[wellylug] If you are stuck for ideas for a lightning talk session

[Brent Wood]

And a wellylug equivalent to the perlmongers solution by Grant for selecting a random package on a Debian based Linux system:-)


dpkg --get-selections | tail -n `rand -M \`dpkg --get-selections | wc -l\`` | head -1

I figured you should be able to do this with common Linux commands, without resorting to a programming or scripting language.
This is one way...


If I thought about it a bit more I figure awk could probably do this a bit more elegantly, if not even more arcanely!.



Brent


________________________________
 From: Grant McLean <grant at mclean.net.nz>
To: wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz 
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [wellylug] If you are stuck for ideas for a lightning talk session
 

Presumably the WellyLUG session on Monday will take a relaxed approach
to the five minute time limit (as the Perl Mongers did last night) so
the dire warnings in that page can be ignored.

Also, I'm guessing that people with slides will either bring their own
laptop or put them on a web page.  Bringing PDF/OpenOffice/HTML files on
a USB stick could also work.

The suggestion on our page that people might randomly select a Perl
module to talk about could be adapted to "randomly select an OS
package".  For example on a debian-based distro, this 1-liner will
randomly select one of the packages you have installed:

  dpkg --get-selections | \
      perl -E '@p = map { s/\s.*//r } <>; say $p[rand(+ at p)]'

See you Monday.

Cheers
Grant



On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 15:14 +1300, Hugh Davenport wrote:
> Graciously stolen from Wellington Perl Mongers, who had a
> lightning session last night.
> 
> http://wellington.pm.org/lightning_talks.html
> 
> I shall add this to the WellyLUG page at some point.
> 
> Let me know if you get a spark of ideas for a talk next monday!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Hugh
> 
> 



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