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Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.


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One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com

Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.

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Thursday, July 25, 2013

You have to have Team Foundation Power Tools installed and tfpt in your PATH, but otherwise, this is very nice.  I was just setting up a .bat file to sort of manually (painful; I know there has to be a better process for my workflow) diff and sync two sets of files in different places (even relatively different places), and part of that was to check out each file it was checking so it could diff, save to non-TFS location, then copy to files under TFS' control.

But then I had a significant number of checked out files that didn't need it.  This SO post shows how to fix that issue.  Very nice.

version control - TFS: How can you Undo Checkout of Unmodified files in a batch file - Stack Overflow:

Take a look on Undo Unchanged command of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools August 2011

c:\myProject> tfpt uu . /noget /recursive

Thanks Matt Florence for link update.

Thanks Ray Vega for actual syntax.

posted by ruffin at 7/25/2013 12:43:00 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, July 24, 2013

You are receiving this message because you have an account registered with this address on ubuntuforums.org.

The Ubuntu forums software was compromised by an external attacker. As a result, the attacker has gained access to read your username, email address and an encrypted copy of your password from the forum database.

If you have used this password and email address to authenticate at any other website, you are urged to reset the password on those accounts immediately as the attacker may be able to use the compromised personal information to access these other accounts. It is important to have a distinct password for different accounts.


I haven't kept a list, but this is becoming horribly common.

Seems like if you don't have two-step authentication, you don't have any authentication at all.

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posted by ruffin at 7/24/2013 07:26:00 AM
0 comments
Monday, July 22, 2013

Look, email should be simpler.  I'm glad my extended family in general has moved on from the smilie-icon , theme-infested stomping grounds of Incredimail and friends, and I was really excited when the (now dead) Letters project wanted to support (only?) plain text composition, but, at the same time... is it wrong to want to highlight some text?

Part of Gmail's latest interface overhaul was to tweak composition into that crazy little box that pops up in the bottom right of your browser window.  If I want to highlight text that I'm writing inside of that little iframe-ish thing, I select it, click that crazy tiny A icon, keep my mouse on that wacky row of choices, FIND ANOTHER A icon (this time not in italics), click that, then mouse over to the left to choose my color from that groovy pallet.


RLY [gender-inclusive though admittedly still slightly normalizing] guys?  Maybe the tiny frame means shorter emails and the buried rich text options pushes down the number of highlighted passages, and somehow that much less markup helps Google trim bits on the pipe, but rly?

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posted by ruffin at 7/22/2013 03:21:00 PM
0 comments
Friday, July 19, 2013

Why do modern OSes still have an easily accessible command line?  Don't get me wrong -- I love the command line.  I think the argument quickly reduces to, "How in the world would you remove it?"

Let's say this new Windows 8 UI ("!Metro") takes hold and the Desktop does, in a few years, go largely away.  What do we do with apps like Process Explorer, something that's got a GUI and is used by programmers do accomplish low-level tasks, um, sorta like they do on the command-line now?

Can we really ever justify completely trashing the conventional desktop?

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posted by ruffin at 7/19/2013 11:20:00 AM
0 comments
Monday, July 15, 2013

Basic Regular Expressions / Learn Vimscript the Hard Way:

Vim has four different "modes" of parsing regular expressions! The default mode requires a backslash before the character to make it mean "1 or more of the preceding character" instead of "a literal plus sign".

 I love VIm.  I really do.  My wrists and my carpel tunnels love VIm.  I have been led to believe I've donated to helping folk in Uganda via VIm.

This crazy VIm take on regexp stuff, I do not love.

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posted by ruffin at 7/15/2013 04:35:00 PM
0 comments

SA1111: ClosingParenthesisMustBeOnLineOfLastParameter: Cause

The closing parenthesis or bracket in a call to a C# method or indexer, or the declaration of a method or indexer, is not placed on the same line as the last parameter.

So far, my least favorite StyleCop rule, surprisingly enough.  I can grin and bear most, but this one seems to conflate the end of the statement with the last param or chained call preceding it.

   1 var myQuery = this.Session.QueryOver<Table>()
   2     .Where(abbre => abbre.AnotherTable.Id == this.someId)
   3     .JoinQueryOver(abbre => abbre.AnotherTableStill)
   4     .JoinQueryOver(ope => ope.YesAnotherTable)
   5     .JoinAlias(abbre2 => abbre2.More, () => someAlias)
   6     .Where(() => someAlias.JiveField.IsIn(someArray))
   7     .SelectList(list => list
   8     .Select(abbre => abbre.Id)
   9     .Select(abbre => abbre.ApplicantFirstName)
  10     .Select(() => someAlias.JiveField)  // I want him on his own line.
  11 );

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posted by ruffin at 7/15/2013 02:20:00 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Bribery & Corruption Worsening Worldwide, Survey Shows:

The Global Corruption Barometer 2013 paints a bleak picture. One in every four people paid a bribe in the last 12 months when accessing public institutions and services, according to Transparency International's report.

This is a story I've seen getting some play for the last couple of days.  Here's how I know it's not a particularly good study: The Democratic Republic of Congo isn't on the map of corruption hotspots.

Unless the country's recently made a heck of a turnaround, I can attest bribery is rampant there.  Not a big deal -- you work for the government, someone needs your services, you're not well paid, and these crazy "Westerners" have enough cash to say stuff like, "the going rate for the director of religious affairs is a measly $163".

To US Americans (finally figured out why Miss South Carolina put that together -- "US Americans" as in "I'm overly PC and I don't mean all of the Americas when I say 'Merica"; maybe she's not quite as spacey as I thought), bribery seems strange, unconventional, and unfair.  To many parts of the world, it's just a slightly less equanimous (or maybe "less transparent" is more accurate) means of taxation.

Which leads us to ask who is behind this Global Corruption Barometer and who they represent.  Woodward and Bernstein might pass along a suggestion: Follow the money.

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posted by ruffin at 7/10/2013 09:43:00 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Boy, couldn't see that coming.  Welcome to the gun show, Feedly.

This is why we rewrite Google Reader on Google App Engine, not some in-house server farm.  And this is also probably why Google let Reader go: Surprisingly high resource requirement without a clear monetization path.

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posted by ruffin at 7/02/2013 09:43:00 AM
0 comments
Monday, July 01, 2013

I couldn't tell if Stallman was hyperbolizing ("It's a trap!") or had a point, but I can't help but concede this point:

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk:

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."


There's something to be said for thin clients, but why?  Why do we necessarily need to return to thin clients?  Reminds me a little too much of the (potentially even true?) story about the beginning of our eggs-for-breakfast connection.

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posted by ruffin at 7/01/2013 07:29:00 AM
0 comments

Support freedom
All posts can be accessed here:


Just the last year o' posts:

URLs I want to remember:
* Atari 2600 programming on your Mac
* joel on software (tip pt)
* Professional links: resume, github, paltry StackOverflow * Regular Expression Introduction (copy)
* The hex editor whose name I forget
* JSONLint to pretty-ify JSON
* Using CommonDialog in VB 6 * Free zip utils
* git repo mapped drive setup * Regex Tester
* Read the bits about the zone * Find column in sql server db by name
* Giant ASCII Textifier in Stick Figures (in Ivrit) * Quick intro to Javascript
* Don't [over-]sweat "micro-optimization" * Parsing str's in VB6
* .ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); (src) * Break on a Lenovo T430: Fn+Alt+B
email if ya gotta, RSS if ya wanna RSS, (?_?), ¢, & ? if you're keypadless


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