Presumably named for being a selector?
Binary Output
XD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%27_Selecta!
To a lot of British people of a certain age seeing the letters 'BO' trigger an automatic response.
Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#12Simple tool, elegant interface!
In the context of large files, do you think you would like to extend it to a multi-threaded variant to fully exploit additional cores or will the overhead due to threading and memory bottlenecks not provide any advantage?
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for instilling a “fear” of that in me to watch out for when using Swiss knives from now on.
You'll be OK as long as you don't push down on the tip of the blade (imagine trying to use the point to drill a hole in some leather. The blades don't lock, so can fold expectedly. Other than that, lovely things. I was making a weak joke, which received the downvotes it deserved :)
It's a real threat and happened to me 25 years ago. I still have a scar across the knuckle of my first finger and haven't used a Swiss Army knife since. Leatherman or Gerber only for multi-tools now.
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#14Simple tool, elegant interface! In the context of large files, do you think you would like to extend it to a multi-threaded variant to fully exploit additional cores or will the overhead due to threading and memory bottlenecks not provide any advantage?
It's fully reentrant and thread safe atm. I haven't thought about multithreaded parsing & printing, though. Mostly it was intended as a quick tool to get data into the right format for testing or debugging or writing code.
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#15A really needed project! I've started something really similar last year because I felt I needed something: https://github.com/tehmoon/cryptocli which can do a bunch of things. Perhaps you can get ideas!
Needless to say that I use it every day :p
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#16Example usage from the readme below. There is no explanation whatsoever provided as to what is going on with all the different formats.
Build up test data for low level code.
$ bo -n oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011
0x3f, 0xc0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x3f, 0xa0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x03, 0xe8, 0x07, 0xd0, 0x0b, 0xb8, 0xff, 0xfe, 0x7a, 0x8b
What kind of value starts with a lower case ‘o’ or a ‘P’? Or are those commands? If so, why don’t they start with hyphens? Are they file names? If so, why aren’t they preceded by -i or -o to match the docs? Is some of it output?
If I used this, how would I explain my work to my coworkers? A tool should solve problems, not give me a new ones.
My approach is usually to make a tool friendly enough that a newbie can glance at a command typed in by anyone and immediately see what it is supposed to be doing, without reading any help file. But in this case even the help file doesn’t help.
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#17It looks like a useful tool, thank you for taking the time to write it. I realise that further down the page you explain what the various type definitions mean, but it might be nice to make that clear in the initial examples you give. For instance, say: See the per-byte layout (_oh1_) of a larger integer in big (_ih4b_) or little (_ih4l_) endian format, separating each byte with a space (_Ps_). $ bo -n oh1 Ps ih4b 12…
Yes, I was a bit torn between showing a bunch of what it can do, and getting so verbose that people stop reading. This tool is surprisingly difficult to explain concisely!
That seems to be a reality of the “Swiss Army Knife for X” products. Tons of features are a blessing and a curse. You should listen to this Masters of Scale episode for an in-depth discussion of how to overcome the inherent marketing challenges:
https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#18This is pretty useful - my shell history is littered with invocations to node (8333..toString(16)) or python (hex(ord('/')) doing this by hand.
Would love to see a homebrew formula for it.
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#19Example usage from the readme below. There is no explanation whatsoever provided as to what is going on with all the different formats. Build up test data for low level code. $ bo -n oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011 0x3f, 0xc0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x3f, 0xa0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x03, 0xe8, 0x07, 0xd0, 0x0b, 0xb8, 0xff, 0xfe, 0x7a, 0x8b What? What kind of value starts with a lower case ‘o’ or a ‘P…
The HN crowd are my UX testers. Whatever people don't understand is easily fixed with a git push!
Re: Show HN: Bo, the Swiss army knife of data examination and manipulation
#20Example usage from the readme below. There is no explanation whatsoever provided as to what is going on with all the different formats. Build up test data for low level code. $ bo -n oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011 0x3f, 0xc0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x3f, 0xa0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x03, 0xe8, 0x07, 0xd0, 0x0b, 0xb8, 0xff, 0xfe, 0x7a, 0x8b What? What kind of value starts with a lower case ‘o’ or a ‘P…
The HN crowd are my UX testers. Whatever people don't understand is easily fixed with a git push!
I'll attempt to possibly convert the grandparent comment into something more constructive. I'd note that your tool is probably the appropriate complexity level compared to utilities of the same sort (ie: sed, awk, dd, etc).
But let's say we want to improve the UX of the tool for new users. As a strawman, you could offer longhand forms of the mode switching flags for them. For example:
bo -n oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011
Could be written long-form as:
bo -n --output=type=hex,width=1,endian=l,width=2 --preset=c --input=type=float,width=4,endian=b 1.5 1.25 --input=type=int,width=2,endian=b 1000 ....
You could even print the shorthand version to stderr whenever one of the simpler syntaxes was used.