Amuyu

So, over the weekend, I stumbled across a Really Good Thing. I’ve been using VIM and the mac carbon based GUI for VIM for a while now. I’ve even set it as the default editor for TXT files. However, I found myself right-clicking on files and selecting to use TextEdit more often than not. Why? Because TextEdit opens up much faster. I mean much faster. Then, by happenstance, and a lot of bored tv watching and web clicking, I stumbled across this Cocoa port of the VIM gui. On top of looking much better than the default carbon gui, this one fires up almost as fast as TextEdit. It also has cool support for transparencies, tabs, and a full screen mode that takes all of the non-sense off of the screen and makes you FOCUS. It’s actively being developed and looks very promising.

macvim – Google Code:

Neal Boortz (boortz.com) is a nationally syndicated radio show host based out of Atlanta. Amongst many other things, he is the author and main proponent of the fair tax law movement. Those of you not familiar with this, I strongly encourage you to read through this. Well, Neal is also a funny man. A few years ago he and his crew took an interview of a local crime witness and “translated” it for the rest of us. Well, I just found this animated version of it. Enjoy:

Boo Got Shot – Animation – The most amazing videos are a click away

OK – this is one of those things that has bugged me since Leopard came out. I love QuickLook but it failed in the powerpoint department. It seemed like only 1/3 of my PPT and PPS files were visible using QuickLook. Well – this hint at macosxhints takes care of that. Contrary to the comments in the hint, my 10.5.2 did not have this on by default.

macosxhints.com – 10.5: View any PowerPoint document in Quick Look

Merlin Mann might be one of the funniest, but also most insightful people ever. He recently made available the presentation he gave at MacWorld. In this brilliant presentation, he talks about how to keep our time and attention focused. He also gave me another reason to buy a domain name – mentalsausage.com.

Check out the presentation:

While sitting on a boring con call, I went ahead and re-did the shooting wheel into a PDF. This is a nice big sheet version of this so that you can take it to the range with you. This is a great tool to improve handgun shooting accuracy.

Today I went to the range with my older daughter. We had a good time, but as I was trying to teach her how to improve her accuracy, I kept remembering a chart I’d see years ago. It took me a long time to find this site: http://www.bullseyepistol.com/training.htm that had the chart. I’m including it here to expose it some more.

So, I was just at a customer site today. They have an interesting storage problem. Part of it was that we needed to map a whole bunch of hosts IP addresses to their VLAN id’s so that we can determine how much storage was in each VLAN. This will help architect our backup solution. Well, there was no such simple mapping to be used, so we started with an excel spread sheet that had all of the hosts names and each of their drive letters (capacity and free space). Another excel spreadsheet had the hostname to IP mapping. Yet a third spreadsheet had the subnet mask to VLAN tag mapping. Problem was that none of these represented the data in a consistent manner. The storage spreadsheet had the short name of the hosts. The hostname+IP spreadsheet had the fully qualified domain name and the IP addresses in a full decimaled notation (i.e. 010.010.005.013 as opposed to 10.10.5.13). The VLAN spreadsheet had the domains listed in the standard x.x.x.x/x notation. Well manipulating almost all of these turned out to be mostly doable via excel. But, the conversion of 010.010.005.013 to something sensible turned out to be not so easy. Excel’s string functions are, ahhh…, rudimentary. So, rather than waste a whole bunch of time writing an excel equation that had a whole bunch of “=left(A2,search(“.”,A2,(search(“.”,A2)))” nonsense, I turned to my trusty command line on the mac and turned to sed. I copied the column with the IP’s to a text file called aa (one IP/line). It looked something like this:

slick:~$ cat aa
010.003.001.208
010.004.001.040
010.007.096.016
010.004.001.226
192.168.012.032
192.168.013.021
010.002.001.160
010.010.004.164
010.010.004.165
010.010.004.049
010.010.004.051
010.010.004.052
010.002.001.034
010.010.003.039
192.168.013.200
10.2.19.92
10.2.19.91
010.010.003.052
010.010.003.053

I then wrote this shell one liner:

slick:~$ while read i; do echo $i | sed ‘s/^0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*$\)/\1\2\3\4/’; done <aa

and it output this:

slick:~$ while read i; do echo $i | sed ‘s/^0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*$\)/\1\2\3\4/’; done <aa
10.3.1.208
10.4.1.40
10.7.96.16
10.4.1.226
192.168.12.32
192.168.13.21
10.2.1.160
10.10.4.164
10.10.4.165
10.10.4.49
10.10.4.51
10.10.4.52
10.2.1.34
10.10.3.39
192.168.13.200
10.2.19.92
10.2.19.91
10.10.3.52
10.10.3.53

So, the question is, can any of you (the four people that read my blog) do better on the RE in the sed statement?

Also, Microsoft, please add regular expressions to the function list! If not Steve Jobs, Numbers?

OK – now this is an idea that I’ve had in my head for a while and it looks like someone has done it. This service lets you set up “partners” with friends that have big setups to do off-site backups. In essence you set up an off-site encrypted backup at a friends data control facility … I mean home computer setup. The only downside I see is that this is a windows only tool right now.

Anyone out there want to test it out with me?

Zoogmo – Your Online Backup Community: Unlimited. Free. Secure. Automatic:

NetNewsWire has proven itself to be a True Time Saver ™. If nothing else you should attempt to use this and give it a fair shake for a week or two. I won’t go back.

In my never ending search for total nerdery, I came across a quick howto on google adsense. My blog is now adsensified, so if you are so inclined, the few of those of you that come by here, click away on the adds. I’ve tried to make them as unobtrusive as possible.