patrick schneider

I don’t have a facebook account. One of my friends was trying to get me to set up an account so I could see some pictures. Okay. Fine.

I go to their Sign Up page. Here’s what I see (click to see it full-screen):

Wow. It’s definitely what you think it is:

Hitler is a verification word?!? Classy. I still don’t have a Facebook account.

I was getting this error when attempting to restore a checkpointed and journaled backup of Perforce:

[perforce@source restore]$ p4d -r /data/p4root -jr checkpoint.659 journal
Perforce db files in '/data/p4root' will be created if missing...
Recovering from checkpoint.659...
Perforce server error:
        open for read: checkpoint.659: No such file or directory
[perforce@source restore]$ ls -lah
total 5.8G
drwxrw-rw-  2 perforce perforce 4.0K Jul 24 14:28 .
drwx------  5 perforce perforce 4.0K Jul 24 14:11 ..
-r--r--r--  1 perforce perforce 5.8G Jul 24 14:16 checkpoint.659
-rw-rw-rw-  1 perforce perforce 4.1K Jul 24 14:28 journal

As it turns out, the -jr flag expects absolute paths for the names of these files. Once I made this switch, everything worked fine.

We have an internal Maven repository at my company. This allows us to have an official repo of “approved” artifacts that developers can use. (For example, GPL’ed projects might not be legal to use for our purposes.)

Anyway, we use a script to pull down artifacts from the official Maven repository (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/). However, the script does not overwrite, and sometimes metadata files are duplicated. The resulting directory listing for an artifact might look like this:

$ ls -1
1.0
1.0-rc1
maven-metadata.xml
maven-metadata.xml.1
maven-metadata.md5
maven-metadata.md5.1
maven-metadata.sha1
maven-metadata.sha1.1

Obviously fixing the script to overwrite would solve the problem of these “.1″ files. But, I was curious as to how I could easily move the “.1″ files to their appropriately named counterparts. My newfound love for xargs made me think that I could do this in one cool command-line statement. Here’s what I came up with:

ls -1 *.1 | sed 's/.1//' | xargs -i mv {}.1 {}

Broken down:

1. I pass the “-1″ flag to ls, which tells it to print each item on a separate line. I filter ls to only show files that match the “*.1″ pattern.

2. Each line of output from ls is piped into sed, which just simply substitutes nothing for “.1″. We have constructed the desired file name.

3. Now, I can pipe each of these desired file names into xargs, and use the -i flag to substitute the standard input to the {} token.

Maybe there’s a completely obvious way to do this that I haven’t run across, but, like I said — newly discovered love for xargs, and everything looks like it can be piped into it

Unix and its chain-commands-through-pipes always comes through. Recently I had a need to do some recursive permission changes. The permissions needed to be changed carefully, though: I needed files to have permissions of 664 (-rw-rw-r–) and directories to have permissions of 2775 (drwxrwsr-x). (The “2″ sets the sticky bit for the group.) Anyway, the find command allows you to find directories and files easily with the -type flag. And, as usual, xargs helps out a ton.

So, changing permissions for all directories below the current directory:

$ find . -type d | xargs chmod 2775

Changing permissions for all files below the current directory:

$ find . -type f | xargs chmod 664

The ‘xargs’ command is invaluable. It appends the incoming data from the pipe (in this case, the line-by-line results from the ‘find’ command) to the end of the command. So the above commands get translated to:

chmod 664 ./some/file/or/directory

…for every file and/or directory. Obviously you should change the permissions to whatever is appropriate in your situation.

I recently bought a Maravilla Home. For the money, I don’t think that there’s a better-built home in Austin. Listed below are some of the more salient features.

• 8′ solid-wood, stained, arch-top doors throughout. These are the most eye-popping doors I have ever seen in my life.
• 3-layer, hand-troweled stucco exterior. This is the real stuff, folks! Not sprayed on.
• 2″x6″ exterior wall construction
• 50 year, concrete barrel-tile roofs. The roof looks like the original clay-tile roofs, but, being concrete is much nicer and sturdier. Also, they installed a radiant barrier in the decking underneath the tiles to help keep down energy costs.
• blown-in fiberglass insulation in walls and attic
• Cutler-Hammer electrical service box
• Sharp Community Propane, provides gas for the Jenn Air cook top
• natural stone, vessel sinks in bathrooms
• red onyx tile counter tops in kitchen. It’s probably the most amazing stone I’ve ever seen.
• 20″x20″ tile in all common areas and 16″x16″ tile in the bathrooms
• private, gated courtyard with wall fountain
• high-efficiency (14 SEER) HVAC units
• minimum 10′ ceilings throughout, with common areas higher

The list of features could go on… many of these things can be selected and customized as you see fit.

Construction took about a year, but going into it with that knowledge beforehand, I was able to plan everything out accordingly. The house was certainly worth the wait.

So, the gist is that my Maravilla home is incredible: the robust construction is unparalleled by anything I have seen elsewhere in Austin, the finish-out is immaculate, and the 4-star energy rating provides continual benefits. The list of standard features beats any builder out there, and the vast choices in upgrades allows fine-grained personalization. For the price, I am positive that my home easily contends for the highest quality in Austin.

Finally, I’ve begun work on the slideshow of my IKEA kitchen installation project. There are a couple of hundred images in total, and I’ve only gone through 45 of them so far. Slowly but surely, though, I am making progress.

The slideshow is meant to be a chronological, visual ccount of the kitchen remodel project I undertook at the beginning of 2004. Hopefully people contemplating a do-it-yourself IKEA kitchen can use this site as a little boost of confidence that it can be done.

Check out the slideshow here.

Also, feel free to email me from my contact page if you have any questions or comments.

http://www.slate.com/id/2133754/?GT1=7641

Who else saw this on national TV? Hey Matt, what did you think about that game?

I still think we’re a better football team, they just made the plays in the end.

— Classy Matt Leinart

Oh come on, you can be more candid than that.

Regardless, the 2005/2006 National Championship game was the most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed.

http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,69805,00.html

What on earth is America thinking?!? I would personally like to apologize to the rest of the world for this outrageous negligence on the part of the Bush administration.

What kind of message are we sending by not attending these talks? That we, as a nation, don’t care? It would seem that way.

What an abhorrence.

Bush rejected Kyoto outright in 2001 because “its mandatory energy cuts would harm the U.S. economy”. I would suggest that its mandatory energy cuts would stimulate U.S. energy entrepreneurialism in new, exciting, and environmentally-friendly ways.

Oh… haven’t you heard? Global warming may cause the next ice age (and a lot sooner than you think).

Everyone in America needs to read this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wartech/nature.html

Then read Blink by Malcom Gladwell.