Brian's Waste of Time
As I got hit with a meme about command line stuff, I figured I'd share an update to my favorite bash completion:
SSH_COMPLETE=( $(cut -f1 -d' ' ~/.ssh/known_hosts |\
tr ',' '\n' |\
sort -u |\
grep -e '[:alpha:]') )
complete -o default -W "${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}" ssh
If you ssh directly to IP addresses very often, you might want to leave
off the last grep -e.
Not going to tag anyone, but if you have a favorite completion, please share! (I suggest not in a comment on this post as my comment system does not preserve any formatting).
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bakert tagged me, so:
brianm@binky:~$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
164 svn
52 cd
42 ssh
32 sudo
22 git
16 ls
16 for
14 echo
13 man
10 curl
brianm@binky:~$
Sadly, I only seem to keep a 500 line .history -- need to fix that.
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Mon, 14 Jan 2008It came up in a different context, so thought I would post :-) If you trim a tiny smidge from the butt end of a uni-ball Signo 207 refill it fits very nicely into the Pilot G2 Pro body. The G2 Pro body is my favorite everyday pen body, but the G2 cartridges (what do you call them when they include the ball, anyway?) tend to be uneven and even blotchy on me compared to the 207s. So, a couple seconds with a pocketknife and I have the best of both worlds!
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Thu, 03 Jan 2008Right now I am functional enough in emacs to do basic things, like write this blog post, but I use too many OS X-isms, like splat-z for undo, and I need to turn those off and learn emacs properly :-)
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Mon, 10 Dec 2007Reminder to myself to try out Sup.
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Wed, 19 Sep 2007So, Mint won the TC40 contesty thing. Looks neat and all, Quicken but web based. I go to take a look and the first thing it wants is my login/pass for my bank's website. Umh. I don't care if my brother runs that site. No.
On the other hand, I see why the business model shows so much promise. If things go south they can dump all their users' money into an offshore account and head south themselves.
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Tue, 21 Aug 2007Forget commons-validator, just use the mechanical turk to validate credit cards.
<sound>rimshot</sound>
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Sat, 18 Aug 2007
Fussy Baby + The Free Sound Project == Better
Ian is awesome, just a bit... sensitive :-) White noise helps to soothe him, a lot. While poking around for some good white noise I stumbled across The Freesound Project. It is great. Aside from wonderful rain sounds and whatnot for Ian, this is amazingly soothing to me. You just don't get them out here naturally.
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Wed, 11 Jul 2007Om, while talking about Ning, reiterated a commonly held idea I kind of disagree with:
you can't move your users with you, basically handing over your community to the company
If I use your site, I don't think having my email address actually means very much. Heck, for any non-transactional web based app, it probably will never be used except for things which land in the spam bucket. This is triply true for anything community-centric.
I am a member of lots of online communities, ranging from things like Honorable Players (one of the longer running gaming clans around, even if I don't have time to play anymore), to Apache (whom you probably know if you read this blog), to LtU (despite the fact I am 90% lurker there) to The Order of the Stick (not the fan community, just a daily visit and something I am attached to). I think only Apache has a working email addy for me, but most of the HP folks probably have one that will wend some path to my inbox.
More importantly, if any one of them were to move, say to Codehaus in the case of a subset of the Apache community, I would just follow the community, not the person who knows my email address or has the domain a community I love happens to be using right now.
For a business, being able to uniquely identify you far and away trumps having your email address. The ad networks nailed this one. Having an email can even be a liability -- people make throwaways and you wind up mucking up your internal metrics because folks are afraid you'll sell their email address to those dastardly spammers (not a useful business model anymore) or something worse. So, you can uniquely identify people -- all this takes, in practice, is a cookie. If someone wants something more resilient they can trade the cookie for a login/passcode combo so they can get a tighter grip on their cookie. If they want you to tell them when interesting things happen they can give you an email address. Asking for the email addy then lets you provide me an additional service, it is the opposite of "having my email address makes me your user."
An example of some folks who seem to very much get it: Meebo. You can go and start IM'ing through them without ever creating an account. It works fine (shockingly well for a web app doing what it does, actually). If you use it enough you tend to create an account just so you don't have to keep logging into multiple IM services through them. They have a ferociously loyal community and... they could pick up and move to wobblywombats.com, erase the user database, blog about it in a couple places, and aside from a couple clicks of confusion, not miss a beat.
