Posts tagged ‘perl’
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…
Open URLs in Default Browser
August 4th, 2010 at 9:45 am by Dr. Drang
You’ve probably read this post at Daring Fireball in which John Gruber lays out an OS X service, written as an Automator workflow, that opens all the URLs in the currently selected text. If you haven’t, go read it now, because we’re going to talk about how to simplify it and make it work with…
A quick script for Avery 5160 labels
July 24th, 2010 at 11:26 pm by Dr. Drang
An occasional theme of these blog posts is the value of scripting as a way of showing your computer who’s boss. If you can’t write scripts—and here I’m adopting a broad definition of scripts to include macros and other customizations—you become a slave to your computer, forced to do things the way it wants you…
Ack
June 18th, 2010 at 11:03 pm by Dr. Drang
At the end of last week’s post about trusses, I mentioned that I had found an old photo of a roof truss by greping for the word “truss” in a folder of project reports on my work computer. I should not have grep’d; I should have ack’d. Ack is a Perl script that’s meant to…
More Avery labels
February 4th, 2010 at 4:02 pm by Dr. Drang
This week I had to create lots of small labels to attach to laboratory samples. To make this easier, I modified my file folder label script to handle the smaller Avery 5167 labels, the kind usually thought of as return address labels. The new program, called ptlabels (“print tiny labels”), follows the same logic as…
My script hall of fame
January 27th, 2010 at 1:25 pm by Dr. Drang
Many of my posts here have been about the writing—or rewriting or rerewriting—of scripts to automate the dull, repetitive, clicky-click tasks so common to computer use. While almost all of these scripts have been worthwhile, a few have proved so useful that I use them on a weekly or even daily basis. These are the…
