I started doing a stupid ruby project. Not gonna talk about the details yet. The point of the project isn't so much to solve a problem as it is to future proof myself from future problems.
As a programmer and CLI fanatic, I avoid normal power user tools like Excel. I realize it's powerful and there's plenty of depth to be learned, but it just rubs me the wrong way. Anyway, I bumped into some functionality in Google Sheets that bridged the gap between coding and spreadsheeting. My coworkers hadn't seen it yet, so I figured I'd share it here.
I'm not naive enough to say I'm restarting this thing and actually going to post a lot. Been there, done that. But I have come to appreciate coder blogs a little bit more and would like to be the sort of person who has one. Let's see where this goes....
Today is my last day at my current position as a Drupal developer. After this I'll be moving on to Rails. Now I can finally feel good about the circle jerk that is Hacker News.
I found a tome of ancient wisdom abandoned at work. Unix Power Tools from 1994 or so. Unsurprisingly I hoarded it. Very surprisingly I actually read it, cover to cover. A lot was out of date or irrelevant (I just don't care about formatting text for print). Here's the stuff I kept for later.
https://github.com/sagotsky/tapir/
I've been playing with a couple APIs at work lately. This is something I really enjoy, with a couple exceptions:
I started (well, reinvigorated) this blog because a) Hacker News told me over and over that devs should blog. And b) because I needed an excuse to play with Ruby. Jekyll comes with tags out of the box, but they don't seem to do much. Of course you can write a generator that makes pages of each tag, but that would be a custom plugin and Github wouldn't compile it. Since I'm trying to keep this jekyll plugin free (my other blog that I'm still in the process of migrating will be more experimental) I figured I'd see what I could get out of tags as provided.
I've been dealing with soreness in my wrists for 10 years. Using an ergnomoic keyboard and avoiding the mouse (or mousing lefty when my right hand gets tired) has helped a ton. When it doesn't the wrist exercises I found on Zed Shaw's blog are usually enough to fix it. This week has been particularly bad though and I was thinking about going back to wearing wrist braces, until I found relief in the gym.
dmenu is one of my favorite stupidly simply programs. It reads stdin, pops up a menu with each line as an entry, and returns the one you select. I think I've mentioned this before.
My favorite trick I taught bash is really stupid. I almost didn't bother with it because it's so dumb it's hardly deserving of an alias. Then I went and made it and liked it so much it lives in its own separate repository, outside of my dirty pile of dotfiles. Here's fd:
I have a confession to make. I use PHP. HackerNews tells me that makes me a bad person.
Last time we used gdm to switch between virtual terminals. gdm3 still hasn't restored that feature, so here's what I've been using instead.
Hi. I'm attempting to reinvigorate my code blog. That's misleading because it was never vigorated to begin with. But hacker news keeps telling me it's important to be a social coder, so let's try this again and see where it goes.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. In the past every time I’ve attempted to use an array in bash I reached the conclusion that arrays were the breaking point where I should give up and write a perl script instead. Finally found a case where the bash array was simple and reasonably elegant.
Long ago I learned that bash’s aliases don’t process args and you should just use functions instead. Turns out you can do args. This isn’t the most useful thing in the world because, well, functions. But it’s still cool.
PHP’s multicurl has the saddest documentation I’ve ever encountered. What should have been an afternoon project in total(or 10 minutes in bash with xargs -P) ended up being 2 days to figure out. Now that I think I know how multicurl works I can start making it actually do something.
dmenu is cool. For a while I’ve been wanting to use it to jump to new tracks in rhythmbox. Had I realized how easy it was, I’d have done this sooner.
This shouldn’t be difficult, but documentation is poor and scripting is unintuitive. Hopefully someone else will find this post useful.
Wrote a script to update my xmobar whenever the volume changes. Previously this was based on writing to a FIFO whenever I changed the volume. That worked, but only within my account. Other users could change the volume and I wouldn’t know until I made noise. Prior incarnations simply polled amixer.
I occasionally have to use windows for work. I often end up using it for gaming. If I ever try to get anything done in windows, unless I’m ssh’ing into a computer with a proper OS, I have to do it in cygwin. But cygwin is slow and obnoxious to install. And because I don’t use it often I don’t bother configuring a good environment for it.
The new gdm in Karmic Koala is deprecated and featureless. It does not support this script. I don’t know if other gdm’s will be so useless, but if you’re on Karmic, don’t waste your time with this one.
I had a go at my own downloader. It’s available at http://code.google.com/p/arrss/
I’m still using pytvshows and I’m pretty happy with it. The only problem is that it is limited to tvrss.net. I tried adding support for other RSS feeds, but it just wasn’t happening. tvrss.net only misses one of my shows (and a whole lot of the better half’s shows) so it’s not really a big deal.
I’ve lately found myself posting and dissecting my beloved .rc files. I suppose it’s time to document them ad nauseum so I can refer to the post later. I went to all the trouble to keep them synced up over CVS, so I might as well discuss the files themselves.
Since Foxmarks let me into their beta program I’ve been experimenting with Firefox3 beta5. The one feature I’ve been looking forward to more than anything else is better SVG support. Once I settled into the browser I started updating my SVG project, GameFace, so it’ll work with Firefox3.
This is something I’ve been working on periodically for a month or two. To provide content for my XBMC media box I’ve been bittorrenting TV shows via RSS feeds. The concept is brilliant. Each show has its own feed and when a new episode comes out a new .torrent file appears for download.