Tag Archives: Technical Notes

Vexing!

Looks like I’m going to have to change my layout / appearance to this for a while. The ‘Quirkblog Classic’ look has something in it that breaks horribly when viewing category archives.

Wasting time through scripting

Just some silly geeky fun from ~stevenf: It’s zep.pl! A PERL script that, eventually, generates the lyrics to a particular Led Zeppelin song!

So far, the best I’ve done is 15 ZepMarks.

Saving time through scripting

I’ve got a heck of a project percolating at work. Basically, we’re going to be taking a ton of old surgical education videos that have been digitized and saved in a fairly proprietary WMV format and posting them in a much nicer, Video iPod compatible M4V format.

Fortunately, queueing them up for compression is something that can be done in big batches and left to render overnight. Unfortunately, re-compressing the video means that all of the tags and comment fields indicating which doctor it is and what surgery they’re performing are lost and need to be re-entered. We have it in a database, but copying and pasting back and forth between it and a couple hundred movie files is going to be a huge hassle.

Then I found this post from a guy who had a similar problem and solved it using PERL script and a well formatted XML file. I showed it to one of our programmers this morning and he thinks he can cobble together a script that will fix the tags on a couple hundred videos in a few seconds. I’ll post it here if it all works out.

Quick SSH Howto

I’m putting this here as a reminder to me, but other folks might find it useful.

Let’s say you’ve set up your home server behind a firewall, with a non-standard port active so that you can SSH in and do work from wherever you happen to be. Let’s also say that you want to connect to a shared folder via Appleshare.

Here’s how you route it via SSH.

Open up Terminal and type the following (substituting the obvious for the correct):

ssh you@your.server.com -p portnumber -L 10548:127.0.0.1:548

Then go back to the Finder, hit Command-K to connect to a server, and connect to afp://127.0.0.1:10548

Hm… A minor quandry.

How am I going to get my RSS feeds all straightened out?

Setting up forwarding of the old static index page to the new one was a simple matter of slapping a meta tag into the header, but will that trick work for the syndication feed?

I guess it’s time to do some research…


Update: I wound up just re-rolling things by hand. I swiped the RSS code from my comic feed and replaced the old feed with a pointer to the new stuff here.

Five Minute Install My Butt

Farewell MoveableType. I think. I haven’t been writing a lot lately, and part of the reason is that I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with Movable Type. Every time I check the server logs there are literally hundreds of hits a day on the trackback and comment cgi scripts. All of them spam. It got so bad that after a couple of months I just flat out disabled commenting. And started looking for a different hosting system.
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Testing…

Is this thing on?

It Lives!

Ok, the DBD::MySQL problem that’s been vexing me for about a week is taken care of. I had to reinstall the entire MySQL system from binary packages to do it, but it all works now.

For you non-computer types out there, installing from binaries after trying to build a program from source is sort of the equivalent of having some engine trouble, trying to fix it yourself, and then buying a new car that looks almost exactly like your old one rather than dealing with the smoking heap of twisted wreckage that your inept wrenchwork created.

tar -xzvf

tar -xzvf

tar -xzvf

I’m putting this up here because, frankly, I seem to be something of an idiot and can never remember that tar -xzvf is used to eXtract a Zipped File, Verbosely.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. It’s just something bothering me.
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Oi…

Ok, quick reminder to self – the hand-rolled RSS feed for comics won’t behave correctly if you forget to update the year. Should be fixed now, for folks who get their automatic comic updates from here:

feed://www.quirkspace.com/comic/index.xml