I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
WordPress developers keep tempting me to upgrade – recently they have released version 2.0.1. More than a hundred bugs were fixed. No more negative feedback from user crowds.
If I wasn’t as busy as I am right now, I would have jumped on the update script already. But I just don’t have the time. Hopefully I will find some before the winter ends…
I came across the best shell alias ever:
alias up="cd .."
This is one of those things that make me go “Why didn’t I thought of it earlier? And myself?”.
In order to add some value to this post, here are my two mostly used aliases:
alias pd="perldoc" alias pdf="perldoc -f"
The other day I met a few new people in the bar. Most of them were younger than me, but not all of them had IT-related jobs and hobbies. While we were exchanging contact information, I kept thinking about the technology and how it affects our lives.
15 years ago, when meeting new people name and place of work or address were sufficient. People were asking for a phone number, but not everyone had it. Contacting a person was complicated. Espeically if he didn’t have the phone number (like I). Even if he had a phone number, one had to find out the appropriate hours to call.
10 years ago phones became more widespread. But email was still a new thing for most people. Not everyone had it.
5 years ago mobiles started to jump in. Approrpiate hours became pretty much obsolete – call during the daylight of the timezone in question and you’ll be fine. Email got more common. Instant messengers became popular too.
This year I met a lot of new people. And, although, most of them were from my area, I had a choice of mobile phone, email, and ICQ number to choose from in order to contact them.
That other day though was a totally other story. Everyone called each other on the mobile to save the number. Than we continued with ICQ numbers. Than with blog URLs (many people use LiveJournal these days). A notebook computer appeared out of nowhere and we connected to pub’s free WiFi access point and looked through each other’s blogs and journals. Within 15 minutes or so everyone know a whole lot of everything about each other – hobbies, interests, age, lifestyle, who travelled where and when, etc. We saw a bunch of pictures and even some common friends, although we were from different parts of the world.
When we left from the pub two hours later, I had a feeling that we knew each other pretty good. Missing bits could be easily reconstructed by studing all the available information. Or talking on the Internet. Directly. Any time.
It doesn’t matter anymore where you live. All you need to have is a mobile phone (which supports SMS), instant messenger account (ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! – whatever works for you), and an online journal (standalone blog or LiveJournal or both). Interestingly, it’ll take you less than an hour to get all three. The world is definetely getting smaller…
This is a simple thing, but when you need it – you need it. There is no need in implementing a function that does or looking for a module at CPAN. All you are looking for is already there.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; # Get the number from the command line or use default. my $number = shift || 42; printf "%b\n", $number;
You might want to refresh you memory of printf or sprintf by flipping though the manual pages.
P.S.: 42 decimal = 101010 binary. Is it cool or what?
If I would have a choice to install the only one plugin for my WordPress (how glad I am that I don’t have to make this choice, by the way), I’d go with Spam Karma.
Last week I installed it to see if it was any good. It is. I needed just a couple of days to realize how big of a problem SPAM comments still were. They weren’t appearing automatically on my blog, but I was getting an email every time a new comment was submitted, and I had to mark it as SPAM in the admin interface. Of course, there is a shortcut ‘Mark all as SPAM’, but still, it required an action.
With SPAM Karma, I don’t have to do anything at all anymore. It checks all the comments and automatically marks SPAM as SPAM and aproves the good ones. I don’t get emails about each SPAM comments anymore. Rather a daily digest that tells me how many SPAM comments were caught and where I can review them, if I wish. For each approved comment I still get a notification – so that I could reply faster. And on those rare occasions when SPAM Karma can’t make up it’s mind, it sends me the request for approval.
In short, it works better than very good. It works excellent. And I didn’t even do any configuration what-so-ever (although there are plenty things to tweak). Just intalled it as it was.
With this plugin there is no need to use captchas or limit commenters to logged in only users. Great!
P.S.: I’ve also recommended this plugin to Michael Stepanov and he seems to like it too.