random($foo)

Linklogged, but worth mentioning repeating verbatim in the main blog since it’s damn cool. We’re having a SXSW party! We booked I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness! Kick! Ass!

That is all, continue on.

Pretty much the best thing ever. (for context):

Their Own Version of a Big Bang:

Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham’s presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that’s how it could happen,” she said.

Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham’s mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

More discussion on mefi.

Neverland, Amerika is an amazing set of images.

Ha! Take a look at what’s on the screen of the “super-secret agency’s headquarters” and then have a laugh here. I know when I think of national security, the number of Mozilla patches is at the top of my list.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but now that I’m working on lots of identical systems, I finally have checked my bashrc into source control. Over the past couple years, I’ve accrued some useful tricks. My number one useful alias is virc, which I’ve now adapted to scm form:

alias virc='svn update; vi ~/.bashrc; source ~/.bashrc; svn ci ~/.bashrc -m "virc bashrc auto-update"'

This is, I think the secret to being sure that you put that tricky 20 command pipe, or the path that you type over and over again. With the virc, I’m 4-letters away from pasting that and having it immediately available at the prompt. The scm calls make sure that I’m editing the latest version and that I check it right in.

A couple bits of laziness philosophy:

• single letters – I used to have things like cdwww, but my laziness has progressed to new levels, so now I alias single letters to changing folders. Typically they go like this:
  

  export w='/var/www'
alias u="cdd $u"

  The cdd is an alias I have to pushd. I also have some things bound to relative paths. For example, I have h bound to htdocs, so I can type w to get to my web folder, and either h to get to the htdocs or l to get to the lib folder.

hostnames – Same premise as above but for SSHing. I used to have things like sshrf, but now I do whatever’s shorter (ssh[shortcut] or [hostname])

• tl – Simple shortcuts, like in this case for tailing logs, are great for chaining together. If you’re doing a lot of tl | grep ‘foo’, you’ll probably save as much time over the years as that mega-command you create that you don’t use all that often
• multiple hosts – here’s what I use to create host specific branches (I probalby will need to change to globbing or regex matching)
  

  if [ `hostname` == "muffins" ]; then
export svn='file:///var/svn'

fi

• multiple files – for stuff that I don’t want check in, I have a separate file now:
  

  if [ -f ~/.mybashrc ]; then
source ~/.mybashrc
fi

  The multi-file loading can be nested in the multi-host conditionals for loading files for specific hosts.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any good shell-tip sharing sites, but it would be interesting. — I got sidetracked here, and it’s late, so maybe to be continued.

Having used it since inception, I’ve been unsatisfied with how it actually records and presents my listening habits, but I have to admit that the journaling/community features have improved tremendously. I followed a recommended posting and was intrigued by the musical connection term extraction for the post, so I posted my Belated Best of 2005 list to try it out.

The connections require manual linking with UBB-style tags (there’s an AJAX lookup on the right) so it requires a certain amount of dedication to type the songs in (smart autocompletion is no doubt the obivous next step), but I have to say, that it’s definitely on the right (and similar…) track. Now, the test, is will like-minded people be able to find, and comment on my post and get me roped into participating more in the Last.fm community? 🙂