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Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
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Fri, 15 Apr 2005

Use the laser for good - 23:54
So many people will have seen this story about Laser Controlled Zombie Flies (I got the link from BoingBoing), which of course has people saying things like "I, for one, welcome our remote-controlled headless zombie fly overlords."

Of course, when, some time later today I was reading Bruce Schneier's writeup on the difficulties involved with hacking the papal election system and I came across the following line

I read that the Vatican is worried about laser microphones, as there are windows near the chapel's roof.

it had me thinking, yeah thats right, and you probably do not want the papal election to be hacked by headless, laser remote-controlled catholic cardinals.

[/amusing] link

Good ol' stat has been around a while - 21:22
In order to take my mind of other stuff while eating dinner, I took up the challenge presented by Stewart as commented on by Mikal, has the command line utility stat been around for a while in debian?

So I do not have any of my machines still running buzz or rex these days, so I can not simply log in and have a look. I had a look around, as noticed by Stewart stat is in the coreutils package now days, which is part of base. Looking back through some archived debian distributions I can find some traces. In the current sid coreutils changelog.Debian the first entry is from 2002 stating it is a combination of the old base packages textutils, fileutils and shellutils. Those older packages do not appear to contain it, however looking at a Contents file from 2.0 (hamm) (released in 1998 AFAIR) there is a stat program, in the utils section rather than base, in a package named stat.

So it looks like stat has been available for a fairly long while in debian, I also suspect it has been in debian since that time, and in coreutils since the package was created, in the changelog for coreutils the first mention of stat is.

- stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b

Which is dated Mar 2003, as it is not a message along the lines of adding stat to package, I think it has been around for a while and in base at least since 2002. I say, I think, as I can not summon the effort required to track the history of the command in debian simply to suggest Stewart may be being lazy, after all I am lazy too.

[/comp/linux] link

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