Tag: programming

After a recent feature request I decided to look into adding category support for my Ulysses-Post-to-WP script. In the end it was actually easy. It involved changing one variable from post-tag to category. The hard part was finding out that was the needed change. The documentation isn’t very clear, and I had to pull a post out via XML-RPC to see the format. The testing and writing up the changes took more time than the actual change.

After using GitHub to contribute to a project the other day, I got to thinking about other uses for Git. One was to keep a backup of my ~/bin folder. I write a lot of one-off scripts to make my life easier. Most of the time they’re under 20 lines and previous versions aren’t really needed. But sometimes1 I break things. Other times I’ll go back and wonder what the hell was I thinking.

Killed by spam. But not just closing, everything will be deleted.

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases.

The list:

I saw on Twitter than someone had made a random response generating page. I decided that a local version was also in order.

The project is a ruby script that can be run from the command line. It also contains a MacOS X workflow file that can be installed as a system service.

In my continuing adventures with the PogoPlug V4, I decided to get OpenVPN working. The install was easy enough, but getting the configuration correct turned into a literal project—it has it’s own GitHub repository.

My VPN provider of choice is TunnelBear1. I started with them about a year ago because of their free service. The free accounts get 500 MB of data transfer per month. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get me out of a data emergency. Like the time I had to log into my bank from a supermarket’s free WiFi. They also have a promotion where sending a tweet from the app will add 1 GB of data to your account. That’s enough to get me through a usual month.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

The goal for this week was to push out 1000 words per day. Only blog posts, fiction, project writing counts. Keeping track of emails and fourm posting would make me crazy.

Writing a sample chapter for a possible programming book was quite eye-opening. I’ve never done any serious non-fiction writing other than a magazine article. Writing a programming book is considered non-fiction just as a humor book is.

I find the classification funny. “Fiction” is defined as everything not-made-up. It can be anything from a story about a crime in your town to space battles. Non-fiction is everything else.

In the sample chapter I realized there was as much fiction as truth. I was making up a story about the code I was writing. I could take the story in direction and provide the code to go along with it. I’m not trying to solve an “out in the world” problem. I’m just telling a story, illustrated with code. If someone learns from it, even better.

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.)

Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works.

Lately, I’ve been dabbling in ruby programming. I’ve mentioned it a few times recently. I’ve also been thinking that what I’m doing would make for a decent beginners book. I’ve seen a few of the ones out there. The projects are much more involved and tend to focus on web applications. This would be more of a beginner-to-beginner style project.

I’m thinking there might be a place for a smaller, focused book. One that follows a project from beginning to end. Along the way it could touch the incidentals like git, text editors, the basic ruby gems, and such. The result would be a small app that interacted with a web service.

Last week I got sucked into a small coding project. I wanted a quick way to upload files to AWS S3. S3 acts like a FTP file server. But traditional upload methods like SFTP aren’t allowed. This makes the service tricky to use from the command line.

I wanted a simple tool that I could use in three different ways:

There are several file transfer program that have a graphical interface. Filezilla doesn’t support the S3 protocol. The built-in uploader in Hazel also doesn’t speak S3. Cyberduck is able to connect to S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files. But it’s not scriptable and must be used manually.