Doug, Doug, Gray Doug
I had a mini-discussion with Neil Stevens about the genesis of my Mac use, sparked by the news that GNOME is moving to JavaScript as its primary development language. I used to be a strict Linux-only user and tended to look down on Macs as mere playthings. I’ll let the Tweets tell the rest of the story.
Continue reading “My Move To The Mac (Encapsulated In A Few Brief Tweets)”
I recently had a need to export the contents of a GNU Mailman-based mailing list for WordCamp Philly, so I poked around the web-based Mailman admin interface, hoping to find an easy way to export a .CSV or at least a list of names, to no avail. The only supported, native way is to use a couple of Mailman shell scripts from the command line. Alas, since this particular list is hosted on a shared hosting account, I lacked the proper access to pursue this route.
There are a few ways to get around this, but they involve
Perhaps you heard that laughter from where you sit? That was me. Laughing maniacally at those “solutions”.
I needed simple, I needed quick, so after a bit of Google scouting, I came across the following (ever-so-slightly modified/generalized):
wget -O - --post-data 'adminpw=${admin password}' http://${listserv domain name}/admin.cgi/${list name}/members | egrep "_realname" | sed 's/^.*value="\([^"]*\)".*value="\([^"]*\)".*$/\1,\2/' | sed 's/%40/@/' > maillist.csv
This single-liner should work on any Linux/Mac/BSD/etc. box with a decently up-to-date version of wget installed on it and it should dump a nice comma-separated list into a file, maillist.csv. Let’s break it down a bit so that you can see how it’s working its magic.
wget -O - --post-data 'adminpw=${admin password}' http://${listserv domain name}/admin.cgi/${list name}/members
Here, ${admin password} is the actual Mailman list admin password, ${listserv domain name} is your actual Mailman server’s DNS name (in my case, it was lists.phillywp.org, but yours will obviously differ) and ${list name} is the actual list slug.
NOTE: Some Mailman setups have pretty URLs turned on, in which case you may need to use admin/ instead of admin.cgi. The fastest way to determine the proper URL is to simply visit your Mailman list admin page and take note of the full URL.
This portion of the code retrieves the contents of the ${list name}‘s membership list by essentially screen-scraping the entire page. This is a step in the right direction, but obviously not very human-readable. The output is littered with HTML output that makes picking the subscribers’ needles out of that particular haystack a bit of a chore. The next two bits help on that count.
| egrep "_realname"
This bit strips all lines except those containing the subscribers’ real names. Again, useful, but still a bit too much info for our purposes.
| sed 's/^.*value="\([^"]*\)".*value="\([^"]*\)".*$/\1,\2/'
Here we look for two values contained in the line, specifically the subscriber’s real name and email address. We then output those two values as essentially Real Name, email Address.
| sed 's/%40/@/'
There’s one small problem with the comma-separated values we exported in the step above — the @ symbol is actually encoded as an HTML entity, namely %40. By running that sed, you’re changing %40 into the universally-understood @
So, when all is said and done, you should have a nice, concise, comma-delimited text file containing a complete list of your Mailman subscribers, one per line. I hope someone else finds this to be as time-saving a proposition as I did.
I don’t think the hiring committee really knows what it’s asking for on this one.
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. RedHate leads to a general dislike of humanity and root access.”
That’s right, folks, it’s time for another browser-clearing session ’round these parts, so strap in and enjoy.
What’s worse than finding out that a former classmate was published in Linux Journal? Finding out that he works for Google and races BMWs on the weekends, of course. Hi, Laz!
The world’s oldest profession? Not recession proof. How did I know about this? CNN Headline news decided it was newsworthy enough for a noontime story slot. I think we’re going to need a smaller violin, folks.
The creator of that Big Picture blog I mentioned the other day was interviewed over at Waxy.org. Pretty interesting stuff. And, if you’re interested in seeing ground-level shots from the Midwest flooding, the Red Cross started a category on their WordPress blog devoted to galleries from their on-the-scene staff. There are some very cool and moving shots among those posted, so give it a look.
Continue reading “…To The Dump, To The Dump, To The Dump Dump DUMP!”
I’m working a bit late today as I had to schedule some downtime for a critical piece of hardware that needed to be powered down, lightly disassembled, have a part replaced and then powered back up. As I unscrewed the part to be replaced, I thought to myself “Boy, it’d sure stink if I dropped this case screw down into the bottom of the case, what with this rack-mounted system being without true rails and all and thus really hard to get into.” Bet you can guess what happened next.
Cursing my luck, I sprinted back to my desk, grabbed my flashlight and the closest thing to a mirror I had on hand — a Dell system recovery CD. Back to the rack I went and, using the CD as an adjunct periscope, I located and managed to fish out the screw, no fuss, no muss.
