OneAndOneIs2

Having been a member of the gym for a few months, I thought I should start looking at some of their classes. They're all free, for starters. And I still have those aches and pains that just won't go away..

So I started this evening with yoga. An hour and a half. A roomful of people, only one other male tho. That's an even worse ratio than you get when you go dancing..

Was pretty good. I think I might keep going. Shall have to see how it compares against pilates...

I am SERIOUSLY ****** off that this piece of **** made it onto my computer - I have *never* installed the toolbar, and when installing the IM client always take particular care to avoid doing so. Finding it on my computer after a reboot when I know for a fact that I never installed it, nor upgraded anything Yahoo-related, and that it has tampered with the settings for every browser I have installed, without ANY of the usual "Hey, is it okay if I hijack your computer and **** up all your defaults to redirect you to sites you have no interest in?" messages, I regard as making your software no different from any other piece of malware that infects the unwary.

Stop pushing this **** onto people's computers. If I want your ******* toolbar; if I want your useless ******* homepage as my homepage; if I want anything other than your IM software which I'm forced to use occasionally because you keep breaking compatibility with other chat clients; if I want anything from you other than the one piece of software I actually download and install; rest assured, I'll ******* well do it myself.

Leave my computer the **** alone. Got it??

No, my message to them didn't have any asterisks.

I've ranted on here before about these people pushing unwanted packages and tampering with settings as part of every install process. The fact that they appear to have upgraded the version of the one piece of software I did actually install, screwed with ITS defaults, AND installed other crap as well, AND changed my browser settings, ALL without any messages or warnings, has really not left me happy.

Could you tell..?

Pretty much everything I do is command-line based these days. So I thought I'd post a few of the things I've found useful lately.

• {}s when moving or copying files.
  You know when you want to copy a file in a directory that isn't your current one? e.g. you're in your home/ and you want to do something to Firefox's userChrome settings. This means copying userChrome-example.css to userChrome.css but the path is a PITA to type twice.
  So instead, you can use curly brackets to make one statement do the work of two:

  cp .mozilla/firefox/profile/chrome/{userChrome-example.css,userChrome.css}

  - much better!
• Useful when you want to edit a file in a non-local directory, as an alias in your .bashrc:

  function vai {
  found=`find . -path *$1`
  vi $found
  }

  So, having created your userChrome file, instead of

  vi .mozilla/firefox/xvuz3pf5.default/chrome/userChrome.css

  you can use the above and simply vai userChrome.css
• If you want to edit a file that isn't just in another directory, but on another server, but using your own local text editor with its nice config files, you don't have to copy it over, edit it, copy it back. Instead, do it all at once:

  vim scp://user@host.name/path/to/file

• Lastly, regex find&replace - often handy, often tricky. So here's an example of one, you can extrapolate from there:
  You want to take a list of filenames

  DSC001.JPEG
  DSC002.JPEG
  DSC003.JPEG
  DSC004.JPEG

  and change them into

  photo_001.jpg
  photo_002.jpg
  photo_003.jpg
  photo_004.jpg

  The command would be:

  :%s/^.\{3\}\([0-9]\{3\}\).*/photo_\1.jpg/g

  which, broken down, means:

  :       - ex command
  %       - every line
  s       - find & replace
  /       - beginning of first term
  ^       - Start at the first character of the line
  .       - any character
  \{3\}   - Three repetitions of the previous character
            (so in this case, any three characters at the start of the line)
  \(      - Opening parentheses of a part of the search that we want to be able 
            to use in the replace text
  [0-9]   - match any number, from 0-9
  \{3\}   - Three repetitions of previous character - here, any three numbers
  \)      - closing parentheses
  .*      - any number of any characters
  /       - End of search term, beginning of replace
  photo_  - replacement text
  \1      - First parenthesised text in the search term, i.e. first \(text\)
  .jpg    - replacement text
  /       - End of replacement term

Hopefully, something or other in there might be useful to the geeks amongst you who use the CLI (or a decent text editor ;o). For anyone else, this post was a baffling waste of time.

Such is life!

As you'll see if you look in my sidebar, there's now an entry for twitter, as well as the facebook & other entries that have been there for ages.

I'll give it a go and see how I get on with it. No promises either way..

I know, I never actually said I was going anywhere.. Meh. Like it makes a difference. I left work on Friday and got a stunned "You're not coming back on Monday??" look from the boss (who'd okayed the holiday in the first place)

Went camping. Not my usual style. I usually go with the "What don't I need?" attitude, as a result of which I successfully lived out of a single rucksack for quite a long time and a phenomenal number of miles, as some of you may remember... No, this was the "How much can we take?" approach, as a result of which the only way we managed to get everything into the car was by taking the roof off it.

I'll probably put photos up on flickr or facebook at some point.

Funniest thing I saw in the week was a vulture trying to fly from a low perch to a higher one. Graceful, they're not. It looked for all the world like he was thinking "Yikes, the ground's getting closer, I must thrash at it with my wings to make it go away, or I'm going to collide with it!!"

It *did* mean spending a whole week with absolutely no internet access, tho. First time I've done that in a LONG time. Come back to a huge amount of spam and a lot of catching up to do on RSS feeds.

I've also started to consider putting my as-yet-unused twitter account into active service since I seem to have too few opportunities to write full-length blog posts these days.

We shall see..