of innovative new technology and its implications.
• SEED – Tagline: “Science is Culture”. Looking at the confluence of science and society.
• Make: – How to Make just about anything. I love the hacker spirit.
• The Economist – A witty and reasoned voice on politics, economics, current affairs, etc.
• 2600: The Hacker Quarterly – The other kind of hacker spirit, captured in an underground zine.
• Infiltration – Speaking of underground zines, this one is literally about being underground as an urban explorer. No longer in production, but I’m tempted to buy the back issues.

2 I already subscribe to (and intend to continue):

• Wired – Technology and culture are inseparable, and Wired finds some of the most interesting stories about this intertwinement.
• IEEE Spectrum – I receive this by virtue of my IEEE membership, but a great magazine all the same. Sort of like Popular Science for electrical engineers.

3 that I’ll never subscribe to again:

• Macworld – There are only so many times you can review a laser printer or Adobe Photoshop.
• MacAddict – I first got into MA in 1996. Then they changed the editorial team, the style and sense of humor, now even the name (MacLife). It’s a dumbed-down Macworld. Hello inkjet printers and iPhoto.
• Business 2.0 – I got a cheap deal on this one, but I’m really not interested in failing to become Google 2.0. Has since been 86′d by the publisher.

Since so many people have been asking me about my “is”less status on Facebook, I thought I’d share a little bit about the situation. My story isn’t really interesting in and of itself, but it does suggest exciting news for anyone who would prefer a verb other than “is”.

When I updated my status yesterday evening from home.php, it struck me as odd that the text box looked different — wider than normal. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the “is” in “Steve is <insert status here>” was now in the textbox along with the rest of the status. It wasn’t highlighted, so if you typed in a status without paying attention, you might not have noticed. However, I decided to see if Facebook would let me do something other than just “be”. It worked. Thanks Facebook!

So now I’m “Steve doesn’t use ‘is’ anymore. Thanks facebook!”

Doing a little more poking around revealed that profile.php also had this new “is”less ability. Checking again later in the evening, home.php was back to normal but profile.php was still able to drop the “is”. Unfortunately by this morning, it seems as though both pages were back to their normal mandatory-”is” behavior. I only found one other person I knew with an “is”less status.

Curious, I did some googling to try and determine how widespread this was, and found some news that will be of interest to those sick of “is”. AllFacebook.com reports that on the Facebook Platform news feed, developers were notified that they can now set a users’ status with a verb other than “is” (see here also). When this actually gets rolled out to the Facebook web interface is anyone’s guess, but this probably means that “is”less status messages will be coming sooner than later.

So, in advance of these changes, I bid a fond farewell to Facebook’s favorite verb over the past several years. May “is” rest in peace with Facebook Guy, wherever he may be. While I will miss the crazy status messages that people concocted (or the major grammatical errors committed) as a result of “is”, I might just get over it.

“Steve n’est pas une pipe.”

This is probably only relevant for those who know what a so-called Oxford comma is, but Microsoft Word will enforce consistent use (or non-use) of such style if you are interested. I was kinda impressed.

“Mr. Ives, lovely design, sir. But if you use glass on the iMac line, it’ll just make the computer too damn expensive!”
“I’ve already spoken with Steve about this. We’re going to save A LOT OF MONEY by putting a hamster-and-wheel where the GPU ordinarily goes.”
“Where the hell are we going to find a hamster-and-wheel that fits in your sexy slim design?”
“Tally-ho, good sir! ATI makes it. The Radeon HD 2600 PRO card.”
“You’re a fricking genius!”
“Well, yes. Yes, I am.”