Disqus - Latest Comments for ELLIOTTCABLE

Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 15:07:17 -0000

I wanted the few remaining advantages of tail -f without leaving my beloved less; so I finally knuckled down and wrote a lightweight, portable sh function to handle the downsides - the key is to use tail to do the file-reading (to interleave multiple files and avoid reading hundred-gigabyte log files into memory), redirect into a temporary file, and then less +F that tempfile.

Here's my robust version; it also moves the filenames from interleaved (as tail -f prints them) up to the start of the logline. To avoid buffering, you'll need either unbuffer from 'expect', or stdbuf from 'coreutils' (although the function works without either):

https://gist.github.com/ELLIOTTCABLE/1c5afda811c1c4b822cf75361e8ded2f

Re: git ready » reflog, your safety net

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:44:05 -0000

12 years on, and I've definitely used it quite a few times over the years.

Re: Ten Things A Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 19:13:43 -0000

Yeah! This list is surprisingly great (I was a bit concerned when it started with “I’ll exclude things like communication ability … professional conduct …”, but I think it did well redeeming itself!); but I'd definitely replace one of the items with thorough TDD – or just a section of “Non-JavaScript-specific becoming-a-better-software-developer stuff” like that.

Re: Roll your own dynamic DNS service using Amazon Route53

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 06:20:53 -0000

I've combined some of the additions by various commenters here and GitHub forks into one updated version, and added support for `awscli`'s `--profile` feature, for easy application of Prez's excellent security-tip.

See my fork here: https://gist.github.com/ELL...

Re: Tesla Autopilot’s new radar technology predicts an accident caught on dashcam a second later

ELLIOTTCABLE — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 20:00:06 -0000

On my machine, clicking the ‘play’ button on that embedded video opens up very questionable spyware websites in background tabs. Sketchy.

Re: The Best 4K Monitors

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sat, 26 Nov 2016 22:17:42 -0000

I'd love to see the new Apple-sanctioned LG UltraFine 5ks — a single USB-C connection, charges your laptop, sounds perfect.

Re: First look at Tesla’s new Supercharger layout concept

ELLIOTTCABLE — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 05:46:25 -0000

I don't know if I buy this, if only because: marketing value. My school has an EV ‘station’ with chargers for different products (alas, no Tesla / HVDC), all of which is roofed-over with a neat, angular solar-panel ceiling; and they get to plaster all of the above with cute little informational signs about the environment and electricity and EV ownership and shit.

tl;dr Tesla stations with solar roofs catch more attention. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Apple Maps showing accident notifications

ELLIOTTCABLE — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 15:08:05 -0000

I've gotten spoken notifications and red/orange banners *during* navigation, on the highway, outside Chicago, for a long time. (Months? A year?)

Re: Should You Email a Professor During the Ph.D. Admissions Season? // Blog // Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University

ELLIOTTCABLE — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 15:21:54 -0000

As I'm not privy to the graduate-schooling process, can you give a quick explanation of how you “cover [a student's] tuition, stipend, health care, and studio time?” (This isn't intended accusatorially, I'm just very confused: I was under the impression that most university professors were already generally not-very-well-off; and definitely did not have the understanding that they regularly provided some sort of scholarship to prospective students!)

Do students not, themselves, pay tuition during graduate-school? Or conversely apply for loans or scholarships from other programmes? :x

Re: Changing the PDMS Coating on Your Form1 Printer Vat

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:37:03 -0000

There's also the ‘bombs away’ approach. Pour it from 30+ inches, allowing it to collapse as an extremely thin, high-speed stream at the bottom of the pour. (Use the edge of a table or something.)

Re: Multiple var statements in JavaScript, not superfluous

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 05:54:25 -0000

Ditto. This is what I've been doing for ages; I almost always declare all of the things I'm going to be defining in following blocks. Has the added benefit of separating “consideration of variable scoping” from the rest of the considerations involved in writing your code; it makes the effects of variable scoping much more obvious.

Re: The Great Mystery of the Tilde(~)

ELLIOTTCABLE — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:17:38 -0000

Usefully, it's one of the only operators that's *only* interpretable as unary; it's an excellent way to force the parser to interpret a particular bit of code as an expression instead of a statement. I use it facetiously all the time on the throwaway non-results of anonymous functions, simply to force said anonymous functions to be parsed as expressions. As an added benefit, it also can't fuck up the parsing of previous lines if you are the type to omit semicolons.

