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Peter Bhat Harkins
Queue Zero
Life: media, podcasts, queue, yak shave
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Almost exactly a year ago, I posted about Sizing Up My Queue to count up how much video and audio I had downloaded to watch.
The final tally?
Deleting Spam From sup Maildirs
Code: email, spam, sup, yak shave
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A quirk of the sup email client is that it doesn’t sync back changes like deletes to mail sources. “Deleted” messages are only flagged and hidden from the user.
Sizing Up My Queue
Code: media, podcasts, Ruby, yak shave
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I have a folder named “queue” that I download podcasts, videos, and books to. It occurred to me that it hasn’t been empty for years. That’s OK, the world is a very interesting place, and I care that I produce things, not just consume them.
But I wondered how big the queue is. Not in terms of disk space, that doesn’t tell me much because the different encoding rates and formats result in very different file sizes. (The disk space command is df -h, if you need it.) In terms of time.
Installing You Need a Budget 4 (YNAB) on Arch Linux
Code: Arch Linux, Wine, yak shave, YNAB
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We only want to advertise YNAB for platforms that we can enthusiastically proclaim, “This will work great for you! We promise! If it doesn’t, we’ll work until it does.†The fact is, we can’t do that for Linux anymore.
YNAB & Linux, 2011
Life events have me experimenting with You Need a Budget, software for planning and tracking budgets. I like that it has an opinionated plan that balances prudent buffers and real-world complexity. Unfortunately YNAB 4 was built on Adobe AIR, which no longer runs on Linux.
Create localhost Aliases for Different Projects
Code: debugging, DNS, domain names, scar tissue, yak shave
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As a consultant I’m getting set up to develop on a new Rails project every few weeks or months. And I’ll jump back to an earlier project to answer questions, fix bugs, fix typos, etc. Eventually, something overlaps between them. I got bit by this again, so I wanted to write it up.
Case Sensitivity in In-Page Anchors
Code: browsers, fuck Internet Explorer, HTML5, yak shave
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As I’ve been working on Chibrary, I ran into a small cross-browser compatability issue: only some browsers treat anchors as case-sensitive. The call numbers that uniquely identify messages would be perfect for linking to in the middle of a long discussion, but some of them only differ by case.
So I wondered: is that acceptable in linking to an anchor inside the page? A quick experiment with Firefox worked fine, but I wanted to be thorough.
Dual-Booting Arch Linux on Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd gen
Code: Arch Linux, configuration, hardware, Lenovo, Linux, Windows, Windows 8.1, X1 Carbon, yak shave
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I decided to replace my mid-2011 Macbook Air 3,2 with a non-Apple machine, but every laptop I looked at was unsuitable. Most were overpriced, with a big and clunky design. The Lenovo X1 Carbon was promising, but the 2nd generation had a keyboard that was just too weird (and the function keys changing modes means you can’t touch-type them anymore). Standard qwerty is bad, but it’s the devil I know.
Personal Workflow
Life: procrastination, productivity, to-do, Trello, yak shave
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For about a year I’ve been using Trello, a free web app for organizing notes, to track my personal to-do lists across various projects. I’ve used it to create the Well-Sorted Version (which included repeatedly proofing 600 pages of gibberish) and update NearbyGamers from Rails 2.1 to 3.2.13 (while moving it from a VPS to Heroku and from MySQL to Postgres — a yak-shaving marathon) while staying on top of daily chores and other life maintenance. For the first time I feel reliably productive and in control of the overwhelming procrastination that’s kept me from from finishing these and many other projects for years.
Recreating My Firefox Profile
Code: customization, Firefox, nerd pride, yak shave
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With the release of Firefox 5 a few days ago, I thought it was time to recreate my Firefox profile. You may not know what it is because you only have one: it’s the set of your add-ons, bookmarks, history, and every other kind of customization you can do to Firefox.
Deploying Crontab With Your Rails App
Code: cron, Rails, yak shave
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This is a short one. If cron is an old friend, don’t futz around with weird Ruby. You know the pitfalls of cron (environment variables, long jobs without lock files). So write your crontab and check it into config/crontab.