muscling through a minor migraine while staring at a monitor

i woke up with a a headache this morning. what a way to start the day, eh? and it didn't let up when i finally arrived at the office, as late as i already was. what's worse is that any sort of light in my eyes made my head pound more. now, i can't afford to take the day off of work, or even just an extended morning break, i've got deadlines to meet.

here's how i muscled through that mildly malicious migraine:

step 1: treat the damn thing

everything you learned on how to treat a hangover is fair game here. this morning's recipe for success:

• two tabs of tylenol (your preferred headache medicine will do)
• get something to eat, the fattier the better (all i had was a bit of pound cake, but that's better than an empty stomach)
• hydrate hydrate hydrate, and when you're done with that, hydrate some more
• if you drink coffee, by all means chug that coffee!! you can kick that caffeine habit some other day

step 2: take it easy while still being productive

with a headache even thinking hurts, which is a problem if your job relies on brain activity. in my line of work, even the most menial of coding task takes some brain power. the solution: don't think. while you wait for the drugs-food-water-coffee concoction to kick in, do your busy-work tasks. answer some emails. fire off that email to HR that they've been houding you about. make some notes in your pivotal tracker issues. or hell, just catch up on some lifehacker posts. =]

step 3: turn down the lights

i don't know about you, but when that headache kicks in i just can't stand bright light. i'm lucky that the fluorescent tubes in my section of the office have been out for the past two weeks. i still have a big bright iMac monitor i have to stare into, though, and it seems like every application and every web page insists on having a bright white background color. never to fear, there's ways to tame it the beast:

• start with your desktop background. you can go the quick-and-dirty route with simple all back, or go with any dark wallpaper of your choosing (my personal favorite is the cli cheat-sheet useful wallpaper).
• any text editor worth its salt will let you change the font and background color scheme. Some MacOSX favorites: in Xcode head over to Preferences : Fonts and Colors, and go with the Midnight theme
  
  In TextMate try out the Twilight theme (no sparkly vampires here, sorry ladies). While you're at it, try out the Homebrew theme in Terminal
• try out arc90's Readability bookmarklet with the Inverse style to tame website's colors, not to mention make pages more, well, readable with no more cruft and clutter around a page's actual content
  
• if all else fails, invert your screen's colors. this option is usually buried in your computer's accessibility setting, sometimes called "high contrast" mode. If you're on a Mac you can go into inverted color mode with a ctrl-opt-command 8
  

how Dropbox saved my command line - extended

i came across a clever blog post on the 'tubes. it described how one could harness the file-syncing powers of Dropbox to keep one's bash shell config files all lined up across several machines. this was just the ticket to keep my mac laptop, my work imac, and my linux box command lines all in harmony with each other.

of course, i couldn't just leave well enough enough alone.

MacOSX hostname discrepancies

the first problem i ran into was reliably getting a machine's hostname on the MacOSX side. the network at the office insists on setting my imacs's hostname dynamically, and it's never the same between bootups. luckily i stumbled on a command that'll get the local hostname of a MacOSX computer:

Listing 1: getting the local hostname in MacOSX:

$ scutil --get LocalHostName

this will spit out whatever name you have set in System Preferences -> Sharing -> Computer Name, regardless of what the local networks says.

why not synced bin directories, too?

i have a handful of utility shell scripts that i had spread out across my different machines. similar to syncing up the config files, i came up with a way to consolidate all those scripts into a single shared ~/Dropbox/sh/bin directory. i also have a ~/Dropbox/sh/bin/Darwin directory for my MacOSX-specific scripts, and a ~/Dropbox/sh/bin/Linux for my Linux scripts, all of which my PATH environment variable appropriately points to. See Listing 2 to see it in action.

older Dropbox versions can't remember which scripts are executable

the official stable version of Dropbox on Linux maxes out at 0.7.x, which unfortunately doesn't sync the executable bit on files. that means all that effort getting my bin directories would be for naught. all is not lost! there exist Dropbox beta builds that go up to 1.0.10, which do support executable-bit syncing. the easiest way to get the latest dropbox beta builds for Linux is with a utility by the name of dbupdate. Note: if you have Dropbox installed for a single user (e.g. not system-wide, like how crunchbang linux does it by default) you'll have to run dbupdate manually from the command line. problem solved!

