One of the posts on my blog at CSP, got someone else thinking. I love it when these conversations get started.

Just published My Kind of Lab on the Dorklog.

I was trying to find a networking test from xenophile in my irc logs today, but I just couldn’t remember where it would have been. Fortunately, this is easy with *nix.

grep lets me search text for a string of text, and I know I was looking for xenophile, so:
grep xenophile

But, I don’t even know whether his name is capitalized or not! Adding -i will ignore case:
grep -i xenophile

Now, which log was that in? I have about 60 of them lying around in this directory… I guess I’ll search all of them:
grep -i xenophile *

Whoah, that was about 1200 lines of text (xenophile apparently talks a lot). Lets make that a little more manageable and put the output in a tmp file:
grep -i xenophile * > tmp

Ok, now I can just search that one file for the text I’m looking for. I know he was saying something about a test:
grep -i test tmp

There. Only eight lines of text, and the second line is the one I was looking for.

Or, I could’ve just done this all in one line:
grep -i xenophile * | grep -i test

I’m neck deep in a messy little mid-course adjustment of the CMS at work. It’s a frustrating little mess, and if I didn’t hate clicking so much, I might actually enjoy it. (I always enjoyed untying knots in necklaces and yo-yo strings.) I am reading The Pragmatic Programmer and have become obsessive about preventing the duplication of code/information. Currently, at least 30% of the code in our websites is duplicated. *shiver*

So, we’re going through all the sites and streamlining the code for navigation and the edit layouts.

But each site takes about 15 minutes and requires 250 clicks. We have probably 220 sites to transition. And this whole process will only bring us down to about 27% code duplication. *sigh*

One thing I hate about code is that some things can be really difficult to look up. For example, I would like to learn a little bit more about –> in PHP. But search engines aren’t big fans of letting you search for >. Oh well. I guess I’m going to have to look through a book instead.

Update: Found something here thanks to a pointer from someone in ##php. But it is still funny to me that I couldn’t find that info by searching.

I just posted “Google releases patches that enhance the manageability and reliability of MySQL” on the Open Source Initiative blog.
(comment there)

If I were running linux full time, I would love to give this client a try. I may just try to compile it for darwin/osx anyway.

UniTTY is a multi-faceted client that does much more than just standard SSH. This client provides the network administrator with the ability to connect to systems using SSH, SFTP, Telnet, Secure VNC and also provides sophisticated identity management facilities that help to cut down on repeated and unnecessary password entry.

[Via 3SP - UniTTY (Java SSH Terminal Client) and LInux Magazine ]

The OLPC Game Jam is a game design and programming event designed to encourage (simultaneously) experimentation and innovation in the game industry and kick off development of open-source games for the OLPC platform (the XO). A group of game developers will get together over a three-day period to make as many innovative games as possible for the laptop, which is being distributed to children in developing countries around the world.

[Via Game Jam - OLPCWiki]

I love codefests. We should have more of them around here. Get a whole bunch of people together who are interested in having some of the same kinds of tools; code it up; release it to the public. I think I want to setup a EDU Jam for MN Private Colleges.

Would you come?

What would you want to make?