Election Indeterminacy: Ideas for Alternative Election Coverage

While helping out at Leith FM studios during the general election in May, it occurred to me that, despite planning, everything seemed a bit random. At the same time, I was listening to recordings of John Cage's Indeterminacy, and thought that perhaps one can combine the two into a performance piece for radio about an election in progress.

The basic idea: in the studios are the players: elected officials from at least two parties, a political activist, a newsreader (to read wire stores), a reporter at a polling place who can be reached by phone, and a comedian. A moderator would use some method to randomly choose one of the players to speak about anything for no more than one minute. Most players are free to comment about what previous players said, or address general questions to the next player to speak, though that player is only determined afterwards. (The newsreader would be confined to reading only wire stories.)

My "hypothesis" is that the casual radio listener would not be able to distinguish this performance from actual election coverage that one might hear on other radio stations.

This could be extended to a live performance in front of an audience, allowing audience members to queue up to be players. (An audience member would only have one turn.)

To make this more entertaining for a live audience, one might also include a jazz band as another "player" to improvise.

(With the Scottish parliamentary elections coming up in May, I thought about organising this as an event, but it's too short notice and I am too busy with other things to do it properly, alas.)

Postscript: this technique could be applied to news coverage of any "breaking story" besides elections.

A bash script implementation of the trashcan spec

I hacked together a command-line implementation of the Freedesktop.org Trash Can Specification in Bash 3.2 one evening:

#!/bin/bash

# trash (version 0.2.1)
# Robert Rothenberg

# This is a bash script implementation of the FreeDesktop.org Trash
# Specification.

# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: trash FILE..."
exit 1
fi

# sed script to encode filenames

sedscript='s/ /%20/g
s/!/%21/g
s/"/%22/g
s/\#/%23/g
s/\$/%24/g
s/\&/%26/g
s/'\''/%27/g
s/(/%28/g
s/)/%29/g
s/\*/%2a/g
s/+/%2b/g
s/,/%2c/g
s/-/%2d/g
s/:/%3a/g
s/;/%3b/g
s//%3e/g
s/?/%3f/g
s/@/%40/g
s/\[/%5b/g
s/\\/%5c/g
s/\]/%5d/g
s/\^/%5e/g
s/_/%5f/g
s/`/%60/g
s/{/%7b/g
s/|/%7c/g
s/}/%7d/g
s/~/%7e/g
s/ /%09/g'

function url_encode {
echo $1 |sed -e "$sedscript"
}


function get_trashdir {
mounts=`cat /etc/fstab |grep -v \# |awk '{print $2}'`
base=/

if [ "$EUID" != "0" ]; then
mounts="$HOME $mounts"
fi

for i in $mounts
do
if [[ $1 =~ ^$i ]]
then
if [[ $i =~ ^$base ]]
then
base=$i
fi
fi
done

if [ "$base" != "$HOME" ]; then
trashdir="$base/.Trash/$UID"
if [ ! -d "$trashdir" ]; then
trashdir="$base/.Trash-$UID"
fi

mkdir -p "$trashdir"
if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
base=$HOME
fi
fi

if [ "$base" == "$HOME" ]; then
base=$XDG_DATA_HOME
if [ -z "$base" ]; then
base="$HOME/.local/share/"
fi
trashdir="$base/Trash"
fi

echo $trashdir
}

for f in "$@"
do

# get full pathname of file
filename=$(readlink -f "$f")
dir=${filename%/*}

trashdir=`get_trashdir "$dir"`

mkdir -p "$trashdir/files"
if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
echo "Unable to write to $trashdir" 1>&2
exit 2
fi

mkdir -p "$trashdir/info"
if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
echo "Unable to write to $trashdir" 1>&2
exit 2
fi

trashname="${filename##*/}"
origname="${trashname%%.*}"
ext=".${trashname##*.}"
if [ "$ext" == ".$trashname" ]; then
ext=""
fi

cnt=1
while [ -e "$trashdir/files/$trashname" ] || \
[ -e "$trashdir/info/$trashname.trashinfo" ]; do
trashname="${origname}_${cnt}${ext}"
let cnt=cnt+1
done

deletedfile="$trashdir/files/$trashname"
deletedinfo="$trashdir/info/$trashname.trashinfo"
canon=`url_encode $filename`

cat > "$deletedinfo" <<END
[Trash Info]
Path=$canon
DeletionDate=`date +"%FT%H:%M:%S"`
END

mv -v "$filename" "$deletedfile"
done

exit 0

It's quick-and-dirty hack, so I won't vouch for how well it follows the spec, or even works. But it was interesting to see how closely it could be implemented in Bash using as few external commands as possible: readlink, mv, mkdir, cat, awk, sed (the URL-encoding routine comes from here).

If you're looking for a proper implementation, see trash-cli here.

UPDATE (2 March 2011) An updated version of this script is now on GitHub here.