The Deep Thoughts Cookie Cruncher

another "fine" product of UMPC

(or Useless Midnight Programmers' Corpse)

Why??

A while ago, I found a Deep Thoughts cookie cruncher for DOS... This was a neat little trinket, but it just didn't cut it when it came to usefulness. I wanted to be able to have a "Deep Thought of the Day" automatically sent to me, but using a DOS machine, one cannot perform a task unless one was logged in... (How I hate DOS)...

The net result is...

I gleaned all the text out of the Deep Thoughts program I had, and created a NEW cookie cruncher to work with a file so I can run it on one of my UNIX accounts and thus run it from a cron task...

It took me about 8 hours (so far) to get it the way I wanted it, and here it is... So far I have only tried it on these setups...

A Sun workstation running System V Release 4
A DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1 v1.3
A 486DX2/66 running Linux 1.1.89

All other machines SHOULD be able to use the program as the code is ANSI C (I think). I compiled with GCC on all machines, and also with DEC's CC on the Alpha

Usage

Any user who wants to use deep_thoughts should

ensure the executable is on their path

create a file in their home directory called .dtrc that contains:

	the full path name of the Deep Thoughts Data File
	the full path name of the log file

let 'er rip.

The Deep Thoughts Data file MUST have the following format for the program to work properly:

the first line should contain the number of Deep Thoughts in the file.
each subsequent line should contain one Deep Thought apiece. NOTE: each Deep Though MUST be on one line (e.g. NO linefeeds/carriage returns in them) or the program will belch loudly (or otherwise fail)

Have fun. Of course, this code can be used for other cookie crunching at will, simply by changing the header[] initialization, and by changing the contents of the Data file.

I will not be held responsible for any annoyance caused to the creator of the Deep Thoughts. I simply did this to enjoy his work.... Any copyright complaints should be directed to /dev/null.

Revision Listing

1.0     012595  Original version 
1.1     012795  Added -h option - creates an HTML version of the Deep Thought
1.2     012795  Added word wrapping (-w size), Makefile
1.3     012995  Added -H option - outputs to both stdout and to a named HTML
                  file
1.4	013195	Added help screen (-h), removed previous -h & -H, added new
		  -H which outputs HTML version to a file ONLY, added -t which
		  outputs text version to stdout, added log file (-l)
1.5	021495	Added -H - as outputting HTML on stdout

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$Id: Deep_Thoughts.html,v 1.8 2004/06/23 15:55:19 gjhurlbu Exp $