This is for Lin Swimmer (and the state of California)
November 21, 2009
What I've Been Programming Lately: Bash Scripts
November 15, 2009
As if I wasn't already in love with POSIX shells, the more Bash scripts I write, the more I love it. Thank you thank you thank you, Apple, for including a (mostly) standard Bash shell in OS X!
One of the latest scripts that I wrote is simple but extremely useful to me. It moves the most recent file in my ~/Downloads directory to the current directory. Simple, and it sure started that way, but I've tweaked it to work quite nicely. The default behavior is to tell me what the most recent file is and ask me if I want to move it ('y' moves it and any other key cancels). This helps me if I forget that I downloaded some other things since the one I wanted to move. It also keeps track of a history, and allows for undoing the last move (if I do mess up). Also, it has decent error handling to ensure that I don't accidentally overwrite an existing file or such. This script is called mvdl, and I may post it on Google Code or Github sometime soon.
The other script I've been having fun perfecting is called backupwithgit. After my recent infatuation with Git, I've been versioning like crazy. backupwithgit helps me version not-too-critical directories, like my ~/random-textfiles directory. I can set a few options in the script, then make a symlink called backuptxt (or whatever I want), and then anytime I type 'backuptxt' in the terminal from any directory, it'll add and commit everything in my ~/random-textfiles directory. To deal with another not-too-critical directory, I set a couple more options in backupwithgit and then make a new symlink with a different name, and I'm good to go again. Like mvdl, this script will also be showing up on Google Code or Github sometime soon-ish.
I honestly don't know if these scripts would be useful to anyone other than myself, but I'm perfectly willing to share them once I clean them up a little bit. (Honest... just a little bit. They're quite nice as is.) If you're actually interested and can't wait for me to clean them up and post them, let me know and I'll hook you up, although they're pretty trivial scripts.
(If you've read this far through this post, then you might be interested to know that I'm quite disappointed with Stargate Universe. It seems as though they're explicitly trying to Battlestar Galactica-ize the Stargate franchise.)
Cucumbers! Cabbage! Chick peas! Tahini! Happiness!
I honestly haven't much awesomeness to tell you about right now. Or at least no one shining bit of awesomeness. So, instead, I will mention many little bits of semi-awesome right now. And maybe a small rant or two. In no real order.
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I've been spending a lot of time playing with jekyll, a "a simple, blog aware, static site generator." With it, I can write webpages with Markdown formatting and then quickly generate a static site. First, I converted my internal websites into jekyll sites (I keep a few personal websites going on my computer for nicely formatted notes and quick references to things). But now I'm in the process of actually (and finally!) making a real "homepage" kind of website, which will be unveiled to the public sometime-ish. It's fun! So easy! And it's a fairly small and simple Ruby program, so it's a blast to mess around with the jekyll source code too.
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I really don't know why it took me so long to wrap my head around it, but I've finally started keeping my work version-controlled. For a while, I've known how to check out code with Subversion, Mercurial, Git, CVS (and probably other I'm forgetting), but that's about all I've been able to do. But now, thanks to a guide which was surely written with me in mind, Git for the lazy, I'm quite comfortable with all aspects of Git. Actually, I'm more than comfortable... I'm smitten. And since I keep as much stuff of mine as I possibly can in plain text formats, I'm able to keep so much of my stuff version controlled! This is definitely something I've always wanted, even though I didn't know it.
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Bad grammar has been a bit of a pet peeve of mine for quite some time, but normally I can overlook it. Hell, I used to participate in various forms of internet lingo way back in the day, and I still quite enjoy some of the turns of speech that come out of forums like 4chan. But lately, I've seen quite a few people I respect linking to articles with atrocious grammar. I'm not even talking about simply switching its and it's, but writing frequent needlessly-confusing sentence fragments and gigantic run-on sentences. Possibly even worse, there seems to be a rising trend of quoting tweets - as compressed and stunted as they are - verbatim on one's blog. My disdain of Twitter aside, take pride in your quotes, O Internet!
But what can be done? It seems as though when one attempts to correct someone's grammar, it's usually perceived as snobby or condescending. The corrector is derided as "grammar police" or a "grammar nazi." And it's been my experience that kind, private emails to the author are typically ignored. Every time that I think long and hard about this problem, the only solution I come up with is improved education in schools.
Just how horribly selfish is it to now care about school funding so that there are better blog posts for me to read?
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I may have mentioned this before, but after being mostly unemployed for almost a year, I now have a lot less free time than I had grown accustomed to. As such, I can't read all the feeds in Google Reader that I used to. This is a sad affair, this pruning of information. I used to be able to read it all - to know it all - but now, I have to pick and choose. To a certain extent, it feels like it did when I no longer worked at a music store and no longer knew what practically every single album being released sounded like. As someone who frequently forgets things, I loathe the feeling of not knowing, or more precisely, knowing that I would have known.
