phipster

A Fundamental Law of the Universe

2012-02-15T16:43:00.000-08:00

...the primary rule of IT support: whoever touched it last owns it.

- Remy Porter for WTF!

How to write regexs matches that span multiple lines in Visual Studio search

2012-01-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

Visual Studio has its own weird syntax for searching with regular expressions. Here's how to make a match across multiple lines. Given the sample XSL blocks below

<xsl:apply-templates select="Alph"
mode="frobit"/>

<xsl:apply-templates select="Bob" mode="zap"/>

<xsl:apply-templates select="Cam" mode="frobit"/>

I want to match the two statements with the mode="frobit", even though the first one has a carriage return in the middle. In VS, you'd use this regex statement to match just the first and last lines, skipping Bob with mode="zap":

select.*\n@.*mode="frobit"

The first bit, select.*\n, is standard Perlish for "match from the word select to the end of line character, \n."

The at sign @ is VS's way of asking "please can you find zero or more carriage returns, but only as few as needed." The alternative is the "greedy" match, using an asterisk *, which says "find as many lines as you can ending in carriage returns before you hit mode="frobit", so the match in this case would make one giant match, including all of the text from select="Alph" all the way to the last "frobit" on Cam, capturing poor Bob in the middle along the way.

How to clean up Windows Media Player

2012-01-06T19:48:00.000-08:00

If you've relocated or removed a media directory but its contents are still showing up in WMP's libraries list, try deleting the contents of C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player. That should clear out phantoms!

How to restore TortoiseSVN icons in Windows Explorer

2012-01-03T15:51:00.000-08:00

From the TortoiseSVN FAQ:

With TortoiseSVN 1.3.0 and later, you can also rebuild the icon cache by calling TortoiseProc from the command line like this TortoiseProc.exe /command:rebuildiconcache

Open Windows Explorer from the command line with a Folder tree

2011-12-01T12:56:00.001-08:00

Did you ever have one of those "GARGHH!" moments when someone shows you how to do something sorta obvious but not really? Like opening Windows Explorer from the command line the way you want it to look? For example, I changed the default action for files of type "Folder" from "open" to "explore". That way, when I double-click a folder shortcut or "My Computer", the sidebar in the Explorer view shows the list of folders instead of the list of tasks, other places, etc.
The commands C:\>start foo or C:\>explorer /e, foo (notice the switch and comma!) opens Windows Explorer view the way I like it:

Typing C:\>explorer foo produces a standard or default view:

This respect for the user's preferences seems to extend to things like the tool bars and status bar and type of view, e.g. tiles or details. C:\>explorer foo seems to ignore all of your preferences.

Thanks to the mighty folks at How-To Geek for the awesome insights.

Good advice

2011-11-19T20:32:00.000-08:00

Focus on the product, not on your code.

The Anti-Car Movement

2011-08-17T08:24:00.000-07:00

Erik Curren writes in his review of Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay:

For my money, to get people to demand change on such a large scale, they’re going to need a pretty strong motivation. As any salesman can tell you, fear of loss is a much stronger motivator than hope of gain. And considering what’s at stake at this point — the survival of human civilization — a healthy sense of fear and urgency is also a more realistic reaction than warm-fuzzies about a higher quality of life.

Foolish things done in a moment of weakness

2011-07-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck.

Failure

2011-04-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

The best way to avoid Failure is to fail constantly.

Jeff "Chaos Monkey" Atwood

Gas Station Philosophy

2011-02-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

My office-mate's father once saw these instructions inscribed on a humble tire pressure gauge, and I thought it just had to be shared with the world:

Too little pressure causes poor performance, too much pressure causes blowouts.

Remember that as you motor on down the Highway of Life.

Smalltalk Lives

2010-12-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the heart of Reqpro, Smalltalk lives on. Got this notice when I quit:

Quote of the day

2010-10-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

functionality is an asset, but code is a liability
- Ted Dziuba on Taco Bell Programming

Keyboards

2010-09-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

I don't understand why most generic PC keyboards, you know the kind that plug into a USB port on your PC, lack on-board USB ports themselves. It would be so convenient for things like keyboard lights. Back in the day, my Mac keyboard had Apple Desktop Bus ports, so I could plug the mouse directly into the keyboard.

Compute length of a string in a batch file

2010-09-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

set myvar="some string"
rem compute the length of a string
set #=%myvar%
set length=0
:loop
if defined # (
   rem shorten string by one character
   set #=%#:~1%
   rem increment the string count variable %length%
   set /A length += 1
   rem repeat until string is null
   goto loop
)
echo myvar is %length% characters long!