the goods

without further ado:

Listing 2: bashbootstrap:

# bashbootstrap
if [ -z "$PS1" ]; then
 return
fi

localhostname() {
 case $(uname) in
  "Darwin" )
  echo $(scutil --get LocalHostName)
  ;;
  "Linux" )
  echo $(hostname)
  ;;
  * )
  echo $HOSTNAME
  ;;
 esac
}

dropboxshelldir=~/Dropbox/sh
dropboxdir=$dropboxshelldir/etc

masterbashrc=$dropboxdir/bashrc
masterbashrcpost=$dropboxdir/bashrcpost
osbashrc=$masterbashrc-$(uname)
localbashrc=$osbashrc-$(localhostname)

masterbin=$dropboxshelldir/bin
osbin=$masterbin/$(uname)
localbin=$osbin/$(localhostname)

echo -n "Applicable shell configs: "
for bashfile in "$masterbashrc" "$osbashrc" "$localbashrc" "$masterbashrcpost"; do
 if [ -r $bashfile ]; then
  . $bashfile
  echo -n "$(basename $bashfile) "
 fi
done
echo

echo -n "Applicable bin directories: "
for bindir in "$masterbin" "$osbin" "$localbin"; do
 if [ -d $bindir ]; then
  PATH=$PATH:$bindir
  echo -n "$(basename $bindir) "
 fi
done
echo

# Set convenience aliases
myed=${VISUAL:-${EDITOR:-vim}}
alias editbashrc="$myed $masterbashrc"
alias editbashrcpost="$myed $masterbashrcpost"
alias editosbashrc="$myed $osbashrc"
alias editlocalbashrc="$myed $localbashrc"

a few odds-and-ends

• MacOSX gets confused with .bash_profile and .bashrc, check bash_profile vs. bashrc for a solution
• need some idea on how to spruce up you command line? lifehacker terminal tweaks is a good place to start
• Don't have a Dropbox account yet? Why not use this dropbox referral link to get an extra 250MB of sync space gratis! (full disclosure: i'll get and extra 250MB of space, too =] )

experiment: a week's free time without internet research

i'm a victim of the internet.

god bless you, internet, for providing instantly assloads of information regarding nearly any subject imaginable. wikipedia, you've been a great friend in fueling nights of curiosity binges for this trivia whore; everything from C macros leading to the design history of Objective-C, to the Danger Doom discography leading to the next planned Deltron 3030 album, you make it so easy to dive into your many information rabbit-holes and play for hours on end.

but i've burnt out. i've heard it called "information overload". i like to think of it a symptom of "jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none"ness. i have plenty of interest, and the wonders of the wired make it trivial to gather more and more information on any of them, then (attempt to) stuff all that info in my head for some later use.

one problem of course is, if i don't use it i lose it, so everything i put in, if i don't do anything with it it just fades away as if i never learned it in the first place. the other danger is that i tend to use this "research" as distractions from actually accomplishing stuff, or from discovering, delving into, refining, and clarifying my own deeper personal thoughts.

so my resolve this week: no internet research outside of work hours.  i can't survive a complete internet blackout though. i need my wired to comunicate with everyone i care about and who care about me (a week without katie is torturous enough). aside from that, this week's after-work free time internet usage i'm going to limit to downloading games so as to rediscover some of my classic favorites (starting with zelda: a link to the past), discovering or rediscovering music and movies, looking up guitar tab to get more songs under my fingers, and more frequently spilling my thoughts and confessions onto this here blog.

shit, i don't know what's gonna happen. i don't even know if i can make it.

no more idle research, spike. do. or do not.

transition from meager dad to rich dad

quite suddenly i've found myself, out of all those in my immediate family, to be making the most money. "don't be surprised, spike", you may say, "that's what that fancy computer science degree gets you". yeah, it's true, all those years of hard work in school and later in the workforce has finally started paying off, and in a big way. it's just a little strange, making more money than my old man, the one man i think so highly of and can never surpass. it feels odd.

