Surfraw isn’t browsing the ‘net without a condom

March 28th, 2007 • bash, linux, web

About a month ago, my friend livinded introduced me to an infinitely helpful program for using in Bash or any other Linux shell: surfraw. Surfraw is an excellent tool to search for just about anything on the internet straight from the comfort of your shell. Installing it from source is as easy as unpackaging the source, running `./configure && make && make install`. Installing from Debian or Ubuntu is even easier as you can merely type `sudo aptitude install surfraw` and you’re done. Once it’s installed, all that’s left is to run `surfraw-update-path` and you’re ready to use it after you start another shell session.

I find this tool incredibly helpful because I use bash…a lot. I normally have two shells open that I’m currently working with and it’s so nice to be able to type `rfc 821` and have the original SMTP RFC pop up in Firefox on one of my multiple viewports (or virtual desktops for you non-Linux folks). This lets me work unhindered on what I was doing without having to stop, switch to the other desktop, pull up www.rfc-editor.org and search for 821, then go back to whatever I was doing in shell on the *other* desktop. This way, the RFC is ready for me when I need to reference it and it’s on another viewport so it’s non-distracting and unhindering to what I’m currently doing.

As you can see from the SourceForge site, surfraw has a ton of sensible options already built-in (google, yahoo, rfc, ask jeeves, etc. etc.) and adding new ones is very simple if you feel comfortable adding some shell code. I’ve written a few scripts like this in the past that were very much application-specific so I may end up adding those functions into surfraw’s elvi (the author’s oddball name for sites to search) for future use.

If you find yourself switching between a terminal window and your browser very often to look something up, I highly advise downloading surfraw to more streamline your tasks.

Turns out it was just a button push away

March 28th, 2007 • chatter, web

So, my cable internet connection was down for nearly two days and I was relegated to using my connection at work which I don’t particularly like to do. This means I get to drone on at work about nothing ineteresting since I’m not digging through all of my RSS feeds for tidbits of interestingness. Anyway.

When the connection went down I did the normal Adelphia/Comcast troubleshooting shuffle: unplug modem, unplug router, wait 30 seconds to 5 minutes, plug up modem, plug up router, see what works. Well, I did that a few times and of course, nothing worked. Instead of calling those imbeciles at Comcast, I futzed about more, doing the same things over and over without results. Having worked in IT for over 9 years now, I felt pretty silly so I went to bed. Come the next morning, I scurred to do the troubleshooting dance again without change and decided to unplug it all and go to work. Fast forward to around 10PM that night (yesterday, 03/27) I start messing with it and miraculously everything works…sans router(s) in place which make me hesistant to even plug up a toaster to my modem. So I manage to restore both routers to defaults and still, no go. Turns out the modem was sending a Ping of Death to my routers for whatever reason. Also turns out there was an outage in my area that just happened to coincide with the time I originally noticed it going out and Comcast said it’d be “fixed by 8AM”. Right. That’s why it took 4 days to fix the same issue last year (ping of death, not an outage) because someone obviously cannot differentiate BRAVO and VICTOR in a MAC address. Anywho, after I hung up, I unplugged everything and went off in a huff.

Fast-fast forward till tonight when I got home from work. I decided to reset one router (again) to see the results. This time the reset worked, maybe I only thought I did it the other night. I was so looking forward to chewing out Comcast for bombing my modem with garbage data during the Adelpia->Comcast transistion but I was robbed of that.

Now that I’m done with my rant, anyone know of a good Google Calendar sync program for Windows Mobile 5? I’ve tried OggSync and frankly, it’s trash. Extremely clunky useless UI and atrocious colors. I’ve also tried GMobileSync which was OK but only synced one calendar of three and only sync three events out of about 70. It had an OK UI but lacked any real options or much of anything else. It’s basically dummy-proof. I also tried GCalSync but it failed to run on WM5 which I expected.

So now I’m on the hunt to get useful apps on my new T-Mobile Dash smartphone.

Homemade red lentil soup

March 28th, 2007 • Uncategorized

Homemade red lentil soup,
originally uploaded by tehbizz.

My coworker Kafel just made a huge batch of red lentil soup for us. It’s different from what I’m used to but it’s amazing tasting.

Later he’s making some rice for us too