Do you ever spend 20 minutes figuring out the perfect way to do some arcane task on the command line, only to forget it and need it again in a month? I do. A lot.

I started keeping a directory with little plain text documents that had the command line I wanted inside them. I recently uploaded them to my static site and wrote a script to use them easier.

It’s real simple, just download the howto bash script in the following directory http://static.velvetcache.org/howtos/ and place it in your path. Now make a directory for your HowTo’s somewhere and put the whole path into a file in your home directory called “.howto”.

You should be able to call $ howto –sync and it will pull down a tar of the most current files, then expand it into your HowTo directory.

If you download the howto.tar.gz by itself, be warned that it is a tar bomb and will rudely scatter its files all over your directory.

Lastly, onceyou have some HowTo’s installed, just use $ howto -l to list out the possible choices, then $ howto print-unix-timestamp, replacing “print-unix-timestamp” with the name or number of the HowTo you want.

Below is the howto shell script, because I like including code in my posts whenever I can.

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#!/bin/bash
 
function printUsage {
	echo "Usage: howto [-l | --list] file-name"
	exit 1
}
 
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
	printUsage
fi
 
if [ ! -f ~/.howto ]; then
	echo "No .howto file found in your home directory!"
	exit 1
fi
 
HOWTODIR=$(cat ~/.howto)
 
if [ "$1" == "--sync" ]; then
	LRECENT=$(cat $HOWTODIR/CURRENT)
	SRECENT=$(wget -O - http://static.velvetcache.org/howtos/CURRENT 2> /dev/null)
	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "Can't contact download server."
		exit 1
	fi
	if [ "$LRECENT" != "$SRECENT" ]; then
		cd $HOWTODIR
		if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
			echo "Can't change to the HowTo directory."
			exit 1
		fi
		wget -O howtos.tar.gz http://static.velvetcache.org/howtos/howtos.tar.gz
		if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
			echo "Can't download new files."
			exit 1
		fi
		tar -zxf howtos.tar.gz
		if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
			echo "Can't untar the updates."
			exit 1
		fi
		rm -f howtos.tar.gz
		exit 0
	else
		echo 'Nothing new to download.'
		exit 0
	fi
fi
 
if [ "$1" == "--list" ] || [ "$1" == "-l" ]; then
	COUNTER=0
	for howto in `ls $HOWTODIR`; do 
		echo "$COUNTER $howto"
		COUNTER=$(expr $COUNTER + 1)
	done	
	exit 0
fi
 
echo $1 | grep '^[0-9][0-9]*$' > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	COUNTER=0
	for howto in `ls $HOWTODIR`; do
		if [ $COUNTER -eq $1 ]; then
			cat $HOWTODIR/$howto
			exit 0
		fi
		COUNTER=$(expr $COUNTER + 1)
	done
	echo 'That HowTo was not found.'
	exit 1
elif [ ! -f "$HOWTODIR/$1" ]; then
	echo 'That HowTo was not found.'
	exit 1
fi
 
cat $HOWTODIR/$1
 
exit 0

It’s been about a month and a half since I started re-writing OurUNO in a nice, intelligent, frameworked system with Smarty and I ran CLOC on my source dir today. CLOC doesn’t do Smarty templates, so I ran them as HTML, close enough, right?

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      74 text files.
      74 unique files.
     640 files ignored.
 
http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.00  T=1.0 s (73.0 files/s, 4918.0 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHP                  40       723       140      2370 x   3.50 =        8295.00
HTML                 24       151        17      1036 x   1.90 =        1968.40
CSS                   6        50        23       345 x   1.00 =         345.00
Javascript            2        10         0        47 x   1.48 =          69.56
Bourne Shell          1         1         4         1 x   3.81 =           3.81
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                 73       935       184      3799 x   2.81 =       10681.77
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What I like is that my PHP files are ~23% empty space, and the one shell script has only 1 line of code. Now, the PHP is all new as is most of the javascript and some of the TPL files. So even saying a 60% cut on JS, CSS & TPL, thats still 3728 lines of code in the spare time from about a month and a half, so about 83 lines a day. It’s amazing what as little as 83 lines a day can do.

Released Nix 0.7 today. It’s a minor-ish update that mostly just adds a bunch of cpu icons to the configurator.

Download Nix 0.7

So I finished Fate/stay night a few evenings ago. It’s 24 episodes and I really, really enjoyed it. Definitely in my top three.

The art varied a little bit, with some stellar work and some average fare, but overall it tended towards good I thought. Some things in the storyline went a bit under-explained, but that’s really to be expected from an anime made after a detailed game.

What made this show so great were the characters and how they interacted and grew. Really great relationships, even if the dialog was a bit spotty. I also had the fan sub version, so that might have contributed to weak dialog as they tend to be in a rush to publish. Make no mistake though, very good storyline and very good character development.

The only thing I outright didn’t like was the ending. It wasn’t necessarily a bad ending, it was quite powerful and brought closure to the sotry, but it just wasn’t the one I would have preferred. A follow up series would be awesome, and could fix the ending for me, but as far as I know isn’t really in the works.

Overall a great show, I give it an A.

You have got to love MySpace. Their code has got to be so nasty, I mean, just the markup on a profile makes me sick to my stomach, I can’t imagine the pasted together backend that would generate that mess.

When I got an event invitation I went to RSVP and had a thought. I wondered how well they error checked their inputs. I mean, I’m sure they strip and escape for SQL injection, but do they constrain anything?

I busted out Firebug, edited the source for the RSVP and now I’m bringing several tens of thousands of friends with me to the party. Awesome.

Click for biggies.


(Note: the 91213 didn’t work, too big I bet)