and it's hard not to feel that it has all come so suddenly. just this time last year my contracting gig had no tasks for me and i found myself again without work and without income. not six months i was crashing on a homey's couch in san francisco, banging out code in his basement, thinking life couldn't get much better. these days i'm back at a stable office job, complete with my own desk, health insurance, and the biggest paychecks i've ever seen signed over to me.

my life seems to be on the verge of transition from meager dad to rich dad. i've tended to live my life in a pretty modest fashion so far, but i can't continue with my overly modest ways if i am to break out of this modest existence. time to start doing what rich dads do.

there's the big question. never being one myself, i can only make guesses what a rich dad does. here's my first incomplete stab at it: what does a rich dad do?

• a rich dad doesn't have outstanding student loans
• a rich dad puts away money for his kid's college fund
• a rich dad helps out his parents and sisters when they need it, just as they helped him when he was in need
• a rich dad helps out those friends in need who in the past propped him up when he was down and out
• a rich dad loves the town and house in which he dwells
• a rich dad dresses well (a combination of a shopping spree with raych and a shopping spree with katie should spruce up my wardrobe quite nicely)

this transforming into rich dad status certainly won't happen overnight. i've certainly a backlog of things to handle and take care of. i just need to start laying out a path, however vague, in which to follow forward.

did i leave anything out? am i totally off base? dear reader, won't you leave a comment?

"a new place to get my coding on", or "when RL happens"

i'm finally back at an honest-to-god full-time coding gig, and boy is it refreshing. you may have heard of my new employers before.

don't get me wrong, doing the indie thing with my boys at Ayumusoft was some of the best times of my coding career. i'm forever indebted to them for the opportunity i was afforded there, and the great times we had together. hell, my work at Ayumusoft led directly to landing my new gig. big-ups to Dani and Simar for bringing me aboard, and for believing in a guy and his skills.

i'm overdue for a regular paycheck and health insurance, though. my tyke is long overdue for that. and being at a place with a huge budget which lands an iMac, iPhone4, and an iPad on my desk, that's pretty nice too.

a full-time gig means my online presence has suffered. i haven't touched ye old blog in over a month. i check up on twitter only once a day and only on a good day. even my own flesh and bits FortuneBOT, i can go a week without taking the time to see what he says. a far cry from my contracting and unemployed days, when i lived almost exclusively on twitter and facebook.

i fib. my new full-time status isn't all to blame for my recent online absence. RL happened. i get to see my boy a lot more these days, once a weekend (hopefully soon a lot more than that); i've got an effing amazing, fun, and beautiful girl i get to call my girlfriend; and we're plenty busy trying to find an apartment where we can fully enjoy LA city living (as our times in SF has shown us: working, living, and playing in the same place is the only way to go).

i leave you now with a recent observation: new computer programming gigs, they always seem to begin the same way.

day one: "here's your new desk and new computer. spend the whole day installing a bunch of software, we'll get something for you to do tomorrow."

day two: "we still don't have any specific tasks for you to do. just grab the project from the SVN repo and start poking around the code."

day three: "how you like the codebase?" lots of hacks, but hey that's the nature of shipping software. i'm just glad i know how to refactor shit. "good good. here's some things the designer wants and/or needs fixed." on it.

lather, rince, repeat day three

my recent techie prowess, plus HTTP hacking with curl, and the joy that is fortune

being between gigs at the moment, i have to keep my days busy lest grow used to inactivity, or worse, i slowly lose my mind (any more than i already am). that means working on my own projects, which include a couple of code-related things i'm working on, and a few non-code related things (more on the latter in the future).

on the coding front, i'm still putting in a little bit of work into Corner Flower Shoppe. today i helped to finally get Google Analytics sorted and working (woot!).

then there's my personal baby, FortuneBOT. for the uninitiated, fortune is a classic UNIX program that greets you with a random quote; sometimes like a fortune cookie, sometimes nerdy, sometimes offensive, but more often than not grin-inducing. FortuneBOT is literally fortune brought to you over twitter.

