• For example - if you came in here asking “how do I use a jackhammer” we might ask “why do you need to use a jackhammer”
• If the answer to the latter question is “to knock my grandmother’s head off to let out the evil spirits that gave her cancer”, then maybe the problem is actually unrelated to jackhammers

The bash.org quotes database.

Knowing the scope of the problem is more important than having what looks like a solution to the problem, and sometimes going through the effort of building a possible solution is the only way to truly understand the scope.

Google, from an article on how to tackle those massive programming projects.

In hopes that it’ll be handy to someone, somewhere, someday, here’s a fun little PHP CLI (!!) tool that takes a directory of images and removes spaces and parentheses, the two most common culprits of brokenness on the web when it comes to unix compatible filenames. The script takes exactly one (optional) argument, specified by the -p flag – the path to the directory you want the script to operate on. (That’s right, this baby works recursively!)

I actually can’t take any of the credit for this one. It’s all Tim’s doing. All I did was add the path flag/CLI stuff. Just download the file at the link below, rename with a PHP extension, and place in a convenient location.

Download now!

And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

Anil Dash, on the key reason he believes the open standards for Google Wave will have a tough time being adopted and adapted.

Calling Iranian politics “byzantine” doesn’t quite do the trick, because all Byzantium really had going on was palace intrigue. Tehran is that, plus Twitter.

Gabriel Winant, from a piece detailing the ins-and-outs of Iran's current political scene. I love Twitter and all, but ascribing this kind of importance to the service is just way over the top.

When someone says “FAIL”, what they’re really saying is, “I’m failing to understand a creative person’s constraints.”

Anil Dash, on the death of FAIL.

If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.

Reid Hoffman. (via 37signals.)

In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

Kai Diefenbach, quoting an unnamed source.

I just managed to successfully upgrade an Ubuntu Intrepid server configured for Django to Ubuntu Feisty. Since you're here, you're probably trying to do something similar, so I hope these instructions help. My initial build more or less followed these instructions. You may want to check and see how closely your build matches mine before proceeding.

Your first task is upgrading the server. (All performed as root.)

1. sed -e 's/\intrepid/ jaunty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get dist-upgrade

The next part was tougher to figure out. It turns out that Ubuntu Jaunty ships with Python 2.6 as the default Python version. Python 2.6 has changed the site-packages directory (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages) to dist-packages (/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages). It's a sensible name change, so I'm not complaining.

I had a lot of stuff in site-packages – including my Django core files – so rather than symlink everything therein, I just deleted the bits already in the dist-packages directory and moved the contents of site-packages over. So:

1. sudo mv /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/* /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages

You've probably also symlinked the admin media from your Django install into your project, so be sure to delete and recreate that link. For me, that process looked like this:

1. sudo rm /home/dawsoning/public_html/static.dawsoning.com/admin
2. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media /home/dawsoning/public_html/static.dawsoning.com/admin

Happy upgrade!

We called it the Rubber Duck method of debugging. It goes like this:

1. Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck (bathtub variety).
2. Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that's all right.
3. Explain to the duck what you code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain things line by line.
4. At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.

Works every time. Actually, if you don't have a rubber duck you could at a pinch ask a fellow programmer or engineer to sit in.

Andrew Errington, from an awk list-serv discussion on debugging.

When you talk about how much you like a tune, you don’t say: “That’s a great MP3”. You say: “That’s a great song”. The MP3 is the delivery mechanism, not the creative work; just as in type a font is the delivery mechanism and a typeface is the creative work.

Stephen Coles, typography enthusiast and contributor to Font Feed, on the distinction between the terms "font" and "typeface." (via Jeff Croft.)

We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust.

I guess we’ll just have to adjust.

Arcade Fire, from the song "Wake Up."

You’ve been doing it the hard way.

I ran across the “Find and Replace” utility months ago when I was updating a client’s posts with some revised verbage, sitewide. This handy little tool does exactly what it says – that is, lets you search various resources in your EE database and replace specified bits within. You can find the Find and Replace utility by going to the Admin tab, choosing Utilities, and clicking Find and Replace.

What I’d missed initially is that you can actually select “Site Preferences” as a find-and-replace target for one or (if you’re using the multi-site manager) multiple sites. The reason this is important is that many site preferences aren’t easily accessible any other way than, as the Knowledge Base article linked above implies, clicking through tabs and tabs of control panel options. Where before I needed to find every instance of “http://devserver.com” and change it to “http://liveserver.com” through the admin interface, now I just use the included utility.

With Category 4’s WordPress sites, we’ll typically dump the database and do a search and replace on the dump to get at all the possible locations where the address may need to be changed. For some reason (I think because EE tends to serialize data when it really doesn’t need to) that approach never worked perfectly with EE.

But that’s fine. I like this new trick.

There is an unacknowledged war that goes on every day in the world of programming. It is a war between the humans and the computer scientists. It is a war between those who want simple, sloppy, flexible, human ways to write code and those who want clean, crisp, clear, correct ways to write code. It is the war between PHP and C++/Java. It used to be the war between C and dBase. Programmers at the level of those who attend Columbia University, programmers at the level of those who have made it through the gauntlet that is Google recruiting, programmers at the level of this audience are all people who love precise tools, abstraction, serried ranks of orderly propositions, and deduction. But most people writing code are more like my son. Code is just a hammer they use to do the job.

Adam Bosworth, from a 2004 speech on the primacy of simple, sloppy systems over rigid, perfect ones.

TNF has gotten the short end of the stick since Meg and I became parents. (I’m planning for that to change, for what that’s worth.) The lack of action here is partly due to the fact that I launched another site, Dawsoning, a week or so after Asher was born.

Dawsoning is my version of a (very public) baby book. It’s written in Django and, in addition to providing a tidy little blog, aggregates Meg and my tweets, photos, and videos from sundry other places around the web. It’s fun to maintain because I barely have to touch it. Because the only people watching really care about the subject matter (my friends and family), I’ve gotten the strongest positive reaction of anything I’ve yet built on the web. It’s neat, really. Dawsoning gets a fraction of the traffic of this site, and yet it’s more loved by its followers. That’s a nice reminder for me of the relative value of resources on the web. Sure, a lot of people might be watching. But how many of those people really care?

Anyway, for those that are interested, Dawsoning is where I’ve been spending a lot my time. I’m looking to shake things up around here a bit. But in the meantime, if you’re in the mood to browse through a a quickly growing archive of the life of some other guy’s kid, you’ve now got one extra option.