All things Seth Mason

Books I Read in 2025

2026-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Well, it's been over two years since I last generated a post so I had to do some sleuthing to figure out how to do this. So that was fun.

I'm so glad that I wrote docs about how I did this. </sarcasm>

But anyways, here's the paltry list of books that I read this year.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (5 stars).
Blue Nights by Joan Didion (4 stars).
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin (3 stars).
My Life in France by Julia Child (4 stars).
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko (3 stars).
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (4 stars).
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (4 stars).
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst (4 stars).
The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart (3 stars).
All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1) by Martha Wells (4 stars).
James by Percival Everett (5 stars).

For the record (and by record I mean myself), here's how I generated this list (this year):

Export

First export books out of GoodReads using their export functionaltiy to a csv.

Duckdb to the rescue

Then I used the most excellet duckdb to export the data to markdown format:

duckdb <<'SQL' | pbcopy
.mode list
.headers off

WITH cleaned AS (
  SELECT
    Title,
    Author,
    "My Rating",
    trim(
      replace(
        replace(ISBN, '="', ''),
        '"',
        ''
      )
    ) AS clean_isbn,
    "Date Read"
  FROM '~/Downloads/goodreads_library_export.csv'
)
SELECT
  '* [' || Title || '](' ||
  CASE
    WHEN clean_isbn IS NOT NULL AND clean_isbn <> '' THEN
      'https://openlibrary.org/isbn/' || clean_isbn
    ELSE
      'https://openlibrary.org/search?q=' ||
      replace(trim(Title || ' ' || Author), ' ', '+')
  END
  || ') by ' || Author || ' (' || "My Rating" || ' stars).'
FROM cleaned
WHERE "Date Read" >= '2025-01-01'
  AND "Date Read" < '2026-01-01'
ORDER BY "Date Read" ASC;
SQL

The damn robots helped me with some formatting issues because the data coming out of GoodReads is utter crap.

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2024

2025-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

~~Well I never did this. I'll have to do it at some point.~~

Here's the list 1 year late:

Memorial by Bryan Washington (4 stars).
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (3 stars).
Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1) by Lee Child (3 stars).
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot, #2) by Becky Chambers (4 stars).
Severance by Ling Ma (4 stars).
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (4 stars).
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (4 stars).
Slow Horses (Slough House, #1) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
Ilium by Lea Carpenter (3 stars).
Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1) by William Gibson (4 stars).
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (4 stars).
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau (3 stars).
Dead Lions (Slough House, #2) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
Last Acts: A Novel by Alexander Sammartino (4 stars).
Real Tigers (Slough House, #3) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
Spook Street (Slough House, #4) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (3 stars).
Joe Country (Slough House, #6) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
Slough House (Slough House #7) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
Bad Actors (Slough House, #8) by Mick Herron (4 stars).
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (4 stars).
Railsea by China Miéville (4 stars).
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (3 stars).
Lot by Bryan Washington (3 stars).
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré (4 stars).
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (5 stars).

Wow, I really got into Slow Horses in 2024.

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2023

2024-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Well, here's my annual list of books I read. I hope you enjoy my occasional blogging.

Again with 19 books read in a year. At least I'm consistent.

No promises I'll ever increase my blogging frequency any time soon, what with all the bicylce riding and Instagramming.

The Union by Leah Vernon (3 stars)
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (4 stars)
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (4 stars)
Continental Drift by Russell Banks (5 stars)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (5 stars)
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (5 stars)
Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (3 stars)
Users by Colin Winnette (3 stars)
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero (4 stars)
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (5 stars)
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (4 stars)
A Line in the Sand: A Novel by Kevin Powers (4 stars)
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (3 stars)
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (3 stars)
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (4 stars)
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (4 stars)
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (4 stars)
Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (3 stars)
Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun (4 stars)

Despite reports of its death, the Goodereads API still seems to be up and running. While it could use some love (as could the site itself), I won't complain as I can still pull this list pretty easily.