Thanks to poster Secret_Doom on computing.net

How to fix "weird" characters in XML

2010-09-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

I had been aggravated by an extraneous a-circumflex character (Â, Windows keymap Alt-0194, Unicode '\u, HTML character entity Â) preceding all the degree symbols in XML output from C++ code using MSXML. For historical reasons, the degree symbol is defined in code as a literal const std::string = "°", which is later added to an XML Document tree, then output using fout() function.
Here's an abridged sample:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Data>
<Temperature>Â°<Temperature/>
</Data>

[explain ISO-8859-1]. It appears that MSXML stores the character in the XML document as a two byte encoding. UTF-8 uses variable-width encoding, which means the ASCII character codes between 0 and 127 map directly to their hex values in UTF-8, e.g. the capital letter X, is 0x58 in both ASCII and UTF-8.

The hex value, C2B0 (1100 0100 1011 0000), represents a "lead unit". After some Googling, I found a very clear explanation from Andy Hassall to a similar problem:

But your PHP code may be trying to treat UTF-8 as single-byte ISO-8859-1.

A British pound symbol is two bytes in UTF-8 - it's U+00A3 which is 0xC2 0xA3
in UTF-8.

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...00A3/index.htm

If you tried to display this as ISO-8859-1 you'd get:

0xC2 = Latin capital A with circumflex
0xA3 = British pound symbol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1

Mike Brown explains it this way:

Take, for example, the non-breaking space character, which in HTML we often write as " ", a predefined (in HTML, not XML) entity reference defined as equivalent to " ", which in turn is interpreted as the single non-breaking-space character. Different encoding schemes will represent this character as different bit sequences.

For example, in the "iso-8859-1" encoding, the non-breaking space character maps to the bit sequence 10100000, an 8-bit byte representing a value that we can also easily express as decimal 160 or hex A0. But in "utf-8", the non-breaking space maps to the bit sequence 11000010 10100000. If we interpret this as a pair of 8-bit bytes, we could say they represent the values hex C2 followed by A0 (192 and 160).

Now imagine you are the web browser, receiving an HTTP message containing an HTML document. All you see in the message is a stream of bits. How do you know what 11000010 10100000 means?

If you think the document is encoded using utf-8, you'll correctly interpret this sequence as one single NO-BREAK SPACE character (that's its Unicode name).
If you think the document is encoded using iso-8859-1, you will incorrectly interpret it as *two* characters: (0xC2) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX followed by (0xA0) NO-BREAK SPACE.

This was pretty much the same thing I was seeing. The XML processing instruction does not specify an encoding, so it defaults to ISO-8859-1. When MSXML renders the two byte degree character to single-byte ISO-8859-1, the first byte is saved as the Unicode lead unit 0xC2, followed by the single byte for the degree symbol, 0xB0. When the XML file is opened with a text editor (jEdit), the first byte is displayed as the a-circumflex, which happens to be 0xC2 in ISO-8859-1.

I fixed the problem by specifying the encoding in the XML processing instruction for MSXML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Data>
<Temperature>°<Temperature/>
</Data>

It works equally well if the encoding is specified as ISO-8895-1. Now the XML declaration includes an explicit processing instruction for the encoding scheme, and MSXML renders the degree character as a single byte, 0xB0.

one-liner: mount the current directory to a temporary top-level drive letter

2010-04-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

Suppose you're doing command line stuff in some ridiculously deep folder, e.g. C:\some path\to some\ridiculously deep\folder\way down\below a reasonable\level>, so the default command prompt pushes way over to the right edge of the screen, and any output containing the wraps 3 times in the window, and it's just really hard to read:

The following one-liner will "substitute" a temporary drive x: for the current path, effectively mounting C:\some path\to some\ridiculously deep\folder\way down\below a reasonable\level> as x:\

for /f "tokens=*" %i in ('cd') do @subst x: "%i"

Delete the temporary drive with the command subst /d x:

Substituting characters inline

2010-04-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Use the following technique to make character substitutions on the fly from DOS command results.

Given a file listing with underscores in the file names, e.g.

foo_first.txt
foo_second.txt
foo_third.txt

This is ugly, but it works. Start a new command shell with delayed variable expansion option cmd /v, then run the following one-liner, e.g. to replace the underscores with spaces:

C:\>for /f %i in ('dir /b') do @set x=%i & echo !x:_= !

The result will be:

foo first.txt
foo second.txt
foo third.txt

The first trick, delayed variable expansion, is enabled by starting a new command shell with the /v option. This lets you set and change a variable's value at runtime by surrounding the variable with bangs ! instead of percents %. Normally, the default no immediate variable expansion would not update the x variable each time dir /b returns a line. Only the last value set to x is echoed each time:

foo third.txt
foo third.txt
foo third.txt

The second trick, character substitution, is set by !x:_= !.

You can substitute other characters, e.g. !x:abc=def! would turn abcxyz.txt into defxyz.txt

The Metric Law of 90s

2010-03-17T16:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bruce F. Webster, who reminded me of this hoary old saying:

The first 90 percent of a development project takes 90 percent of the schedule.

The remaining 10 percent of the project takes the other 90 percent of the schedule.

Note (15 April 2010) - discovered this is also known as the Ninety-ninety Rule

Experience

2010-03-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

This notion puzzled me for some time: Have you got X years' experience [cooking, programming computers, running a business], or one year, repeated X times?

