Programming and related activities.
Over on the right, in the sidebar, you should see a countdown clock entitled “Countdown to Backpedaling”. (If not, then something went wrong.) If you’ve been listening to Ask an Atheist, then you should recognize this as a widget version of the Countdown to Backpedaling clock. And if not, then you should definitely be listening… Continue reading Countdown to Backpedaling Widget
So I was thinking about how to refactor our custom Linux and Solaris init scripts at work. The way FreeBSD does it is to have the scripts in /etc/rc.d define variables with the commands to execute, e.g., start_cmd=’/usr/sbin/foobard’ stop_cmd=’kill `cat /var/run/foobar.pid`’ run_rc_command “$1″ where $1 is “start”, “stop”, or whatever, and run_rc_command is a function… Continue reading Bourne Shell Introspection
This was definitely a “D’oh!” type of problem. One thing I’d been meaning to figure out for a while was how to send gzip-compressed files to a browser. That is, if I have a large HTML file, it’d be nice if the server could compress it to save bandwith and transmission time. Yes, Apache has… Continue reading Pre-Compressing Web Content
MacOS plist XML files are evil; even more so than regular XML. For instance, my iTunes library file consists mostly of entries like: <key>5436</key> <dict> <key>Track ID</key><integer>5436</integer> <key>Name</key><string>Getting Better</string> <key>Artist</key><string>The Beatles</string> <key>Composer</key><string>Paul McCartney/John Lennon</string> <key>Album</key><string>Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band</string> … </dict> You’ll notice that there’s no connection between a key and its value, other… Continue reading Evil Hack of the Day
Like a lot of people, I have to submit a monthly “bullet” report, listing the things I’ve done in the previous month. Since I use Org-Mode for planning, scheduling, and organizing tool (or rather: I tend to throw a bunch of notes into a file and tell this love child of a day planner and… Continue reading Monthly Reports with Org-Mode
As far as I can tell, FreeBSD 8 tickled something in the driver for my ethernet card, and caused it to behave unreliably. Rather than muck around with half-tested kernel patches or ifconfig settings, I slapped a $30 Whatevertheyhadontheshelf-3000 (read: common chipset that’s been debugged by a lot of people), and as far as I… Continue reading Network Problems Fixed?
Every so often, I need to find out whether I have a certain Perl module installed. Usually it’s either because of a security alert, or because I’m wondering how much of a pain it would be to install some package that has Some::Obscure::Module as a prerequisite. I don’t know how y’all do it, what with… Continue reading Quick and Dirty Perl Hack: Is Foo::Bar Installed?
One thing I’ve noticed about my code is that an awful lot of the comments are of the form call_some_function(); // XXX – Error-checking (where XXX is an easily-grepped marker for something that needs to be fixed.) The proximate reason for this accumulation of “do something smart if something goes wrong to-do items is that… Continue reading Just A Little Bit of Planning
While playing around with a Perl script to look up stock quotes, I kept getting warning messages about uninitialized values, as well as mising data in the results. I eventually tracked it down to a bug in an old version of the Finance::Quote Perl module, specifically to these lines: # Yahoo uses encodes the desired… Continue reading Don’t Put Information in Two Places
In case you haven’t read Tom Christiansen’s Csh Programming Considered Harmful, here’s another reason not to write csh/tcsh scripts if you can avoid it. Unlike the Bourne Shell, the C shell exits with “Undefined variable” if you reference an undefined variable, instead of expanding that variable to the empty string, the way the Bourne shell… Continue reading Another Reason Not to Write csh Scripts