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2022

2022-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Well, this annual reading list is about 12 months too late. I'm back dating it so it at least publishes in the correct year.

19 books. My goal of 50 in a year is still a dream.

Dune by Frank Herbert (4 stars)
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (4 stars)
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (4 stars)
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (4 stars)
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (4 stars)
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (5 stars)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (4 stars)
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (5 stars)
The Old Man by Thomas Perry (3 stars)
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (5 stars)
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy (4 stars)
Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator by Sofia Warren (4 stars)
Educated by Tara Westover (4 stars)
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (4 stars)
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian () stars)
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith (4 stars)
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell (5 stars)
The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson (4 stars)
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (5 stars)

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2021

2021-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Well, this annual reading list is about 2 years late. Whoopsie.

Stupid pandemic killed my reading momentum. You'd think with all the time at home, I'd be reading more but that certainly hasn't happened. Well, that and The Universe in Your Hand took forever to read. Book is dense. But only 13 books this year.

How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens (3 stars)
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (3 stars)
The Best of Me by David Sedaris (4 stars)
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine (5 stars)
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (4 stars)
We Were Yahoo!: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook by Jeremy Ring (1 star)
The Surrogate by Toni Halleen (4 stars)
The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond by Christophe Galfard (4 stars)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (5 stars)
The Whistler by John Grisham (3 stars)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (4 stars)
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (5 stars)
Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics by Tom Scioli (5 stars)

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2020

2021-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Adios 2020! You won't soon be forgotten, that's for sure.

Aloha 2021! In the spirit of getting things off on the right foot, I'm posting the books I read right on time!

Only 17 books this year. Gonna blame too much binge watching of TV shows and a lot of time riding my bike. I seem to be rapidly falling away from my goal of reading 50 books a year.

Particular highlights were The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. The Roth book was pretty frightening given current cirumstances.

But let's not end on a bad note. Here's to a new year!

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (4 stars)
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (5 stars)
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (4 stars)
Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines (5 stars)
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (5 stars)
Wow, No Thank You.</ Samantha Irby (5 stars)

The Mirage by Matt Ruff (3 stars)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (5 stars)
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (4 stars)
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (5 stars)
Lost Children Archive by - Valeria Luiselli (5 stars)
The Outsider by Stephen King (4 stars)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (3 stars)
The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût (4 stars)
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (5 stars)
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (5 stars)
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1) by Liu Cixin (3 stars)

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2019

2020-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

OK, only 11 months late on getting this up. Going to blame 2020 for this. All I'll say is I took a big John Scalzi trip this past year.

34 books.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (4 stars)

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (4 stars)

Little Bee by Chris Cleave (4 stars)

The Last Colony (Old Man's War, #3) by John Scalzi (3 stars)

The Ghost Brigades (Old Man's War, #2) by John Scalzi (4 stars)

Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) by John Scalzi (4 stars)

To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret by Jedidiah Jenkins (3 stars)

The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency, #2) by John Scalzi (4 stars)

The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1) by John Scalzi (5 stars)

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (4 stars)

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (5 stars)

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (4 stars)

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (5 stars)

The Dinner by Herman Koch (4 stars)

The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke (3 stars)

Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder by Leah Carroll (4 stars)

Howards End by E.M. Forster (5 stars)

Delta-v by Daniel Suarez (4 stars)

A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (0 stars)

Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10) by Agatha Christie (4 stars)

There There by Tommy Orange (4 stars)

City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3) by Robert Jackson Bennett (5 stars)

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (4 Stars)

City of Blades (The Divine Cities, #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett (4 stars)

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (4 stars)

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (4 stars)

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (4 stars)

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (4 stars)

Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe (0 stars)

The City of Mirrors (The Passage, #3) by Justin Cronin (4 stars)

Calypso by David Sedaris (4 stars)

City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett (4 stars)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (5 stars)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed (5 stars)

American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1) by Philip Roth (4 stars)

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2018

2019-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

Going on nine years, here's my annual list of books I read. Like all the other years, I didn't meet my goal of 53 books. I only managed 33 in 2018. So, it's basically a repeat of 2017.

