Just A Little Bit of Planning
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...
View ArticleQuick and Dirty Perl Hack: Is Foo::Bar Installed?
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...
View ArticleNetwork Problems Fixed?
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...
View ArticleMonthly Reports with Org-Mode
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...
View ArticleEvil Hack of the Day
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...
View ArticlePre-Compressing Web Content
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...
View ArticleBourne Shell Introspection
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,...
View ArticleCountdown to Backpedaling Widget
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...
View ArticleA Couple of Shell Quickies
Since I got asked several sh-related questions, I might as well get a post out of them. One person asks: I’m writing a portable shell script to download a file from the web, and then compare it to a...
View ArticleFun With Barcodes
If you have an Android phone, odds are that you have the Barcode Scanner app. And if you’ve looked in the settings, you may have noticed one called “Custom Search URL”. This is, as the name says, a URL...
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