the problem with the way FortuneBOT is set up at the moment is that whatever quotes he serves up is dependent on what server he resides on. this was fine when he lived on a tiny little server at home (an NSLU2, or slug, running SlugOS). reliability concerns forced me to move him onto a Dreamhost server. don't get me wrong, he's quite happy living there, and since hasn't missed a scheduled tweet due to untimely power outages. since moving to Dreamhost, however, FortuneBOT has since cleaned up his potty-mouth: no more offensive quotes! and those were some of my favorites!

so long ago i decided FortuneBOT needed to be rewritten, from the ground up, and forgo it's humble 20-line python script roots. well, now i have the free time to do just that, and use it as an excuse for a crash-course in ruby-on-rails and HTTP / REST services (in a desperate attempt to stay relevant).

the REST part of the equation means i have to be able to GET responses from the web service in various formats, not just as HTML. it turns out cURL, along with a little header hacking thanks to the -H switch, makes for an easy way to do just that, all from a command prompt. to make the whole testing process easier i whipped up a quick sh script to do the dirty work for me.

Listing: curl.xml

#!/bin/sh
curl -H 'Accept: application/xml' $@

i've also made curl.json and curl.text scripts for JSON and plain text responses, respectively. you're welcome, internets =]

on that note, i'd like to leave you now with a quote from fortune itself, one of the things it does best (and something followers of FortuneBOT are currently missing) - a dirty limerick:

There once was a man named McSweeny
Who spilled some raw gin on his weeny.
 Just to be couth,
 He added vermouth,
And slipped his girlfriend a martini.

Sessions with m-Xdoctor 2010-07-15.0033

I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.

hello doctor.

How do you do? What brings you to see me?

well, there's this girl i met, and i really really dig her.

Why do you say that?

to be completely vague, she's incredibly cool, i found myself
completely comfortable with her off the bat, and she certainly knows
how to flatter a guy.

Is it because to flatter a guy that you came to me?

no.

Why not?

my real problem, doc, is that i'm hesitent to speak to much of her on
ye old blog. i do like to respect others' privacy.

Does it bother you that you are hesitent to speak to much of her on ye
old blog you do like to respect others' privacy?

i little, i guess. i mean, these are people's lives, and i shouldn't
very well be blasting onto the public internet without their ok.

Earlier you said to flatter a guy?

yeah, she says the sweetest things that just shoot my poor ego into
the stratosphere.

When did you first know that just shoot your poor ego into the
stratosphere?

umm, how about the first compliment? yeah, that sounds about right.

Is the fact that about the first compliment yeah that sounds about
right the real reason?

no.

Are you annoyed that I ask that?

no.

Why not?

you're a script, doc, you just do as you're told. i can't blame you
for that.

Can you elaborate on that?

you're what's called a chatterbot, a slick computer program designed
to mimick human conversation, but in reality you're just following a
handful of simple rules.

Does the fact that in reality I am just following a handful of simple
rules explain anything else?

no.

Why not?

that's your nature, doc, plain and simple.

Maybe your plans have something to do with this.

well, getting back on track, as i was saying, i really like this girl,
so much that i want to talk about her to you, to the world, the the
internet ether. but i dare not divulge too much, lest i mistakenly
reaveal something of her identity. putting my own life into the public
eye is one thing, but i dare not force anyone else into the same.

same what ?

same public scrutiny and lost privacy

Are you sure you dare not divulge too much lest you mistakenly reaveal
something of her identity putting your own life into the public eye is
one thing but you dare not force anyone else into the same?

i'm completely sure.

What makes you believe you are completely sure?

that is my belief, doc. each person should have majority control of
how much [s]he put him/herself out there.

Is it because is your belief doc each person should have majority
control of how much s he put him herself out there that you came to
me?

yeah, i guess it is. i guess i just wanted to tell you that i've run
into a really cool, really sweet, really fun girl, but that i can't
tell you anything about her.

Did you ever regret that you cannot tell me anything about her?

a little.

You mentioned that you are hesitent to speak to much of her on ye old
blog you do like to respect others' privacy?

now we're going in cicles, and that's my cue to say goodbye.

Is it because of your life that you are going through all this?

goodbye, doctor.

My secretary will send you a bill.