In my defense, I did ride my bike quite a few miles. Even more than 2017 so it's not déjà vu all over again.

Anyways, here is the list. Once again, I read a whole bunch of Harry Bosch. And also a whole bunch of Stephen King.

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (4 stars)
Hill William by Scott McClanahan (3 stars)
Cherry by Nico Walker (3 stars)
Nine Dragons (Harry Bosch, #15; Harry Bosch Universe, #20) by Michael Connelly (5 stars)
The Overlook (Harry Bosch, #13; Harry Bosch Universe, #17) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Echo Park (Harry Bosch, #12; Harry Bosch Universe, #16) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
The Closers (Harry Bosch, #11; Harry Bosch Universe, #14) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Trenton Makes by Tadzio Koelb (4 stars)
The Narrows (Harry Bosch, #10; Harry Bosch Universe, #13) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Lost Light (Harry Bosch, #9) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Pym by Mat Johnson (5 stars)
City Of Bones (Harry Bosch, #8) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson (4 stars)
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth (4 stars)
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart (4 stars)
The Time-Crunched Cyclist: Race-Winning Fitness in 6 Hours a Week, 3rd Ed. by Carmichael Chris (4 stars)
Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam (2 stars)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1) by Robin Sloan (3 stars)
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (5 stars)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (4 stars)
Kraken by China Miéville (4 stars)
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai (3 stars)
The Peripheral by William Gibson (4 stars)
The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7) by Stephen King (4 stars)
Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, #6) by Stephen King (4 stars)
Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead (4 stars)
Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, #5) by Stephen King (4 stars)
The Leavers by Lisa Ko (4 stars)
Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC (4 stars)
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (4 stars)
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1) by N.K. Jemisin (4 stars)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (4 stars)
Heroine Worship (Heroine Complex, #2) by Sarah Kuhn (4 stars)

You can see the other years here in case you missed them.

Books I Read in 2017

2017-01-08T00:00:00-08:00

So I got tired of waiting around for Donald Trump to post his reading list of 2017 and decided to preempt him and post mine. I have a feeling his was just the outside of Happy Meals and gum wrappers anyways. Plus, this is the only post I make these days so I want to make sure and get it out of the way early in the year.

My goal was to read 52 books this year but probably spent too much time riding my bike. Maybe I'll do better next year.

Anyhow, highlights from this year were American War. Not sure if it was a documentary or a sci-fi novel.

And The Nix was a really funny surreal satire on modern life. I enjoyed it a whole bunch.

If you want to be absolutely terrified, feel free to dive into The Sixth Extinction.