// Without superfluous operator, we need to surround the anonymous ‘scoping’ function in
// parenthesis to force it to be parsed as an expression instead of a *declaration*, which allows
// us to immediately function-call-pattern it.
;(function(){
   // ...
})()

// By inserting a superfluous operator, we can omit those parentheses, as the operator forces the
// parser to view the anonymous function as an expression *within* the statement, instead of as the
// statement itself, which saves us a character overall, as well as some ugliness:
;+function(){
   // ...
}()

// But, in all of the above examples, if one is depending on ASI, and doesn't needlessly scatter
// semicolons all over their code out of ignorance, a prepended semicolon is necessary to prevent
// snafus like the following:
var foo = 4
+function(){
   // ...
}()
// ... in which case, the variable `foo` would be set to a crazy addition / concatenation involving
// the (probably non-existent) *return value* of our anonymous ‘scoping’ function.

// Hence, our friend the bitflip:
var foo = 4
~function(){
   // ...
}()
// ... he solves all of our problems, by disnecessitating the prepended semicolon *and* the wrapping
// parentheses.

Re: Where Iphone App Dashboard Breaks Down

ELLIOTTCABLE — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:26:48 -0000

Am I the only one who hits home-pause-home and then *types* what he wants, every time? It's extremely fast, reliable, and to the point.

Re: Dropbox disconnects Boxopus for unwanted features.

ELLIOTTCABLE — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:14:30 -0000

I do believe you meant to say “paralyzed.”

Re: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:39:15 -0000

My experience is that Bitlbee is a crock of shit; I really wish we had a high-quality console IM app. Finch is terrible, irssi is not *designed* well for many one-on-one communications, not nearly as excellent as it is for a single many-on-many communication.

Related, irssi doesn’t work well at all in Prompt.app for me; 3G seems too laggy to handle a complex curses app (vim works excellently, but it was originally designed from the ground up for performance over low-baud connections and then expanded into curses-style interfaces, so I suppose the methodologies and focus on performance stuck around.)

Re: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:34:17 -0000

I think the entire point of this post was to *avoid* laptops, bro.

Re: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:31:13 -0000

Why would anyone need GUI apps? #whatworlddoyoulivein

That’s what appswitching is for. Anything I want a GUI for, I have an iPad app for; I have Prompt for “work stuff,” which anyone sane would be doing entirely in the console.

Re: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:26:03 -0000

Meh. Who needs VNC?

Prompt.app, an SSH tunnel over 3G, and tmux with vim and some other amenities. Persistent console “OS” available anywhere, anywhen. Been using it for months, replaced my laptop with this setup this spring. It’s *excellent*.

Just make sure you have a wireless keyboard. (On that note, I had a lot of *terrible* experiences with Apple’s wireless keyboards, not the least of which is the lack of a home-button; I suggest Logitech’s bluetooth iPad keyboard product, which has a home-button, much more reliable connection than any of the Apple wireless keyboards I’ve tried [four? five?]. Only caveat, escape keying is a bitch in vim etceteras, as you have to Fn+Home. Very unnatural chording.)

Re: NativeHost: Run your Cappuccino applications on the desktop

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 13 May 2010 23:25:36 -0000

This is fairly neat. I’m going to have to consider the implications of this sort of web-to-desktop translation quite heavily… thanks for eating up the rest of my weak ;D

Re: Magnus Holm - Chained Comparisons

ELLIOTTCABLE — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:41:13 -0000

Bad Judofyr. STOP IT! STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT! ;D

Re: Hiring & The Sixth Sense of Expertise

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:11:43 -0000

Same here. Serious lapse in judgement on Dustin’s part. (Not that there’s not plenty of other examples to prove his point, but this one stinks of a logic error.)

Re: git ready » tig, the ncurses front-end to Git

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:38:53 -0000

Just to point out; also available on Homebrew: `brew install tig`.

Re: My Proposed Solution to the "Can't Comment On RTs" Problem: Retweet-Replies

ELLIOTTCABLE — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:36:30 -0000

I like that solution. My *personal* solution was to write a tweet‐short‐URL‐in’ service (http://tau.pe/) and then to tau.pe tweets in a separate tweet *after* retweeting them. I could say whatever I wanted about a tweet, in another tweet, and semantically reference the originally tweet through the tau.pe.

Re: CodeRack: Rack::DomainSprinkler

ELLIOTTCABLE — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:14:31 -0000

Uh, this is not very intelligent. Or rather, it won’t be in a lot of situations (no offense to Chris, the code’s fine itself).

The DNS requests will almost certainly outweigh the benefits from parallel connections.

Re: Cubicle Muses - Wave's Web of Protocols

ELLIOTTCABLE — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:19:11 -0000

I think the client/server relationship and protocol is an immensely important part of Wave; possibly the most important part under discussion right now.

I ‘started the discussion’ on the Google Group; I really want to get more voices and opinions in on the topic. You should weigh in, farra… here’s a link:

http://groups.google.com/gr...