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Printing PATHs Nicely (with Perl)
I spend a lot of time in the DOS Command Window. And I spend a lot of time being curious about my Windows PATH. Examining the directories in your PATH can be a demoralizing exercise, but a Perl one-liner makes reading…
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Best Practice: Keeping an Electronic Notebook
My electronic notebook saved me today. I had a technical problem here at work, involving some old internal software. I vaguely remember using this software, but instead of rummaging through old e-mails or polling my…
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The Importance of the Namespace
I was inside XML Notepad, looking at an XML file trying to debug an XSLT issue. I was pretty happy to see that XML Notepad had a Find dialog box that supported XPath. I threw in the XPath for the element I was looking…
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The Slog
A co-worker asked me how my current project was going, and I said it was a slog . He apparently hadn't heard of this word, but a few days later he asked me how the slog was going. I had to smile.
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Travel Tips for Consultants And Other Road Warriors
I am headed "on the road" soon. Part of my job involves doing "onsite client work". This means I do installations, configurations, development, even training. It's part of the typical technical consultant's life…
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How Hard is it to Install a Web Server?
Today I was in RPM Hell , a punishing landscape even when you know what you're doing. And unfortunately for me, I only barely know what I'm doing.
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The Process of Elimination
A few nights ago, I tried to upgrade the CMS that powers this BLOG ( Drupal ). A Drupal upgrade involves an intricate but manageable series of steps, and since I have UNIX shell access with my hosting provider , it…
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Regular Expression Dialects
Over the past few weeks I had some simple text transformations that had me reaching for Perl , but ended up doing directly in Vim . These were very small exercises in Regular Expression (RE) matching/replacing, and what…
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Printing Line N
If you're in front of UNIX system, you should have access to sed , the UNIX "stream editor", which has a lot of utility to it. Here's a little idiom that comes in handy every now and then.
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The Soul of a New Machine
At the booksale room at my local library, I saw a copy of The Soul of A New Machine . Without a doubt, it's my favorite book about the work that I do.