Month: September 2011

More cmd.exe help

So you’re in cmd.exe and you type ‘ls‘ expecting to get a directory listing. Instead cmd.exe gives you the finger. You give cmd.exe the finger back. Just then your boss walks by and sees you flipping off company property. Next thing you’re in her office having a discussion on appropriate workplace behavior. Having had enough of ‘The Man’ you flip off your boss.

Now you’re sitting at the bus stop waiting for the bus that will take about 90 minutes to get you home. Just about 7 minutes faster than if you walked. But it’s cold outside. No job, no car, no prospects. Life sucks. And then you learn that you could have been using DOSKEY to set up persistent aliases in cmd.exe.

Just one simple DOSKEY ls=dir later and it doesn’t matter which platform you’re on. Assuming you already set aliases in .bashrc for all of your bad cmd.exe habits that is.

Chin up, young squire! Now when you’re fired from your next job, at least it won’t be on cmd.exe’s account. You can thank me later.

Foxworthy?

I think “first world problems” is the intelligentsia’s “you may be a redneck if…”

To wit: If you’re complaining that your download from MSDN is running at a measly 650KB/sec average, you’re experiencing first world problems.

And yet, I can’t believe how long it is taking to download some old-assed .iso so I can build some ancient bit of architectural cruft that is both so integral to our workflow that it demands a special place in the VM migration strategy and not important enough to devote development resources to usher it into the modern age.

And, since I’m still waiting, is it a second order first world problem to have a problem with the idea of first world problems? I mean it just feels like some facile way to dismiss legitimate structural problems the world faces, not to mention the day-to-day annoyances we have to muddle through just because we want to survive day-to-day in whatever society we’ve been blessed to be born in to. See, I am smitten with the phrase “first world problem.” On the other hand, when someone other than myself uses it, I feel like dickpunching them. Like, yeah, you’re the enlightened being who has achieved complete balance.

Holy Tagmaster, Batman!

How long has it been since I’ve written CSS? Quite the stroll down memory lane today as I prettified some XSL transformed XML reports.

Relatedly, I’d forgotten just how short browser implementation has come on the promise of serving XML and letting the client render things prettily. I’m all for stopping XSS attacks but good lord, DQ’ing an XSL file just because it comes from a different port on the same machine? Heavens forfend!

To summarize:

  • XSLT processing strategy: 79%
  • XSLT processing implementation: 7%
  • Beautification: 5%
  • Blogging about it afterwards: 9%

Of course, I don’t have the generator tool work even started. I smell a flunked story on the horizon…

SVN Deployment

Seems simple in that “WTF is up with me not doing that until now” kind of way but setting up all of your web content in SVN and then using svn export to deploy to your production server just plain rocks.

  1. Version control–which is desirable on its face
  2. The model enforces backing up–your deployment is just a copy of your versioned repository
  3. Instant recovery
  4. Work locally, publish remotely–no zOMGWTFBBQ moments when your internet connection breaks the I/O pipe your text editor is relying on or even dropping your terminal session, whereby you lose your work

There are many things I’ve learned working in CM these last few years, but the value of SVN or version control generally, continues to be the lesson that keeps paying dividends.

If I were still rabbiting away at the computer lab at $SATELLITE_CAMPUS library, I’d be advocating to teach a mini course on version control as a tool for managing all research projects/papers. It is the hammer by which I identify and act upon all nails. 😉

Hi honey, I’m home

Looks like the migration is mostly complete. A little less painful than anticipated all things considered. Not a lot of planning up front and it looks like the main pieces came across with only minor hair pulling. I can’t believe 10 years of accumulated clutter on $OLD_WEB_HOST was this easy to move. Even if things are burnt, it’s too late to go back now. On my way out the door at $OLD_WEB_HOST I engaged in some pretty fun rm -rf behavior. Not often you get to pull those kinds of triggers.

So $NEW_WEB_HOST seems to be working out so far. Getting to a terminal window isn’t always all that fun and their auto-generated WebDAV thinger doesn’t work as advertised. Not sure I like the way $MAIN_DOMAIN (not blackfez.com) can be used to hit all of my “add-on” domains. Then again, one could do the same thing at the old place, but one had to use the company domain to do that.

I’m a tiny fish in a huge number of users now. CPanel is a nice upgrade from old host’s d-i-y interface. I don’t like how Python is a marginal language at new host and still no pre-fab Java servlet container. I do like that there is a support staff of >1 and that they have an always-on phone number to boot.

Long evening of keypunching makes it feel like work on the weekend so it’s looking like time to turn in. Let me know if you see something awry/broken. I’ll see what I can do to fix that up.