The Ultimate Bicycle Owner's Manual: The Universal Guide to Bikes, Riding, and Everything for Beginner and Seasoned Cyclists by Eben Weiss (4 stars)
Home (Binti, #2) by Nnedi Okorafor (4 stars)
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France by Tyler Hamilton (3 stars)
Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro by Phil Gaimon (4 stars)
Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4) by Stephen King (4 stars)
Draft Animals: Living the Pro Cycling Dream by Phil Gaimon (5 stars)
American War by Omar El Akkad (5 stars)
Dark Tower: Wastelands by Stephen King (0 stars)
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (5 stars)
The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2) by Stephen King (4 stars)
The Nix by Nathan Hill (5 stars)
Loving Day by Mat Johnson (4 stars)
Angels Flight (Harry Bosch, #6) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) by Stephen King (4 stars)
A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch, #7; Terry McCaleb, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #9) by Michael Connelly (3 stars)
Trunk Music (Harry Bosch, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #6) by Michael Connelly (3 stars)
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (4 stars)
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy (5 stars)
Benediction by Kent Haruf (4 stars)
Eventide by Kent Haruf (4 stars)
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (5 stars)
Hollywood by Charles Bukowski (4 stars)
Plainsong (Plainsong, #1) by Kent Haruf (4 stars)
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (4 stars)
Crosstalk by Connie Willis (4 stars)
The Last Coyote (Harry Bosch, #4; Harry Bosch Universe, #4) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Carry the One by Carol Anshaw (4 stars)
The Concrete Blonde (Harry Bosch, #3; Harry Bosch Universe, #3) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
The Black Ice (Harry Bosch, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #2) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder by Michael Pollan (3 stars)
The Last Good Heist: The Inside Story of The Biggest Single Payday in the Criminal History of the Northeast by Tim White (3 stars)
The Black Echo (Harry Bosch, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #1) by Michael Connelly (4 stars)
Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch, #2) by Ann Leckie (3 stars)
The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro (3 stars)
Apex (Nexus, #3) by Ramez Naam (3 stars)
Crux (Nexus, #2) by Ramez Naam (4 stars)
Nexus (Nexus, #1) by Ramez Naam (4 stars)
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (2 stars)
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport (4 stars)
Getting Started with Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson (4 stars)
The North Water by Ian McGuire (4 stars)
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (4 stars)

If you are curious, I use a python script to generate the list of books. (You'll need your Goodreads key in order to use it.) Then I just paste it into GNU Emacs.

You can see the other years here. I've managed to do this for 8 years running. Hooray for narcissistic me!

Books I Read in 2016

2017-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

Ah nuts. It's been a whole year without a single post here. Anyways, at least you get one post a year from me. That's more than some blogs I suppose.

Only 21 books this year! That's a grave offense. I must do better this year. Go 2017!

By far, the most terrifying (and timely) was "In the Garden of Beasts." Imagine watching the rise of Hitler, screaming about it and no one does anything. Imagine. It was much scarier than the Sarah Pinborough books.

Colson Whitehead's book was amazing. Heartbreaking and powerful all in one tiny book. Go read it now. I'll wait here until you get back.

And I cannot recommend reading "Weapons of Math Destruction" after watching "Black Mirror." That will drive you towards a life of digital minimalism where you'll be handing pieces of paper to people to securely deliver messages.

Without further ado, the books I read in 2016. See you next year (unless "Black Mirror" sets you off):

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson (5 stars)
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (4 stars)
Binti (Binti, #1) by Nnedi Okorafor (4 stars)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (4 stars)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind (2 stars)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (4 stars)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (5 stars)
The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi (5 stars)
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (3 stars)
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (4 stars)
Heroine Complex (Heroine Complex, #1) by Sarah Kuhn (4 stars)
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson (3 stars)
Freedom™ (Daemon, #2) by Daniel Suarez (5 stars)
Daemon by Daniel Suarez (3 stars)
The Chosen Seed (The Dog-Faced Gods, #3) by Sarah Pinborough (3 stars)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (5 stars)
The Shadow of the Soul (The Dog-Faced Gods, #2) by Sarah Pinborough (3 stars)
A Matter of Blood (The Dog-Faced Gods, #1) by Sarah Pinborough (4 stars)
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (3 stars)
Metal Cowboy: Tales from the Road Less Pedaled by Joe Kurmaskie (3 stars)
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (4 stars)

If you are curious, I use a python script to generate the list of books. (You'll need your Goodreads key in order to use it.) Then I just paste it into GNU Emacs.

You can see the other years here. I've managed to do this for 7 years running. Hooray for narcissistic me!

Books I Read in 2015

2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Here it is! The annual post you have all been clamoring for.

In review, Kindred was a great book. Hot damn! Go read it now! And the book that's a huge interview with DFW was amazing. That reminds me, I need to see that movie.

Looking over it, I can see I spent a lot time reading books about productivity and work. There are a few books on here from the same topic that I didn't even finish. I guess 2015 was all about business time.

