Author: Nick

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…