There are many ways to make a program/script pause for a few seconds. Here are some of my favourites.
Windows
There are two built-in sleep functions you can include in command scripts (.cmd, .bat and PowerShell):
pause
The pause command pauses until you press a key. It has no option to set the period of time. While pausing, it displays the message “Press any key to continue…” (or “Press Enter to continue…:” in PowerShell).
timeout /nobreak /t 20
This will sleep for 20 seconds, displaying a constantly refreshing message saying “Waiting for N seconds”. With the /nobreak option you have to use Ctrl-C to cancel the timer. If you omit the /nobreak then pressing any key will stop the timer.
Unfortunately my younger kid dropped a pair of singing magnets (rattlesnake eggs, oids, whatever you prefer to call them) onto his laptop. The hematite toys are very strong magnets so their brief enounter with the laptop, barely a few millimetres above the hard drive, made a mess of the system. Massive data corruption and potentially a head crash puts the future of the drive in doubt. Attempts to rescue the system are failing, but thanks to the Ultimate Boot Disk many of the personal files might be rescued. A re-installation of the OS followed by intensive drive checking is ahead of me.
To archive the data, simply boot the UBD, activate the wifi, change the root password, connect via WinSCP [click title to read more…]
A picture of the new Google Nexus One was posted on the Web today. If you look carefully at the reflection on the screen, you’ll see that the picture was taken by what appears to be a white iPhone!
At 15:05 UTC on 31 January 2009 I did a Google search, and strangely every site found was marked as being potentially harmful to my computer. Very strange. So I searched for “Google” itself, and even Google came back as harmful!
I checked on another computer and found the same response. The problem disappeared 5 minutes later.
In my company, we have used intranet/Web technology for many years. Since the day we formed, if I remember correctly. As the years rolled on, we have regularly upgraded our internal services but adoption has not been as big as some of us had hoped. Our internal Web site was run by me, and almost all the content was mine. The wiki was read by several, but fewer contributed (mainly us geeks), and pages generally had single ‘owners’. Nobody blogs. There are no mashes.
Recently we have embarked on a revision of our internal services, and the reaction from across the company is significantly positive. It’s still going to be wikis, blogs, tagging, mashups and [click title to read more…]