No system is an island - Windows tips and tricks for all.

It is funny that sometimes stuff you try to find is right in front of you where you have not looked at all.

Back when I used to play GTA:Vice City a lot in 2003/2004,there was always this song I heard during the game which I wanted to download but I wasn't fully aware of the lyrics as well as the artist and after a while it slipped out of my mortal mind to search for the song deeply.
Today in 2008,I decided to listen to only the songs that I hadn't listened at all from the 80s greatest hits albums and the song was right there.

It is by a band called A flock of seagulls and the song is - I ran so far away which was released in October 1982.

Typical 80s style beat music and video(futuristic costumes/sets like Gary Numan in Cars),guitars go from low to high and back to low with a nice solo and lyrics that are repetitive.

Peace.

I am being very irregular in my blog posts here.Travel and other activities like soul searching are taking most of my time.
Recently I bought a book called The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle which dwells on topics of spiritualism and soul searching.Good read and the author writes in a question answer format about various stuff.

Anyway,here is an extremely simple ping shell script which uses packet count as a fixed number and only one argument which is the target.I did this because ping in *nix shell generates infinite replies(like a ping -t in Windoze)and I didnt want to do a packet count on ping or a ctrl-c everytime to break the response.

anandparekh@hellsbells:~$ cat ping
#!/bin/sh -

# Ping with 7 packets and 1 target
ping -c 7 $1

anandparekh@hellsbells:~$chmod +r ping

anandparekh@hellsbells:~$ ./ping timesofindia.com
PING timesofindia.com (203.199.93.69) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=40.2 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=36.5 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=31.0 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=30.4 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=5 ttl=117 time=35.7 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=30.4 ms
64 bytes from www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com (203.199.93.69): icmp_seq=5 ttl=117 time=35.7 ms


--- timesofindia.com ping statistics ---
7 packets transmitted, 7 received, 0% packet loss, time 6001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 30.492/35.095/40.263/3.118 ms


Or if you dont want to make a script like this,simply alias ping as ping -c $1 in your profile :) ...


Peace.