I’m so proud of me.
WARNING: GEEKY CONTENT AHEAD
If you have no desire to read about login shells, Linux, source code management or other similarly geeky content, you’d best be skipping this one. -ed.
Have you ever allowed a nuisance to go on for literally years simply because you couldn’t be bothered to do enough research to effectively nip it in the bud? I personally had two such nuisances (of a particularly geeky variety) come crashing down this past week.
I, like many UNIX users that spend a good deal of time in a command line environment, prefer to customize my environment so that I can save myself keystrokes, work and headaches. Through judicious use of environment variables, aliases and custom shell prompts, I have made it easy for me to be able to determine where in a filesystem I am at a glance, run commands from any number of frequently-accessed binary directories, ssh to my various and sundry boxes, etc. I have done this on every UNIX box that I have spent any considerable amount of time on since at least my early days in college and, as I am a dyed-in-the-wool BASH user, I have always stored my preferences in a file called .bashrc that sits in the root of my home directory. While at Lehigh, having a .bashrc was sufficient to automatically customize my environment every time I logged in. However, ever since joining my current firm, I have been unable to get any of the UNIX boxes at work to recognize my configuration file automatically. Instead, I have had to type bash each time I logged in in order to obtain the customizations.
Two days ago, I had a brainstorm – I realized that some users were known to squirrel their preferences away in a file called .bash_profile and, in a fit of pique, I symbollically-linked my .bashrc to ~/.bash_profile, then logged in to a random UNIX box. Lo and behold, I was immediately presented with my fully-customized shell. I was at once elated and furious – I have, over the past six years or so, typed “bash” countless times, meaning that I could have saved myself and my fingers 4 x countless keystrokes, wear and tear and keyboard mileage. Grrrr.
I update all of the installations of WordPress that I maintain via Subversion and have largely automated the process via a shell script, although I have left a few of them out of the script so that I can update them more and/or less frequently as situations require. In both real-time and in my scripts, I traverse into the base directory of each blog and run a Subversion update; in other words, `cd [blog directory];svn up`. I was goofing around a couple of days ago and decided to actually pass the directory as an argument to the Subversion update, so I ran a test `svn update [blog directory]` from the base of my Dreamhost home directory. Et voila!, it worked like a charm. To date I have thus effectively wasted thousands of both keystrokes and CPU cycles traversing my directory tree instead of simply running a single command.
I share these insights in the hopes that they will save someone, somewhere some measure of blood, sweat, tears, effort and tedious manpage reading.
Via Slashdot, I saw a story about Richard Stallman convincing Cuba to adopt Linux. Linux companies and Linux advocates have been struggling against a reputation as mere software Communism – good thing Open Source Software’s strongest “advocate” (RMS) has gone and proved the case to be, well, true.
Gah.
With apologies to Trogdor: Shortly after I posted my review of Toast, I stumbled across a comparison review of a few of the top Mac burning software packages. Toast makes an appearance, as do Burn and two others, as well as a 5th one that was suggested in the reviews’ comments (LiquidCD) which got me to thinking about other media-related downloads worth your time.
First up, Windows users looking to convert their media over to handheld-appropriate formats ought to look into Videora which handles the conversion tasks for the Microsoft-addled. Next up is Democracy, an incredible video aggregator with support for RSS “channels” and BitTorrent downloads. It’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows, so platform concerns should be nil. Mac users looking to correctly tag their iPod-ready videos so that they show up correctly in iTunes should look into Lostify, your one-stop-shop for all your video tagging needs.
Last of all, those of you looking to get caught up on TV shows you missed should check out ShareTV, a site that looks to centralize torrents for a lot of the top-flight shows currently on TV in one easily-accessible website. Be sure to give it a look.
A few small compuer-related things have popped up over the last few days and I thought I’d take a second or two to jot down my observations for the benefit of all you fellow Intertron users out there.
Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald really took it to the French in re: their hypocricy in Lebanon in recent days. To wit:
In recent weeks, France stepped forward to act as a broker of peace in Lebanon. “Act†is the key verb in that last sentence, as it now would seem that the only other verifiable part of the sentence is “in recent weeks.â€
To correctly parse that sentence, one must understand that when France suggested it wanted to broker peace in Lebanon, it did not necessarily mean “broker†or “peace†or “Lebanon†in the way we might understand those words. The same is true when France further suggested it wanted to “lead†a “strong†“multinational†“force†there.
Heh. Go and read the whole thing – it’s a biting take on the folly of “international” “action” in the Middle East.