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I've completely forgotten how I heard of it, but my new go-to site for technology news is Hacker News, the communal news portion of Y Combinator, a venture firm. The site typically deals with web development news, but from time to time other bits of geeky news is thrown in as well. I quite love visiting the site itself instead of via RSS, since it has such a quick, minimal interface, and rather substantial comments.
Money In The Bank
November 07, 2009
I have a new favorite website. It's call Bank Notes. It collects bank robbery notes. Most of them are transcribed, not actual scans, unfortunately, but it's still pretty damn awesome.
A Simple Video About Real Life
November 05, 2009
(from the excellent source for disco-y videos and music, arawa.fm)
Love And Logic
October 28, 2009
[This is not what I intended to write about, but I suppose something is better than nothing. This whole NOT-spending-every-waking-moment-online thing I've been doing lately really killed my drive to blog, apparently.]
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The other day, I saw a girl who I recognized from having seen her photo online. I've seen her at my work a few other times, and yet each time is very, very awkward.
- First, she's extremely attractive. That, sadly, always makes things awkward for me.
- Second, the whole online thing is weird. Before nerdiness was as accepted as it is today, I trained myself to avoid talking in public of anything remotely nerdy. I'm untraining myself these days, but still, if you mention a webpage to me in public, you might notice a quick flash of revulsion. Don't worry, it's (probably) not you, it's me.
- Third, she's not the one posting herself online. Her husband is the photographer. She's not the main subject of his photos. In fact, she's probably in only 5-10% of them, if even that. Only someone like me who's been following her husband's photography for a couple of years would really have seen enough photos of her to recognize her as quickly and certainly as I have.
- Finally (and this is the kicker): in several of the photos, she's (tastefully) nude. She's aware that her husband is posting nude photos of her and she's OK with it, but still...
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I just realized that now that summer is definitely over, it's officially been over a year since I had a girlfriend. Unofficially, I'm not even sure if that one counted as a girlfriend, so it could have been an even longer time. But honestly, I don't think it really bothers me. This isn't a dry spell so much as it is disinterest. Or, actually, I suppose I've been interested, but I've just let logic get the better of me. Lately, the girls I've been most into have been totally totally wrong for me. The aforementioned photographer's wife. The ditzy, annoying blond. The model-hot party girl. The painfully naive girl I only talk to because I like her hair. The lesbian customer with the androgynous girlfriend. These are the girls I've contemplated asking out lately. What the hell is wrong with me? Either I need to get my logic synchronized with my lust, or I need to ignore one or the other. Until I start doing either, I'm fine being alone. Hell, I have been getting a lot of programming done lately, after all...
Goth Day, part 2, perhaps? The fashion issue
October 05, 2009
Holy shit. I'm kicking myself for not having thought of this myself:
Waders as fashion! So silly that it's super awesome! And she makes it work, with that awesome sweater. Oh, I suppose according to my brief internet searching, Prada may or may not have featured waders on the runway before. Bah. Whatever. I'm still giving props to this girl. Hmmm, also, according to slightly more searching, women in waders is a fetish calendar series. Fine, whatever. I'm STILL giving this girl credit, because until just now, waders, to me, had always been this:
This is what happens when I listen to industrial music for several hours
Apparently, I make "art":
I think it started when I listened to the latest song posted on Arawa FM. And then I listened to it again. And again.... And again a few more times. Meanwhile, I was looking at every single photo on Rankin's website. Then, while still looking at Rankin photos, I happened across this Front 242 song I had never heard on Constant Siege. And I listened to that over and over too. And for some reason the concept of listening to Front 242 in a Camero stuck in my mind. Then I found myself listening to the whole Ministry - Twitch album. And then those ZYX and Front 242 songs again. And then I downloaded a few Front 242 albums.
Then, before I knew it, I had downloaded a ton of Camero photos and turned them into what you see above.
Yes, this is embarrassing.
Take that, INTERNET.
To Boldly Be Sad Where No Man Has Been Sad Before
September 27, 2009
Well, not exactly. I suppose someone else was sad first, for they made the site: U.S.S. EXCALIBUR MEMORIAL.
Go there. Go there now.
But be prepared to be saddened, as I was, for that is a memorial site to dead Star Trek actors. At the top, it's got the biggies, like DeForest Kelley and James Doohan, but then it proceeds to list what can only I imagine is a complete list of everyone else who ever acted on any Star Trek series and is now deceased.
I dare any Star Trek fan to scroll through that list and not tear up. Especially you TOS fans.
What really got me, though, was the actors who you know mostly from other things, such as...
...Kevin Peter Hall
(who played both the predator in Predator and Harry in Harry And The Hendersons)
...David Graf
(who played Officer Tackleberry in the Police Academy films)
...Andreas Katsulas
(who played so many great characters, such as G'Kar in Babylon 5)
...Vincent Schiavelli
(who also has played many great characters, such as John O'Connor in The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension)
All dead.
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