Peter’s Soapbox

Cell Hell

On Saturday night I lost my iPhone. Fortunately it was found (yay!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work anymore. After months of terrible battery life, now it won’t power up at all, despite my best efforts and those of Apple tech support. To add insult to injury, my Nokia e71, which was working fine, now won’t start up either, and tells me to “Contact retailer.” Wonderful.

Fortunately Apple is sending an advance exchange replacement iPhone, thanks to my buying AppleCare.

In short, don’t try calling me on my cell any time in the next few days.

A Quick and Dirty “It’s Back Up” Bash Script

Today, I had a client’s T1 line go down. Unfortunately, FairPoint Communications has had a mixed track record when it comes to telling us that they have (or more often, have not) fixed the issues.

So I wrote a simple bash script to ping the IP address of the router on the down T1 line, and email me when it came back up. Think of this as the ultra-poor man’s Nagios. Continue reading A Quick and Dirty “It’s Back Up” Bash Script…

Fixing Annoying Keyboard Repeating on an Asus eeePC 1000HA

Ever since I got my Asus eeePC 1000HA, it’s had one very annoying quality. The keyboard, under Windows and Linux, would repeat keystrokes, so if I typed “Peter” I would frequently get “Peeter” or “Petter” or something else with extra characters. Very annoying. Continue reading Fixing Annoying Keyboard Repeating on an Asus eeePC 1000HA…

Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes

I bought this book, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes, years ago, and read it back then after not being able to completely digest O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions (a much larger book). While the O’Reilly book has a lot more content, more examples, and covers several different languages’ regexp parsers, I found the SAMS book a lot easier to process. As the name implies, each chapter is designed to be covered in about 10 minutes, so if you have a couple of hours to kill, you can easily plow through the whole book and try out its examples to get a decent working knowledge of regexps. Continue reading Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes…

Hipocricy

Ensure that the third party who has developed your key software will continue to support that software, provide updates in a timely manner, and can provide you with source code in the event that the third party can no longer support the application.

Source: Recommendations from the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool.  Okay Microsoft, I’ll take that source code for Windows NT and Office 2000 now, thanks.