bright static

I run into this time again; I need to copy all the files from one directory to another including the hidden files and folders. Normally you’d do:

cp -r /path/to/source/dir/* /path/to/destination/dir

But bash’s glob rules won’t include hidden files/folders in the top level of the source directory. I finally found an answer over at linuxquestions.org. Just tell bash to use a different glob rule and you’re done:

shopt -s dotglob

Another commenter suggested cp -rT /path/to/source/dir /path/to/destination/dir as an alternative, but I haven’t tried it. It’s also not in the man page (at least not on my OSX machine.)

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Been awhile since I posted anything. Better posts to come, I swear.

I’ve spent way longer on this than I expected, so I figure I should document it here because I’ll inevitably need it again. This all Ubuntu/Debian specific, so YMMV:

# /etc/hosts
# -------------
# format: IP  FQDN Aliases, comma separated
# list localhost on a line by itself like

127.0.0.1 localhost

# and external ip w/ fqdn and alias

xxx.xxx.0.1 myhost.example.com myhost

—

# /etc/hostname
# set to _just_ the machine hostname/alias, not fqdn
myhost

—

Now test with:

username@myhost:~$ hostname -a
myhost
username@myhost:~$ hostname -d
example.com
username@myhost:~$ hostname -f
myhost.example.com

While I haven’t been programming for that long, it’s been long enough that I should have thought more about what font I use in my IDE. Recently though I installed JSEclipse which wanted to use some really horrible default. I went in to change it back to normal and realized I didn’t know what my “normal” font setting was. I just used whatever the IDE gave me. I don’t think I can fully describe how bizarre this realization was, since as a power user that spends many hours in front of a code editor every day it never occurred to me to set it to something more desirable.

At any rate, now that I’ve been enlightened I set eclipse to use 11pt Andale Mono. I found it in the accepted answer of a stackoverflow question on the topic. There are, of course, many other options. Even after a few weeks to adjust I still look at my code and think, “Wow, that just looks so nice.” This is a completely new emotion, to look at source code and find it visually appealing. Code formatting certainly comes into play there as well, but the addition of a well-designed font increases its appeal by at least one order of magnitude.

Maybe this should have been obvious, but I just spent ten minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t cd into my sdcard on my G1. I checked the permissions and the system process had taken over the directory, with no permissions set at all:

$ ls -l /
...
d--------- system system 2009-05-09 11:30 sdcard
...

I couldn’t figure this out. Why would the system process have wiped all permissions from the directory? I had recently mounted it, while installing my new ultimate doom wad file (more on that later.) It turns out that since I still have the usb cable plugged in, even though I had unmounted the volume, the system process still wanted control of the sdcard. Makes sense, since ubuntu can still see the volume exists but is unmounted. Once I unplugged the cable everything went back to normal. Duh!

These films are fantastic. I can’t stop playing them:

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Thanks to BB for turning me on to Semiconductor.

As a developer I’ve always felt an obligation to own a domain and put lots of interesting and cool things there. Problem is I keep registering domains and not knowing what to do with them. This is yet another attempt at some kind of online presence.

So what’s “bright static”? In some sense it’s just some words that I thought sounded good together. I don’t remember exactly how I came up with it, other than mashing on the keyboard for the better part of an hour in front of a whois.net. Naming is hard. Anyway after coming up with it the first thing that came to mind was a starfield:

There’s also some interesting interpretations related to data mining / machine learning / information retrieval. Honestly though I picked it because I thought it had a “ring” to it, and only then did I start thinking about what it meant.