Twilight Universe

As in Be Back Soon, not the 80’s/early 90’s version… though that would be cool… hmmm.

Anyhow, this site is on hold for now, as I’m sure anyone paying attention still has noticed. We’ll see what happens (I have many plans, but we all know how that turns out).

I’ll still respond to email, and things will be left up around here, but for now there are going to be no updates until I work out exactly what I want to do with this space.

Until then - be well.

…and we’re back.

You might have noticed some downtime today, for some reason my site was using 40-50% of my hosts CPU. As that is somewhat crazy I can only image there was some kind of DoS or similar malicious attack against my site and a few others on this host.

I’ll keep you posted if I find out any more information.

So… Yeah. I admit it, I’m weak.

I’ve wanted an iPhone for months now, something about the UI just clicked with me, and I needed to get a new phone anyhow… so I caved and bought one on Saturday at the SF Apple Store.

I pity the suckers who lined up Friday though, as it was really easy to get one (though they were flying off the shelves) and I was in and out in a couple of minutes. Activation went smoothly and the newer version of EDGE* that AT&T rolled out Friday for data transfer is almost as fast as WiFi - so all that hot air that was written about it being slow is just that - bunk.

So very pretty, and really nice to use… top marks.

I’ll write up a proper review soon and post with photos, but suffice to say: so far, so worth it.

*despite what you may have heard EGDE is technically a 3G network, not 2G.

Having just moved recently with my wife into a new apartment in downtown Oakland I have very spotty internet access. In fact we’re currently sharing my downstairs neighbors wireless which only hits one corner of the living room… with a 6 year old laptop…  so my plans for updating this site every day have taken a blow.

.. along with my emails, other updates, projects, and many other things. You never realize how hooked in you are until you don’t have net access. Sadly I can’t get cable here either… ah well.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming, I’ll fix this soon hopefully.

For no apparent reason - I love working in the command line. It can’t do everything (no, really, it can’t) but it brings back memories of my old DOS days. The days I was still learning computers and drinking it all up like cold iced tea. The command line is so powerful and flexible, and because of that it can be frustrating.

For example - finding a simple string in a whole bunch of text files across multiple directories and then replacing that string in the text file. Tough to do simply in Windows normally, but I figured that, with the power of grep at my hands in Unix I could do a simple find and replace easily.

Not true, at least, not obviously true. The find part is easy, but the replace? It took me a lot of playing around to find out how to do it, amazingly it didn’t use grep (though it probably could). It fact it’s only one line of typing in the shell.

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