Simply, have you grown? Are you doing something new this year, something you couldn't have comprehended X years ago? Did you acquire a new skill, learn a new point of view, make a new friend, visit a new place?

If not, you're on the hamster wheel. Time to bail out.

How to run SQL*Plus one liners on Windows

2010-01-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

Suppose you have a simple one line query to run on your Oracle database. Oddly, SQL*Plus doesn't take SQL statements as a command line parameter.

For a simple one liner, it's often too much work to start up sqlplus, logon, type in the SQL statement, then exit. It may also be too trivial to save the SQL statement to a file that you then call from sqlplus, e.g. C:\>sqlplus user/pass @myfile.sql.

To do it all in one line on the command prompt, echo the statement into sqlplus:

echo select count(*) from mytable; | sqlplus user/pass

This technique would probably also work on a Unix box, but I don't have an Oracle db installed on a Unix box to test it out.

Peak Prices?

2009-12-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've had Oil 101 in my Amazon.ca cart for a few weeks. Just not ready to read it yet. When I checked my cart today, I was unpleasantly surprised to read this note:

Please note that the price of Oil 101 has increased from CDN$ 23.20 to CDN$ 36.97 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

How does Amazon justify boosting the price by almost 60% in just a couple of months? Perhaps, like the book's subject, we've reached "Peak Books"...

gnu find and grep: using path patterns to match more than one file extension

2009-05-05T03:44:00.000-07:00

Example using Cygwin gnu find, xargs and grep to search for a typo in XSLT and XML files. Note that -iregex matches a pattern in the whole path, and the pattern is a POSIX basic regex:

C:\>find ./ -iregex '.*\.\(xslt\^|xml\)' -type f -print | xargs grep -i "staus"

When find matches a file path, the path is piped to xargs, which hands it off to grep to search for the string "staus" - which I want to replace with "status" (but not here :).

Cygwin setup.exe fails during upgrade

2009-05-04T04:42:00.000-07:00

Like Ruben, who provided the clues, I discovered that a corrupt/incompatible alternatives.lst.bz file in the C:\cygwin\etc\setup directory caused Cywin setup.exe to fail.

A few clues pointed to this file as the culprit:

First time through, the installer complained that some other Cygwin process had locked the readme file

the installer just looped indefinitely on extracting the README file from alternatives.lst.bz until I killed it

The only .bz file in C:\cygwin\etc\setup with today's date was alternatives.lst.bz.

Here's what the log file recorded, for several thousand lines:


2009/05/04 11:01:23 io_stream_cygfile: 
fopen(/etc/alternatives/README) failed 13 Permission denied
2009/05/04 11:01:23 Failed to open 
cygfile:///etc/alternatives/README for writing.

I renamed the file to alternatives.lst.bz.bak , then reran setup.exe to successfully upgrade Cygwin.

Now I suppose I should log a bug report...

How to fix apropos for Cygwin

2009-05-04T03:09:00.000-07:00

If the apropos command in Cygwin doesn't find anything expected, run /usr/sbin/makewhatis from your Cygwin bash prompt to rebuild the whatis database.

Thanks to Mike and Igor for their tips.

How to make Windows %path% readable

2009-05-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

If like me your Windows %path% looks something like this:

PATH=c:rubybin;C:Perlsitebin;C:Perlbin;C:Oracle
OraHome817bin;C:oracleproduct10.2.0gpdbin;C:Program 
FilesOraclejre1.1.7bin;C:Python26;C:Python26scripts;C:
Python26Libidlelib;C:cygwinbin;C:Program FilesWindows 
Resource KitsTools;C:WINDOWSsystem32;C:WINDOWS;C:WINDOWS
Downloaded ProgramFiles;C:Program FilesIBMDirectorbin;C:
Program FilesDiskeeper CorporationDiskeeper;c:Program 
FilesMicrosoft SQL Server90Toolsbinn;C:Program Files
Rationalcommon;c:scripts;C:Program FilesjEdit;C:Program 
FilesQuickTimeQTSystem;C:Program FilesTortoiseSVNbin;C:
ipdsdevaxis2axis2c-rel-1.3.0lib;C:Program FilesJava
jdk1.5.0_16bin;C:jruby-1.2.0bin

Then save this to "road.bat" somewhere on your path:

@echo off
rem source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=757655
for %%i in ("%path:;=" "%") do @echo %%i

When you run C:\>road all those paths are nicely split and one-lined:

C:>road
"c:rubybin"
"C:Perlsitebin"
"C:Perlbin"
"C:OracleOraHome817bin"
"C:oracleproduct10.2.0gpdbin"
...

and you can do cool things like C:\>road | find /i "Perl" to find out where Perl is hiding.

To paraphrase the (brilliant) author VinsWorldcom, this one-liner

wraps the %PATH% ENV var in double quotes and then replaces all the semicolon separators with a double-quote, space, double quote. This effectively puts double quotes around all the paths (so spaces won't give any troubles) then use the for loop to list each newly double-quoted string.