As many of you know, from July 2005 - September 2013 I made a zine called Haiku a Day. After 99 issues I stopped, wanting to stop while I was still going strong. Creatively, it's the second longest thing I've done in my life, and every month sending out the latest issue still gave me as much of a thrill as it did the first time I did it. It still tickles me that there are people out there who know me simply as "The Haiku Guy".
Sometimes you have a file that has a certain number of defined columns, and then some variable number of columns after that. Sadly, AWK doesn't have a nice way of specifying $N..., but this works well enough for me: awk '{print substr( $0, index($0, <N>))}' filename where you replace <N> with the column specifier (e.g. $11 or whatever).
Because CentOS doesn't include buildsys-macros-rhel for some reason, a few useful macros in RPM SPEC files aren't included, like dist and el5. To fix that: %define distribution %(/usr/lib/rpm/redhat/dist.sh --distnum) %if %{distribution} == 5 %define dist .el5 %define el5 1 %endif
I wish I remembered where I first came across this. Take an avocado, cut it in half and remove the pit. Scoop out the hole left from the pit a bit to make it large enough to hold an egg. Drop an egg in, dash some salt and paprika on top. Put in a low oven, cook until the egg sets how you like it. It took a little while, but it was tasty.
Taken from the Hoppin' John recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen Blog: 1/2 cup tahini 1/3 cup Frank's Red Hot sauce 1/4 cup water, more or less 2 tbsp nutritional yeast Several glugs liquid smoke Combine everything, add enough water to get to a pleasant consistency. Amazing on rice, beans, kale, everything....
I'm being dragged to a Thanksgiving Day dinner with a friend, and am taking along a cheesecake. I wanted to make a topping for it, and in the theme of the day, why not make it with cranberries? 1.5 cups water 1.5 cups sugar 3 tbsps corn starch Juice from 2 oranges Juice from 2 lemons 1 14.5 oz can cranberry sauce (I used the one with whole berries) 2 tbsps vodka 5 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters 2 tbsps butter More sugar, to taste In a saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the water, sugar, corn starch and citrus juices (if you don't want lumps, shake the water and corn starch together in a jar first).
In a Facebook posting by David Palmer he posited that Dude Jr. (the child of the Dude in the film The Big Lebowski, whom I'm calling the Little Lebowski) would be in his/her early 20s. Surprised that I couldn't really find any reference online to anyone actually calculating the date, I sat down with my copy of the movie, and I posit that the Little Lebowski was born on 12 June 1992.
Those of you on The Quote File have already seen this, for everyone else, here's something you can read in full. Before I go there, however, a bit of an update on how things have been around New York City, during and after Hurricane Sandy. You may have been following my brief notes via Twitter or Facebook, but those are really more suited towards short things; and while I'm certain to have a much fuller treatment of this past week in the next issue of Late Night Thinking, I thought I'd give you all an outline of how things are right now.
Here are some initial notes on writing a ZeroMQ backend for remctl. This is more of a quick brain-dump of ideas. The idea behind this is that often I use remctl as an authenticated communication layer, but it's native method of "fork a program, return the output" is painful for things that have expensive setup times (establishing a database connection, etc.), so I often end up writing a shim that talks down a socket to a persistent daemon.
For some reason, I'm always doing something related to backups, and frequently I need a way of testing backup software to see how it operates, if it's doing things properly and working the way I expect, etc. One way I came up to test is to use a large git repository as a testbed — it's got easily reproducable history and you can check the correctness of any restore --- does a particular restore match what git thinks a particular ref should be?