Dear Mister Jones

I’m back, miss me?  Seriously, it has been a long time since I’ve written a blog post.  I’ve been busy, that’s for sure.  Life’s been passing me by and all that – but I recently was re-motivated to share a few thoughts online with y’all.  Face it, writing and putting thoughts down on paper (sorta) is therapeutic, whether anyone’s reading them or not.  So I’m going to try to get back into the habit of doing this at least monthly, and who knows, maybe even more often.

So I recently read this article about teachers making money: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/teachers-makin-moola-on-the-web/.  From that I was led to the site of Udemy.  Holy cow, is it a great idea!  I don’t know that I consider myself a great teacher, but I do enjoy it – so this may be a tool I’ll be spending some time on in the future.

A few of my good reads out on the web lately:
AskMormonGirl - really drew me in with some of the posts I found here, I can’t get enough of the comments that the readers leave – very thought-provoking.
StevePavlina.com’s series on Passive Income – Although he has a lot of strange ideas on other things, when he puts his mind to writing a well thought-out series on something, he does an amazing job of writing in a sequence and style that just makes sense and sticks with you.
Seth Godin’s blog – This is the kind of stuff that you like to fall to sleep reading – usually thought-provoking and inspiring.

TTFN

On the source system, run:

svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > repository-name.dmp

Copy the dump file to the new server.  There, create a new repository to house the dumped information:

cd /path/to/new/repository

svnadmin create repository-name

svnadmin load repository-name < repository-name.dmp

Now, if you have a project that you checked out from the old location, that you want to point to the new location, run the following command (assumes you’re located in the root of the directory housing the checkout you want to switch:

svn switch --relocate svn+ssh://old/path  svn+ssh://new/path . 

I’d like to shake the hand of whoever did away with the scratchy tags in the back of the neck of T-Shirts.  There was never a good solution to them.  If you cut them really really short with a pair of scissors, you could still feel them.  You’d spend the rest of your wearing experience with that shirt thinking you should have just ripped out the tag – but then it was too short to do anything about it.  If you ripped them out – you’d almost always end up with some part of your collar detached from the rest of the shirt.

The only problem I have now is that occasionally I’ll discover partway through my day that I’m wearing my shirt backwards.  This little sacrifice in fashion is a small price to pay for comfort.

One of my pet peeves is when I visit a web site and it automatically takes up the entire width of the screen.  I have a rather large monitor (you’d be jealous if you saw it) – so when a block of text actually stretches completely from the left to the right, unless I’m sitting far back from the screen, I actually have to move my head from side to side to read it.  This requires much more effort than simply moving my eyes from left to right.  I’m not sure what it is about it that actually bugs me so much – I suppose I like some whitespace around the blocks of text that I read.  Otherwise I feel a feeling akin to claustrophobia.  I wonder what a word would be to describe it – zeromargiphobia? overwide-a-phobia?

Just needed to rant for a moment.

Recently one of my hosting providers went and changed the path to my home directory without telling me.  So, I had to go through a gajillion files and modify a path to reflect the changes.  I thought I’d go ahead and share how I did that for anyone out there that has a similar need.

There are several ways to accomplish this – but this is how I like to do it (this is from a linux command shell):

find . -name somefile -exec perl -pi.bliki -e ‘s/textToFind/replacement/g’ {} \;

The above command uses the find command, starting from the current location (.), looking for files named ‘somefile’ (-name somefile), and every time it finds one, it runs the command following the -exec parameter.  The command following the -exec parameter is a perl one-liner that backs up the file it’s about to modify (with a .bliki extension, I just try to pick something I’m sure will not result in overwriting a legitimate file), and then does a global search and replace of textToFind with replacement.  In the above command, the {} is where find inserts the current file it has found.  You must backslash the semi-colon at the end so that the shell doesn’t interpret it and leaves it for use by the find -exec command.

Once you’ve completed the search and replace, you use the following command to go through and remove all of the backup files created with the .bliki extension.

find . -name somefile.bliki -exec rm {} \;

Hope this makes sense?

Post questions if you need clarification on anything.

I enjoy riddles.  By happenstance, I happened upon the (in)famous -gry riddle, but luckily before I got too carried away searching for an answer I found an essay written by the Word Detective on this very puzzle.

The key to successfully finding an answer to this wriddle is in getting the wording correct:

Angry and hungry are two words that end in ‘-gry’. There are three words in the English language. What is the third word? Everyone knows what it means and everyone uses it every day. Look closely and I have already given you the third word. What is it?

For the answer, see this essay.

Feeling crippled on Windows by not having access to such commands as grep, awk, tail, less … ?  Go here to get a copy of these utilities ported to the Win32 platform.  They’ve made my life much easier when I’m trying to do some quick command-line trickery on a Windows box.

When progamming an AIR application, you may want to make use of the applicationStorageDirectory available via the flash.filesystem package to store temporary files/folders.  You can find where your system is storing these files by doing something like the following:

var f:File = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath(“Test.txt”);
trace(f.nativePath + ‘ is where my file is stored’);

I recently read an excellent article written by Po Bronson entitled, ‘What Should I Do With My Life?‘  It’s an excerpt/summary of a book of the same name.  I don’t recall when I first ran across the article, but I bookmarked it under my “read this later” folder, because it was too long to digest in a short 10 minute sitting.  Well, approximately 3 months later, I have finally returned and have read the entire article.  It was very good.  I don’t know what to do with my life yet, but I took great solace in reading Po Bronson express how others have gone about finding the answer to that question for themselves.

At any rate, I enjoyed the article so much I wanted to find out more about the author, so I meandered over to his web page, and read Po’s basic philosophy on writing.  He closes with the following paragraph:

“I think when a reader reads a whole book – which takes six to ten hours – that’s kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I’m grateful for it.”

Amen to that.  When you consider that everyone has limitless choices available when it comes to reading material these days – it truly is a gift when someone chooses to spend time absorbing yours.