I suspect the knee-jerk reaction to say "if you don't have their email you don't own them" comes from the Dark Days of Internet Advertising when it amounted to getting the company announcements or having a point of contact for the Sales Guy. Now... heck, you are better off forcing them back to your site to see ads, actually. Heh :-)
As a thought experiment, what would I lose if I stopped using personal email? To qualify -- I need to use it internally at work, I need to use it for open source stuff, and I probably need it to handle receipts for some internet purchases. Instead of having complex rules I go to straight white-listing. I can still sign up for any service which thinks they need an email to own me -- mailinator solves that nicely. I am still in touch with friends and family -- we use IM and this magical device called a "telephone" -- you probably have one built into your SMS/Camera device. I would stop getting those annoying chain letters. I would stop being contacted by recruiters who think I am perfect for this .Net contracting position requiring two years experience and a CS degree. Actually, scanning my last-week-archive the only thing I would have missed out on is the Adequate Guinea Pig. This deserves thought :-)
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Wed, 20 Jun 2007It would behoove us all to test what our sites look like in all popular browsers...
... with tabs enabled :-)
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Tue, 19 Jun 2007My name is Brian and I love lolcats.
It gets bonus points for making the jump into newspapers!
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Thu, 08 Feb 2007
Anneal with a Transverse Field via a Tunable Flux Capacitor
I have to wonder if it is a hoax, though, with someone named Geordi (okay, Geordie) saying, "We fix the temperature and anneal with a transverse field (equivalently by opening and closing windows for the qubits to tunnel)," and, "via a tunable flux transformer."
This is so freaking cool, last I had heard getting more than four qubits was "really freaking hard." If they have 16 in a portable demo, and plan on a thousand in the next couple years, ka-wow. As my friend Steve puts it, though, "What kind of frame rate can I expect from Quake 3?"
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Sat, 03 Feb 2007I was at the other end of Henri's IM conversation and I think he is right. It has felt like article writing lately, which is a borkaged mindset. Thanks for wise thought ;-)
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Tue, 09 Jan 2007
Mercurial For Documents (on Mac)
Apple's iWork apps work bloody nicely, but they have a vicious flaw in the '06 version -- they delete stuff inside the archive, such as .svn directories. This sucks, really badly, and means that if you use Keynote or Pages, and are paranoid about versioning (like a lot of folks) things, and like svn, you have gnashed for a while.
Anyway, I switched to using Mercurial for these docs. The main reason I like it for my docs directory is that it has a built-in concept of adding and removing things as needed. You can have a simple script like:
cd ~/Documents /opt/local/bin/hg remove --after /opt/local/bin/hg add /opt/local/bin/hg commit -m "Commit docs from WorkFlow Script Thing"
Which does the ~right thing with regard to these broken archive things. I haven't haven't figured out the right way to do Pages and Keynote plugins/wrappers/magic to automatically do revisions on saving docs, when those docs are in the right directory, yet, but it is coming :-)
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Fri, 29 Dec 2006Apple chose not to fix a problem today, so I am falling back to the last resort of the consumer, warning others about a vendor. Back in August I sent my PowerBook back to Apple to have the "lower memory slot doesn't work" problem fixed, which is pretty common in this laptop. Anyway, they sent it back with a note saying "problem fixed by removing 3rd party memory." At least they were kind enough to put the two gigs of third party memory in a ziplock back and send it back. I do wonder what "fixed" means in the case where it won't boot without memory. In the long process of proving there was a problem over the phone, I put in the original 512 megs (2x256) and verified for the support person that it didn't work then either. Guess I screwed up by putting the two gigs back in to send it to Apple. Despite the report saying all they did was remove the memory, it looks like they replaced the motherboard as well, as it works now when I put that evil 3rd memory back in ;-)
Oh yeah, while they had it they replaced the battery as well (at least they did according to another note they sent back with it), as it was subject to their exploding battery recall. That is the root of the problem which leads to this post. They replaced the battery with a bum one which won't accept a charge. It won't even start charging.