Also, no idea why I read Drop City followed immediately by Open City. City time? Drop City was good by the way.

So, here's the complete list:

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers (4 stars)
The New World: A Novel by Chris Adrian (4 stars)
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (3 stars)
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (3 stars)
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson (3 stars)
The Martian by Andy Weir (5 stars)
Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon (4 stars)
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 by David McCullough (4 stars)
The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato (3 stars)
The Son by Jo Nesbø (3 stars)
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (4 stars)
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (4 stars)
The Three by Sarah Lotz (3 stars)
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (4 stars)
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (5 stars)
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (5 stars)
In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster (4 stars)
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (3 stars)
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (4 stars)
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz (4 stars)
Open City by Teju Cole (3 stars)
Drop City by T.C. Boyle (4 stars)
The Shambling Guide to New York City (The Shambling Guides, #1) by Mur Lafferty (3 stars)
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (5 stars)
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport (4 stars)
Safety Tips for Living Alone (Kindle Single) (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Book 133) (3 stars)
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan (4 stars)
Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John W. Foreman (4 stars)
Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy (3 stars)
Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst (3 stars)
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) by Ann Leckie (4 stars)
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin (3 stars)

If you are curious, I use a python script to generate the list of books. (You'll need your Goodreads key in order to use it.) Then I just paste it into GNU Emacs.

You can see the other years here. I've managed to do this for 5 years running. Hooray for narcissistic me!

Org Exporting and Emailing

2015-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

I use org-mode. I use Emacs. I send email using Emacs.

Thus, I really liked John Kitchin's post about sending email with org. It was almost perfect (to me). The only thing it didn't do was format the content before exporting. It just sent it out as plain org.

Thanks to his hard work, I just had to add a few bits to come up with this. Now I can get the cool line blocks around my code and execute the org-babel blocks in my headings before they get sent out. This is very helpful when sending out snippets of code and random command line effluvia.

(defun email-heading-after-export (backend &optional plist)
  "Send the current org-mode heading as the body of an email, after converting
it to the given backend.
"
  (interactive)
  (setq *email-heading-point* (set-marker (make-marker) (point)))
  (save-excursion
    (org-mark-subtree)
    (let ((TO (org-entry-get (point) "TO" t))
          (SUBJECT (nth 4 (org-heading-components)))
          (continue nil)
      (switch-function nil)
      (yank-action nil)
      (send-actions '((email-send-action . nil)))
      (return-action '(email-heading-return))
          (plist `(:with-toc nil ,@plist)))
      ;; we do not  want the mark to interfere with export
      (deactivate-mark)
      (message (format "%s" plist))
      (org-export-to-buffer backend "*org-to-email*" nil t nil t plist
                            nil)
      (switch-to-buffer "*org-to-email*")
      (let ((content (buffer-substring (point-min) (point-max))))
        (compose-mail TO SUBJECT nil continue switch-function yank-action
                      send-actions return-action)
        (message-goto-body)
        (insert content)
        (if TO
            (message-goto-body)
          (message-goto-to))))))

Now, I can email a heading as ASCII

(defun email-heading-as-ascii ()
  (interactive)
  (email-heading-after-export 'ascii))

Or UTF-8:

(defun email-heading-as-utf8 ()
  (interactive)
  (message "wtf")
  (email-heading-after-export 'ascii '(:ascii-charset utf-8)))

Even Markdown:

(defun email-heading-as-markdown ()
  (interactive)
  (email-heading-after-export 'md))

You could even send email as HTML but there's no way I'm giving out the tips on how to do that.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about the above. And thanks to John Kitchin! This code uses the same License.

I made a toolbox

2015-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

So, I finally got around to making the toolbox from the 1940's from St. Roy Underhill. Aside from making it a bit shorter (so it would fit in our storage), not making the base of the tray out tomato cans and using metal corner bumpers, I followed his directions to the letter. It was a fun project that I made entirely out of hand tools. No electrons were harmed in making this toolbox.

