I have a list of reminders, TODOs, life goals, GTD items in the David Allen's style, etc. I want to print them when I run Linux shell, in the same manner as the 'fortune' utility does. I can do:
cat reminders.txt | shuf | head -1
But I want to print newest reminder lines more often and oldest -- less often. I want some PRNG function that is 'skewed'. This is my solution.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import random, math
#base=1.2
#base=1.3
base=2
total=30
for x in range(1000000): # sample size
r=random.randint(1, int(base**total-1))
y=math.log(r, base)
print ("%02d" % int(y))
If I run it...
% python3 1.py | sort | uniq -c
4 11
5 12
7 13
19 14
25 15
57 16
123 17
249 18
462 19
957 20
1873 21
3936 22
7829 23
15637 24
31430 25
62835 26
124932 27
250500 28
499120 29
You see -- a higher number printed as twice as often as a previous number (number minus 1). Because we use binary logarithm (AKA binlog, log2).
We can reduce log base to 1.3, for example:
base=1.3
...
374 00
387 02
400 04
375 05
742 06
728 07
689 08
1059 09
1504 10
2270 11
2635 12
3297 13
4575 14
5779 15
7578 16
9927 17
13128 18
16940 19
21814 20
28105 21
36322 22
47422 23
62309 24
81244 25
105493 26
136949 27
177545 28
230410 29
Even to 1.2:
base=1.2 ... 4302 00 4271 03 4260 06 4295 07 4323 08 4251 09 4341 10 4291 11 8396 12 8377 13 12586 14 12588 15 17004 16 16932 17 21228 18 29644 19 34327 20 38331 21 46737 22 55134 23 67560 24 80613 25 97433 26 113964 27 139726 28 165086 29
This is better for my purpose. So here is a Python script that returns a random value skewed to higher values:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import random, math, sys
base=1.2
#base=1.3
#base=2
total=int(sys.argv[1])
r=random.randint(1, int(base**total-1))
y=math.log(r, base)
result=int(y)
#return result in [1..total] range
#print ("result", result+1)
exit(result+1)
Now the final script. It prints a random text file from a directory, but prints newest files more often and older files less often:
#!/usr/bin/env bash p=$HOME/reminders total=$(ls -1tr $p | wc -l) #echo $total ./my_PRNG.py $total random=$? #echo $random # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6022384/bash-tool-to-get-nth-line-from-a-file fname=$(ls -1tr $p | tail -n+$random | head -1) echo "=" $fname cat "$p/$fname"
ls -1tr is used to get a list of files in directory sorted by timestamp.
I run this script instead of 'fortune', when bash (or zsh) shell starts.
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