So, I call Apple to see about getting a replacement battery. First person I talk to says no problem, but he needs to get a code to do it because it is not within the first year of my owning the computer. He goes about trying to get the code. Hold hold hold. He has to hand me off to a specialist. The specialist pulls up the report from August and says they didn't do anything but remove the third party memory. I point out they also replaced the battery (without my asking them to), or at least so it says on the note I got back from them. He drops the subject and says that they only replace batteries within a year of the purchase of the computer or 90 days of purchase of the battery, and he won't make an exception in my case. I am, apparently, welcome to write a letter to Apple about this, and maybe someone will do something about it.
So, Apple, here is a note explaining the problem. I figure this is more useful than a letter sent to Cupertino as at least it warns other folks about the level of support Apple is providing.
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Tue, 19 Dec 2006As I have been tagged by both Paul and Gianugo I better start playing! Five pieces of trivia about myself:
- The most peaceful times I have known were when I was working as a canoeing guide in the Adirondacks and I'd get up an hour before anyone else to drink mint chamomile tea while watching the fog burn off a lake.
- I love baking chocolate chip cookies. I'll make several dozen and not even eat any sometimes.
- My dream job as a teenager was to be a sailboat test driver.
- Children are generally afraid of me when I first meet them. My wife thinks it is the beard.
- I've never actually written a Session or Entity EJB which made it into production.
Now, to pass the buck, how about we hear from Robert, Torsten, Gus, Jon, and Shane.
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Fri, 15 Dec 2006Just found Steve's How the Public School System Crushes Souls via Reddit. I wrote a long response, but have since deleted it. It amounts to more or less what he expressed, just different details. As I imagine a majority of the folks who will bother to read this did, I learned the system well enough to work it and come out smelling like roses on paper, at least.
After all this, before changing careers into programmery stuff, I actually took the idealistic teacher route. Sadly, teachers are beaten down in a very similar manner to the students. Fresh out of grad school, with absurd student loan debt and a $10 or $12 per hour teaching job (when you take a North Carolina teacher's salary against actual hours worked), administrative support verging on antagonistic, and explicit instructions that my sole goal was to teach the five paragraph essay (10th grade's mandatory test) I concluded that I had to get the hell out. It is easier to leave the system as a teacher though, which most folks with any talent eventually do. You feel a bit guilty, administrators and other teachers definitely play the "you shouldn't care about the money, you are serving a higher purpose" card. Again, you don't need another hellish description of what teaching is like, there are plenty out there on the intertron.
There are innumerable reasons and explanations for the craptastic state of the mandatory system of daycare and conditioning we call education. My favorite, and probably one of the more accurate, is that it is a purposeful design dating back to Plato. I don't exactly agree with John Gatto's assertions, but he does trace a reasonable history. For whatever reason, I think we can, and should, achieve more.
The practical side of me thinks there is a lot of wealth to be created in providing a better education. The legal and political climate in the US makes this a somewhat unattractive market, but that might be able to be worked into a viable barrier to entry for competition. Who knows. An interesting approach would be company schools. For someone like GOOG, with a bumper crop of smart thirty-somethings who can retire as their kids approach the school years, access to a good education becomes a very powerful employee retention policy. Heck, it also lets them start recruiting amongst a fertile pool of talent very early, but that might be too long a plan for a publicly traded company to commit resources to. Actually, there is a business plan here...
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Mon, 06 Nov 2006Just back from a diving trip to the Philippines. It was awesome. Here are some pics...
:-)
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Thu, 07 Sep 2006It doesn't come up much, but, I have a thing for rocking chairs. I have a few, which living in an apartment can make kind of annoying (my favorite is presently in use as my wife's desk chair, for instance). Anyway, I had the opportunity this weekend to sit in a really nice rocking chair. It looked a little bit too pretty at first, I had my doubts. They were blown away. Holy crap, nice rocking chair :-)
I asked Joy if I could get one, at which point she asked the price, and, sadly, I couldn't get one. However, when I have a few thousand dollars to spend on a rocking chair... :-)
So I go to find their website to link to... no website. Who doesn't have a website anymore? Anyway, I know nothing about them other than I want the pictured (snapped from a business card) rocking chair someday, and it is Livingston's Wood Creations in Clovis, CA.
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Tue, 15 Aug 2006Via Shane, from the "Ha Ha, only serious" department...
FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?
CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.
US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!"
sigh