NOEXTEHO

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.

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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.