Hollywood != Real World

This is why I boycotted Slumdog Millionaire:

Two months ago, the child star of the hit movie "Slumdog Millionaire" was worrying about what to wear to the Oscars. Now she has come home to a very different problem: How to get the fetid water out of her family's one-room shack.

Read the rest of the story.

Moved hosting DreamHost -> WebFaction

Following in Douglass Clem's footsteps (and thanks for the tip about scp), I migrated my domain hosting and this blog from DreamHost to WebFaction, for many of the same reasons. I wasn't unhappy with DreamHost, I just want to try out Pylons and WebFaction seems to be the place to be for that.

my .irbrc file

require 'irb/completion'
IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE] = :SIMPLE

\# call ri from within irb
def ri(*names)
  system(%{ri.bat #{names.map {|name| name.to_s}.join(" ")}})
end

How to make an empty file on Windows

To makes an "empty" file,  containing only a single newline, type this in a Windows command prompt:

c:\>echo. > somefile.txt

The dot immediately after the echo command outputs just a blank line to the file. I think this technique works for Windows NT and better.

Apparently you can also use the fsutil command to make a file of any size filled with zeros:

c:\>fsutil file createnew filename length

jEdit delete duplicate lines

In jEdit's Search and Replace dialog, select "Regular Expressions",  then Search for:

^(.\*)$\n\1

replace with:

$1

This tells jEdit to

• start at the beginning of a line ^


• find any characters, spaces, etc .*


• up to the end of the line $


• including a carriage return \n


• that matches the text on the following line \1


• then replace it with just the first matched line $1

The result is any lines that are duplicated will be replaced with just a single copy of the line.

Using caret '^' in Windows batch files

The caret '^' character serves two purposes in Windows batch files:

1. line continuations:
~~~
@echo off

dir ^
/ad ^
c:\temp
~~~~
results in dir /ad c:\temp, which lists only the directories in C:\temp. (Thanks to SteveGTR for that example.)

2. Escaping reserved shell characters & | ( < > ^. Use a preceding caret to escape and print the character:


echo this pipe will print ^| but this one won't |
echo and this will print one caret ^^


Monotype font for Wordpress "Write Post" text area

I like to use a monotype font (e.g. Courier) when I edit my blog posts in HTML mode. Wordpress seems to default to a proportional font. Try as I might, I couldn't find an easy way to change this from the WP admin pages, so I resorted to hacking the responsible stylesheet, /wp-admin/wp-admin.css, adding the font-family declaration for the #content text area:

editorcontainer #content {
    font-family: Courier New, Courier, sans-serif;
    padding: 0;
    line-height: 150%;
    border: 0 none;
    outline: none;
}