These days I don’t stay at home often, but I do have an RSS/BitTorrent combo fetching me all kinds of neat stuff for me, so I can have it ready for me on the weekend. I love rtorrent, especially due to the fact that I can run it in screen, ssh home and see how things are doing (or add more torrent to the download). However, sometimes my net connection breaks down, computers gets shut off, or things like that. This week my router broke down, so I can’t even ssh home to manually start up rtorrent. My solution: A small script, which checks whether rtorrent is already running, and if not - runs it in a detached screen session. Run this with your favorite cron software.

Gnome 2.24 adds a new Time Tracking feature, which I would have found useful. I don’t have Gnome 2.24 at work, but I do have a Unix-based operating system… Here’s my new ~/bin/track:

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#!/bin/bash
date >> ~/time_tracking
vim ~/time_tracking +

Now, if I could only get vim to automatically hit “A” and space for me afterwards… (I’m betting there’s a way to do it, but AFAIK vim can only receive ex-mode commands as parameters).

Sometimes, when constructing a compound object, we are interested in exporting functionality while retaining encapsulation. For example, suppose we have a Secretary class:

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class Secretary
  def send_fax(destination, fax_contents)
    puts 'Sending fax "%s" to %s' % [fax_contents, destination]
  end

  def answer_call(call)
    # ...
  end

  # ...
end

Our Secretary provides a lot of useful functionality, that our Boss class would like to have. Boss would like to be able to say that he can send a fax, without having the user explicitly request his Secretary beforehand. The same goes for a lot of other methods Secretary provides. Instead of writing a stub function for each of these methods, it would be nice to do the following:

Ditz was lost in the mists of time, and I guess if ttime were maintained, issues would be tracked using Github.

I’ve added issue tracking for ttime using the fantastic ditz. I’ve also added ttime’s rdoc documentation. (Note: Version 0.8.5 is out)

Edit: I was misled!

Illustrated here. Hints below.

>> def inspect_x_and_y(x,y); puts "x: %p, y: %p" % [x, y]; end
=> nil
>> inspect_x_and_y(y={"hello" => "world"},x=[1,2,3])
x: {"hello"=>"world"}, y: [1, 2, 3]

The bits I didn’t know about:

1. "Format strings using a %% sign, %s, %s!" % [ "just like in python", "but with arrays" ]
2. The %p formatting character is the same as inspect.
3. You can call methods with method_name(param2=val2, param1=val1), also like in python. No you can’t! This code sets external variables called y and x.

How embarassing… :(

This site gets indexed by the almighty google. This link is part of a security project I’m doing for my CS degree.

The was part of project BadSense. See the BadSense report