I opted to use poplar that I picked up at the local big box store because all the pine was knotty and crappy looking . All the hardware used on it, I got from Lee Valley. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. And I got some nice compliements at Off the Saw last week.

Learned a ton from this so that's good. For example, using a Stanley #78 Rabbet plane is not as easy as it looks. I kept going cockeyed with it. Also, resawing a 3/4" piece of poplar that is 30" long is not something you can do unless you have an afternoon free. Note to self: make a new friend who owns a bandsaw.

A corollary to this is that sharp tools are very important. The resawing probably would have gone quicker if my rip saw was sharp. And I gouged the side with my dull block plane.

Finally, I learned I really need to make a shooting board. All the cuts where I didn't use my Langdon mitre box, turned out all squirrelly.

But when all is said and done, now I have a nice little toolbox to carry my tools around the house.

Books I Read in 2014

2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

OK, here is the only blog post I seem to do these days: the books I read in the past year. I still haven't 100% automated this. Maybe next year.

The count was a tad lower this year, than years past. I spent a lot more time drawing in my sketchbooks this year than I did reading. I managed to do a sketch a day all the way up until October but then lost steam.

It's also late because I tried to finish Europe Central by William T. Vollman before the year ended. But my Kindle says I still had about 10 hours left last night so that didn't happen. Maybe it'll the first post in my next books I read post.

So, here's the list:

Elvis Sightings by Ricardo Sanchez
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Generation Kill by Evan Wright
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
The Circle by Dave Eggers
MaddAddam (MaddAddam Trilogy, #3) by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter #4) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter #3) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter #1) by J.K. Rowling
Tenth of December by George Saunders
Sorry Please Thank You: Stories by Charles Yu
The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam Trilogy, #2) by Margaret Atwood
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

I ended up reading parts of the Harry Potter series to my kid (the wife and I alternate reading to him), so I just decided to re-read the whole damned series again this year to get the full package. Good thing too, because it turns out I forgot lots of things when I speed read it the first time through all those yeaers ago. I'm betting that the page count for this year is close to previous years because of those damned door stops masquerading as books.

Highlights of this year were And the Mountains Echoed and MaddAddam. I enjoyed The Circle while I was reading it but a week or so after I had finished, I realized it just left too many things unanswered. Not too sure about recommending that one. But you can't really go wrong with anything by Hosseini or Atwood methinks.

Yet another blogging engine

2014-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

Since David Lynch can revive Twin Peaks, I figure I can relaunch this dormant blog. I've redone this site and ditched the old Jekyll static site generator and decided to try out a different generator named Pelican that's written in Python.

I never bothered to learn Ruby so when I ran into trouble with Jekyll, getting it fixed was painful (to me). To Ruby programmers, probably not so much. Since I'm a Python programmer, hopefully I wont' have as much trouble when things go off the rails. Har har...rails...ruby...get it?

Frankly, porting it over was kind of a pain in the arse. I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops with custom scripts and Pandoc (which is a pretty incredible piece of software) but that's all for a different post.

Welcome to the new site. Sorry if I spammed your feed reader with all my new article ids. Hope you still love me!

And I want some of that damn good pie.

Books I Read in 2013

2013-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

It's that time of the year again where I finally stop blowing off blogging and write something. I should really whip up a script to do this since it's using the Goodreads API. Then I'd never touch my blogging software again!

So, withtout futher ado, in reverse chronological order, the 29 books I read in 2013:

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy, #1) by Margaret Atwood
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
The Keep by Jennifer Egan
Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong
Under the Dome by Stephen King
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Indignation by Philip Roth
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Canada by Richard Ford
Everyman by Philip Roth
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Augustus by John Edward Williams
All Clear by Connie Willis
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by Michael D. Sellers
Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) by Connie Willis
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Blackout by Connie Willis
Red Shirts by John Scalzi
You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Michael Ian Black
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2) by Connie Willis
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
Stoner by John Edward Williams

Books I enjoyed this year were Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (you could say that 2013 was the Year of Connie Willis for me...she's great!), Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon and The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.

