non-random ramble

Been doing quite a bit of manipulating LaTeX files on the command line recently, and have a very sweet little command for searching for text in multiple files:

grep -r Hoffman */*.tex | less +/Hoffman

Where “Hoffman” is the search term which can of course be any regular expression.

The “less” command has a very convenient argument “+” which allows you to pass a search term in and will automatically highlight it for you.

The -r in grep recurses directories and */*.tex looks for all tex files. the | pipes the result to less.

sweet.

I’ve been reading Dee Hock’s book “The Birth Of The Chaordic Age”. Its pretty cool. I like the idea of emergent organisations. It has a lot of connections to Emergence By Steven Johnson, which i read some years ago. Its one of the factors that swayed me into starting my MsC, that and Wolframs’ book.

Basically I like the idea of lots of simple rules or individuals with simple behaviour creating very complex responses and behaviour as a whole which is unexpected. It just feels like the right way to think about things. Its intuitive and it might just help in some way for us to deal with the things that we need to deal with if we would like to be still around on our nice planet in 100 years time.