Stephen Van Dahm

Total nerd meme

Stephen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:43:51 +0000

After reading James Bennett’s latest post, I immediately tried the following Unix command:

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  140   ls
  120   cd
   47   su
   26   vim
   26   exit
   14   svn
   11   cat
   10   ./manage.py
    8   mkdir
    7   python

HOWTO: Get rid of that revolting faux-3D Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Stephen — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:07:49 +0000

I don’t know what the folks at Apple were smoking when they decided to build that ugly, glassy fake 3D Dock into Leopard. There is no way in hell that I’m going to look at that every day for the next two years. Fortunately, there appears to be a solution. At the Unix prompt, type:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Now, when the Dock is positioned at the bottom, it takes on the somewhat less abrasive look it has when attached to the sides of the screen. It’s still ugly, but I’ll be able to live with it until Apple releases 10.6.

Writing a new CMS

Stephen — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:25:12 +0000

Tonight, I’ve taken the first steps towards ditching WordPress and rolling my own custom CMS. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and I’ve always dismissed it on the grounds that it’s too much work and time, and that there’s already a ton of blogging software out there. But the truth is, I don’t want a blog, or at least I don’t want my site to look like a blog and be organized like a blog. Basically, I want to use my website to publish a few different kinds of things:

basic information about who I am and what I do.
links to all the cool sites I find, with commentary on why they I think they’re interesting.
digital pictures
code snippets that I’ve written and collected.
longer article-length posts on different subjects that interest me.

Each of these types of content needs to be presented in a different manner, so simply creating new categories in WordPress isn’t the answer. Installing n separate applications to cover all these bases might work, but then I’ll be stuck with n different sets of user accounts, n different admin interfaces, and n different sets of HTML templates. I’ve done that before, and I don’t want to do it ever again. I’ve also tried hacking WordPress and Movable Type to accommodate these different roles, and it sucked, and I don’t want to do that ever again, either.

Besides, I’m a programmer and I want to program stuff.

I’ve decided that, for this project, I’ll use the Python language and the Django web framework. I thought about using this opportunity to learn Rails, but I’ve already got a project in mind for that. I’ve loved Python since my college days, and Django is an awesome framework for rolling your own CMS.

Since I’m writing this on the evenings and weekends, it will be a while before the new system launches. Until then, I’ll still be using WordPress.

Computer Error Message, Probably

Stephen — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:58:24 +0000

This rates as one of the most unhelpful error messages I’ve ever seen:

…unless, of course, it didn’t. Who knows?

Cool Python Function

Stephen — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:56:18 +0000

I’m not sure that others would find this interesting, but I’m posting it anyway in case I need this later. While working on a Python script, I needed something that would generate the proper suffixes to make ordinal numbers like 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Since some markup schemes allow you make the suffix a superscript, I wanted a function that only generates the suffix, so that I can use the function with multiple markup conventions. I poked around in the module documentation and didn’t find anything useful, so I wrote this:

def get_suffix(num):

    special_suffixes = { '1': 'st', '2': 'nd', '3': 'rd' }
    default_return = 'th'

    digits = str(abs(num)) # To work with negative numbers
    last_digit = digits[-1:]

    if last_digit in special_suffixes.keys():
        # Numbers that end in 11, 12, and 13 just get 'th'
        if len(digits) == 1 or digits[-2] != '1':
            default_return = special_suffixes[last_digit]

    return default_return

Short and easy.

Hilarity From The Onion

Stephen — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 18:00:27 +0000

I know this is juvenile, but I can’t stop laughing at this page on The Onion’s site.

NOAA’s Weather Feeds

Stephen — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:10:52 +0000

For a project at work, I need to provide a constantly-updated weather forecast of a certain area in Northern Minnesota. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that The National Weather Service provides this information for free in XML format. Unfortunately, accessing it is kind of a pain. I would like to be able to do something like this:

wget http://nws.noaa.gov/feeds/?zip=55xxx&days=7

But that would be too easy. Instead, you have to use SOAP to send a request and get a response. Even in Ruby, it’s more work and doesn’t really seem natural:

#!/opt/local/bin/ruby

require 'soap/wsdlDriver.rb'

WSDL_URL = "Really long URL"
latitude = 47.716309
longitude = -90.489143

soap = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(WSDL_URL).create_rpc_driver
xml = soap.NDFDgenByDay(latitude, longitude,
                        Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"),
                        7, "24 hourly")

File.open("/path/to/data/weather.xml", "w") do |file|
    file << xml
end

On the bright side, kudos to Ruby for including SOAP classes in its standard library. Python doesn’t seem to do this, and the Python SOAP module in DarwinPorts wouldn’t build for some reason.

Apple’s open(1) Command

Stephen — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:00:37 +0000

I really like OS X. In particular, I like its open(1) command. I seriously wish that Linux and BSD had something like this. Basically, you type open and that file is handled as if you had double-clicked it. This command is so useful and convenient that I can’t remember what I did without it. For instance, today I wanted to edit all the PHP files in a certain directory that had a certain text string in them. Easy:

grep -l text_string *.php | xargs open

Then, OS X opened up my text editor and loaded it with these two files, automagically.

As much as I wish this would appear in Free Unix implementations, I don’t see it happening. Sigh…

Moving from WordPress to Typo

Stephen — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:12:41 +0000

I’m getting fed up with WordPress and am considering ditching it in favor of Typo. You can check out my test weblog here.

Edit: In addition to being slow as tar, Typo is a serious memory hog. For the time being, I’m sticking with WordPress.

I Want to Cry

Stephen — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:19:58 +0000

I’m pretty bummed out after reading part of a transcript of a Senate Commerce Committee meeting on Net Neutrality.

Ted Stevens (from Alaska) apparently received the entire Internet in his e-mail:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

These are the people making important technology decisions that will affect the entire country for decades?

Edit (2006-07-14): Jon Stewart’s Daily Show commentary is absolutely hilarious.

Edit (2006-07-17): And here’s the obligatory techno remix.