Category: Technology

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.

find2perl

I think I’ve heard about find2perl before, but I never used it. Today I was trying to invent a wheel once again and somehow remembered about this useful tool. Here is a quote from the man 1 find2perl:

NAME
find2perl – translate find command lines to Perl code

SYNOPSIS
find2perl [paths] [predicates] │ perl

DESCRIPTION
find2perl is a little translator to convert find command lines to equivalent Perl code. The resulting code is typically faster
than running find itself.

This utlity usually comes together with perl.

KDE web shortcuts

There is a saying in Russia, that can be translated something like this: “Live for a century, learn for a century.” Some people go as far as add “And you’ll die a fool.”. Well, sometimes I feel that it’s true as nothing else. I’ve learned another bit about KDE today. It a simple, but very useful trick. It could have saved me tonnes of time. It will save me tonnes more.

If you ever browsed through menus of Konqueror (konqueror » Settings » Configure Konqueror » Web Shortcuts), KDE’s web browser and file manager, or went into all the million options that kcontrol (kcontrol » Internet & Network » Web Browser » Web Shortcuts) allows you to tweak, you might have seen something called “Web Shortcuts”. Web shortcuts is a feature that helps you save some typing when browsing the web. For example, instead of navigating Konqueror to http://www.google.com, than typing your search query, and pressing the submit button, you can simply type “gg:search query” in Konqueror’s address bar, and it will automatically take you to the Google’s results for “search query”. There are lots and lots of web shortcuts that come predefined with KDE and you can edit them, delete them, and define your own. This is an excellent feature, but the limitation of it for me always was that I am using Mozilla Firefox for browsing and not KDE’s Konqeuror.

Today I learned that this limitation is artificial and does actually exist. I can easily use it with Mozilla Firefox or any other browser (and not only browser) that I want. It turns out that these web shortcuts work separately from Konqueror. You can use them from the “Run Command” dialog in the Start Menu (or by pressing Alt+F2). Instead of the command just type “gg:search query” and you’ll get the result in your default browser.

If you did so, and still get Google results in Konqueror, it means that Konqueror is set to be your default browser. What you can do is edit KDE’s file associations. You can find all file associations in kcontrol » KDE Components » File Associations. For the web browser you basically need to change only application/xhtml+xml, text/html, and text/xml.

Suddenly, half of the Web is available to you at much shorter distance than before. There are shortcuts for virtually all search engines, several dictionaries, function references of a number of programming languages, quotation searches, encyclopedias, etc.

On hiring programmers

Ovid, who is a rather famous Perl programmer himself, has a few tips about hiring programmers for companies who want to do so. Before reading the article, try writing your own ad for Perl programmer position available. Than see if you’ve got it right.

The main thing you want out of an ad is for people to read it. If you have nothing compelling in the ad, the people who will read and respond are the unemployed or the unsatisfied. Why overlook the competent, happy programmers? You want everyone reading your ad.

The Trac Project

Here is a quote from The Trac Project website:

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but the functionality sounds interesting. Did anyone try it?

Email frustration

Since my office workstation is dead, I have to use a terminal for the time being. While I have all the functionality available, things don’t feel the same, as I have to configure and reconfigure things to my likings. One of my biggest frustrations was with email.

Email is an important part of my job. I get a few thousand emails daily. These include alarms and notifications, mailing lists, reports, log analyzers, tickets and requests, and correspondence with colleuges and customers. I have a very fine tuned system that helps me to process all of these messages in a reasonable amount of time. By reasonable I mean less than two hours per day.

With my workstation going down, my excellent email system became unavailable. I had to switch to an emergency set of tools. And that wasn’t as easy as I thouhgt it would be. In fact, I realized how complex my email setup was, but I thought that I could manage without it, albeit in a wider time span.

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