Re: improvement idea of man page of strfile
another idea: 3 A Chinese poem in Tang-dynasty style is very short, fitting in 4 lines. Some people find getting familiar with all famous 300 such poem written in Tang-dynasty a good way to use up brain-power of the days. They can display random one of them on login or use a random one as desktop background. In fact, there are already public-published fortune data files collecting them. This one I didn't try. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
improvement idea of man page of strfile
Original text: OTHER USES What can you do with this besides printing sarcastic and obscene mes- sages to the screens of lusers at login or logout? There are some other possibilities. 1 Include strfile.h into a news reading/posting program, to gener- ate random signatures. Tin(1) does something similar, in a much more complex manner. 2 Include it in a game. While strfile doesn't support 'fields' or 'records', there's no reason that the text strings can't be con- sistent: first line, a die roll; second line, a score; third and subsequent lines, a text message. 3 Use it to store your address book. Hell, some of the guys I know would be as well off using it to decide who to call on Fri- day nights (and for some, it wouldn't matter whether there were phone numbers in it or not). 4 Use it in 'lottery' situations. If you're an ISP, write a script to store login names and GECOS from /etc/passwd in str- file format, write another to send 'congratulations, you've won' to the lucky login selected. The prize might be a month's free service, or if you're AOL, a month free on a real service provider. My improvement ideas: 5 Those who study a foreign language may find it useful to have a word-bank that shows sentences you want to understand better by reading them randomly and include in shell start script. Maybe you can start by picking your favorite novel from wikiquotes and convert the quotes into a format acceptable for strfile, and enjoy one quote every time opening a terminal. 6 Tip-of-the-day for message to show when user started your application. 7 A website of environmental protection can show a tip how to do things with least harm to the environment for every visitor, which simply invoke fortune on every page request, e.g. by using SSI. I know these things work well because I implemented all of use 5, 6 and 7. But being an infrequent participate of OSS I don't know how to contribute this information back to the author / maintainer of the manual (not mentioned in the manual itself). I also worry improving something that hasn't been changed for 10 years could be difficult because nobody wish to move them. What should I do or who should I contact to let them decide if they include my idea in their manual as well? In fact I think the 4th lottery idea isn't better than any of 5, 6, 7 because it is not a full use of strfile, which can produce random text repeatedly (in case of 4, random text is only needed as many time as you decide to give price to someone). And is the change going to spread to other systems that uses strfile? e.g. many Linux distributions contain the strfile manual from BSD distributions. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: improvement idea of man page of strfile
--- On Thu, 10/30/08, Zhang Weiwu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Zhang Weiwu [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: improvement idea of man page of strfile To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Date: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 10:47 AM Original text: OTHER USES What can you do with this besides printing sarcastic and obscene mes- sages to the screens of lusers at login or logout? There are some other possibilities. 1 Include strfile.h into a news reading/posting program, to gener- ate random signatures. Tin(1) does something similar, in a much more complex manner. 2 Include it in a game. While strfile doesn't support 'fields' or 'records', there's no reason that the text strings can't be con- sistent: first line, a die roll; second line, a score; third and subsequent lines, a text message. 3 Use it to store your address book. Hell, some of the guys I know would be as well off using it to decide who to call on Fri- day nights (and for some, it wouldn't matter whether there were phone numbers in it or not). 4 Use it in 'lottery' situations. If you're an ISP, write a script to store login names and GECOS from /etc/passwd in str- file format, write another to send 'congratulations, you've won' to the lucky login selected. The prize might be a month's free service, or if you're AOL, a month free on a real service provider. Erm, I don't see this text in strfile(8) on RELENG_7 which is reasonably recent. Where did you get your man page from? - mdh ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: improvement idea of man page of strfile
mdh wrote: Erm, I don't see this text in strfile(8) on RELENG_7 which is reasonably recent. Where did you get your man page from? - mdh Hi. Sorry, you are right. This text does not exist in FreeBSD. I have a freeBSD notebook and a Gentoo Linux notebook. I found this text by using the Gentoo Linux notebook in bed, the manual page says it is from the 4th BSD distribution. It was in winter too cold to get my FreeBSD notebook to verify this, and I assumed it must be inhered as it is derived from 4th BSD more directly than Linux (which only borrows). Sorry for posting in the wrong list. I will start a search on the origin for this different manual page. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
