Rick's Tech Talk

I spend a lot of time in the DOS Command Window. And I spend a lot of time being curious about my Windows PATH. A Perl one-liner makes reading that PATH manageable.

My electronic notebook saved me today. What are these? They're text files. When I think of all the technical habits I have, this has the best dividends.

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…

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.

I am headed "on the road" soon. Here are some tips I've accumulated about work travel.

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.

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…

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) dialects.

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.

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.