[Verba] Oct 4 Meeting Summary

[Stuart D. Gathman]

Taylor described how he retrieved his homework files from a disk he had 
just reformatted and installed a new OS over.  In the process, he also 
found some of Mr. Carey's tests and quizes from when the computer 
belonged to Mr. Carey.  Moral of the story - remove, or at least do a 
secure wipe on hard drives before selling or giving them away a computer.

We learned about the use of '>', '<', and '|' characters in both unix 
shell and Windows command prompt.  Many things on unix can be done by 
gluing together simple commands with the shell.  Taylor used 'dd' and 
'fgrep' to recover his files.  We looked at some of the simple commands: 
'cat', 'grep', 'echo', 'find'.  On Windows they are called (from distant 
memory) 'type', 'find', 'echo', n/a.

We reviewed the bin.py program written by Rebecca and Jilian last year, 
and modified it to output balanced ternary instead.  Sigh - the time is 
shorter than last year.