Oh, and Beloved. Jeez that book was crazy good. I might read it again in 2014.

If you really want to stay abreast of what I'm reading, follow me on Goodreads. Otherwise, see you next year!

Books I Read in 2012

2012-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Oy vey. So, it seems like I only post here once a year and it's only to list books that I read. Well, at least I'm consistent right?

I kind of went undead crazy this year what with reading the two Justin Cronin books as well as Colson Whitehead's foray into post-apocalyptic zombie prose.

Favorites from this year include (in no particular order) Et Tu, Babe, Empire Falls, The Tiger's Wife and Perdido Street Station. The Art of Fielding was really entertaining too though the ending was very strange.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
The Twelve (The Passage, #2) by Justin Cronin
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney
The Passage (The Passage, #1) by Justin Cronin
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The Submission by Amy Waldman
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Iron Council (New Crobuzon, #3) by China Miéville
RabbitMQ in Action: Distributed Messaging for Everyone by Alvaro Videla
The City & the City by China Miéville
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2) by China Miéville
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) by China Miéville
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
Replay by Ken Grimwood
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut
Call for the Dead (George Smiley, #1) by John le Carré
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Death in Summer by William Trevor

Full disclosure: Most of the book links on this page are Amazon affiliate links so I get to pay off my bookie that much quicker if you buy something.

Using Pandas to stalk your neighbors

2012-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

I picked up the book Python for Data Analysis as I've been seeing it mentioned in quite a few places. And so far, it's great. A very good high level overview of using Pandas. No, not the cute kind of pandas. I'm talking about the Python library for data analysis. Derp.

Anyhow, I decided to dive in and see what I could find out about my neighbors. Chapter 9 of the book goes into analyzing the 2012 Federal Election Commission Database so I loaded it up:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> fec = pd.read_csv('P00000001-ALL.csv')

Looking into the data, there is some garbage rows. I grabbed all the Culver City zip codes (well, the zip codes I care about) at least:

>>> zips = fec.contbr_zip.unique()
>>> mask = np.array([str(x).startswith('90232') for x in zips])
>>> fec[fec.contbr_zip.isin(zips[mask])].contbr_city.value_counts()
CULVER CITY     241
CUILVER CITY      2
SANTA MONICA      1

I don't know if these come from bad data from the contributor or from the FEC so I'm just going to include everything based on zip code.

>>> culver = fec[fec.contbr_zip.isin(zips[mask])]
>>> culver.contb_receipt_amt.sum()
58341.0

Fifty-eight grand! Nice going Culver City!

Now let's see who got the money:

>>> culver.pivot_table('contb_receipt_amt', rows='cand_nm', aggfunc=sum)
cand_nm
Huntsman, Jon                      4500
Obama, Barack                     50381
Paul, Ron                           500
Roemer, Charles E. 'Buddy' III      110
Romney, Mitt                       2850

That's kind of interesting...Huntsman got more money from the 90232 than Romney.

Now, let's check out the occupations that contributed the most:

>>> culver.pivot_table('contb_receipt_amt', rows='contbr_occupation',
... aggfunc=sum).order(ascending=False).head(10)
contbr_occupation
RETIRED                               7272.0
ACCOUNT MANAGER                       5000.0
VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNET MARKETING    4000.0
PROFESSOR                             2800.5
PRESIDENT & C.E.O.                    2500.0
GALLERY OWNER                         2500.0
BOOKKEEPER                            2500.0
HOMEMAKER                             1971.0
INTERIOR DESIGNER                     1500.0
WRITER                                1410.0

Retirees going large. That's kind of interesting. Let's look at that.

