Posts tagged ‘perl’
Mechanics lipsum
December 14th, 2011 at 11:11 pm by Dr. Drang
In yesterday’s Back to Work, during the commercial for Smile Software and TextExpander, Merlin Mann talked about a snippet he uses that inserts a specially-crafted lorem ipsum that’s exactly 500 characters and 100 words long. Most people use lorem ipsums (or lipsums) as placeholder text when designing the layout of a publication or web site.…
Why Python?
October 2nd, 2011 at 11:44 pm by Dr. Drang
A reader1 asks: It seems like everywhere I look people are pushing the Ruby programming language… What reasons are you using Python? Is it because of certain characteristics of the language itself or because you are more familiar with it (due to coming from a Perl background)? A fair question, and I’m going to pretend…
Renaming with Larry Wall
September 14th, 2011 at 11:52 pm by Dr. Drang
When Eddie Smith of Practically Efficient tweeted this the other day, I don’t use it often, but when I do it saves me so much time: A Better Finder Rename publicspace.net/ABetterFinderR…8:15 PM Tue Sep 13, 2011@eddie_smith Eddie Smith I followed the link to A Better Finder Rename (known as just Better Rename in the Mac…
Filing beats tagging and searching
August 30th, 2011 at 9:25 am by Dr. Drang
I confess I don’t get the enthusiasm for programs like Evernote and Yojimbo. Giving my documents descriptive names and putting them in descriptively named folders seems far better to me than trying to develop and stick with a consistent taxonomy for all my stuff. I suppose my preference for using the hierarchical file system comes…
Addresses, labels, and scripts
August 29th, 2011 at 8:52 am by Dr. Drang
A few days ago I added a new script to my plabels repository at GitHub. This is the repository that contains my scripts for printing on Avery address labels, although the previous two scripts in the repository weren’t for printing addresses. This one is. The script is called palabels, and it’s set up to print…
Deposition transcripts update
June 7th, 2011 at 7:39 pm by Dr. Drang
My back went out this morning as I was loading my bike’s panniers for the ride to work, so I spent the day at home reading material for work and trying to find a comfortable position. I was more successful with the former than the latter. What I was reading were deposition transcripts. These are…
Label printing scripts on GitHub
April 23rd, 2011 at 11:33 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve just created a GitHub repository, for my label printing utilities, one of which I used a few days ago to make labels for my new hard drives. What follows is the repository’s README, which should explain how to use and customize the scripts for your own purposes. Perl scripts for printing sheet-fed labels. They…
Dissociated Darwin
February 5th, 2011 at 10:09 pm by Dr. Drang
Have you been following Brett Terpstra’s series of “lipsum” posts? He’s developed a set of TextExpander snippets for generating random placeholder text, the kind of nonsense text people use when figuring out a web or publication layout. The “lipsum” name is derived from “Lorem ipsum,” the first two words of this nonsense Latin passage, used…
Duh, BOM
September 15th, 2010 at 7:15 am by Dr. Drang
One day last week, I decided to make a plot of my weight, which I’ve been tracking daily on my iPhone since the beginning of the year. It turned out to be much harder than necessary because the note-taking app Elements fiddled with the file format without my knowledge. Let’s begin at the beginning. Back…
Who’s up with nmap, revisited
August 19th, 2010 at 11:30 pm by Dr. Drang
I am, sad to say, the de facto network administrator for my small company. Today, one of my partners was having a connectivity problem, and while I was solving that problem (some cabling got disconnected), I learned that my little network probing script, whosup, needed to be updated. Originally, whosup was a one-line shell script…