>>> culver[culver.contbr_occupation == 'RETIRED'].pivot_table(
... 'contb_receipt_amt', rows='cand_nm', aggfunc=sum)
cand_nm
Obama, Barack                     7162
Roemer, Charles E. 'Buddy' III      10
Romney, Mitt                       100

Maybe I misunderstand our local retirees (at least the ones I've met) but this was surprising to me. I really expected Romney to come out on top.

I think that's enough peeking into my neighbors contributions habits for one night. I have to say Pandas makes this sort of thing really easy. I've only scratched the surface here. There's lots more that one can do (mathematically speaking) with Panads. Python for Data Analysis gives you a really good introduction to Pandas and then the webiste fills in the gaps.

Python for Data Analysis and Panads get two thumbs up from me. Thanks to O'Reilly and Wes McKinney.

Python and Spotify Together At Last

2012-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

Here's a simple script to show the currently playing song in Spotify. All you have to do is put it on your $PATH and run:

> nowplaying
The Unsinkable Fats Domino by Guided By Voices

While this is handy in and of itself (to some people), if you are running GNU Screen, you can have it output the currently playing song in your statusline. Just add the following to your .screenrc:

backtick 101 5 5 /home/YOURNAME/bin/nowplaying
hardstatus string  '%101`'

If you already have a hardstatus (or caption) line, you'll just need to add %101 in there somewhere. Then, you'll have the currently playing song easily available.

For info about what the above does, see the GNU Screen manual about backtick.

Here's the entire script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Spit out the currently playing song."""
import dbus
import sys

try:
    bus = dbus.Bus(dbus.Bus.TYPE_SESSION)
    spotify = bus.get_object('com.spotify.qt','/')
    info = spotify.GetMetadata()
except dbus.exceptions.DBusException:
    print('Spotify is not running')
    sys.exit(1)

track = {}
trackMap = { 'artist'    : 'xesam:artist',
             'album'     : 'xesam:album',
             'title'     : 'xesam:title'
             }

for key, value in trackMap.items():
    if not value in info:
        continue
    piece = info[value]
    if isinstance(piece, list):
        piece = ', '.join(piece)

    track[key] = piece.encode('utf-8')

if track.has_key('title') and track.has_key('artist'):
    print('%s by %s' % (track['title'], track['artist']))
else:
    print('No song playing')

If you want Spotify to use the built-in notifier in Ubuntu, then by all means check out Spotify-notify. It also adds support for media keys.

Books I Read in 2011

2011-12-21T00:00:00-08:00

So, it's been over a year since my last "Books I Read" post so it's time I suppose. Only 28 books this year but this includes the behemoths that make up the first five books of the A Song Ice and Fire series so my page count is probably a bit higher this year. Hrm, that might be the job for a different script.

Looking over the list, books that stand out for me this year include The Woman in White, State of Wonder and A Visit from the Goon Squad.

If you want up to the minute updates, I suggest you follow me on Goodreads.

A Dance With Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5) by George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4) by George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3) by George R.R. Martin
A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2) by George R.R. Martin
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin
The Kid by Sapphire
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens by Mark Lamster
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Test-Driven JavaScript Development by Christian Johansen
Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: Can You Focus - Really Focus - for 25 Minutes? by Noteberg Staffan
Bossypants by Tina Fey
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman
City of Ruin (Legends of the Red Sun, #2) by Mark Charan Newton
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Full disclosure: Most of the book links on this page are Amazon affiliate links so I get some coin when you buy something.

The Big Easy 2011

2011-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

TL;DR: I use quite a bit of software.

For no particular reason other than I need to post something to make up for all the times I didn't post (and because I love making lists), here's a list of the software that I use day to day.

Ubuntu: My main machine is running Ubuntu 11.04. I've got other boxes running older versions of Ubuntu (as well as OS X) but this is where my hat hangs for the time being. Speaking of hanging, Unity almost made me want to hang myself but I think I have it dialed into where I like it. Hidden inside the Compiz settings are some sweet keyboard shortcuts for windows management, which is the only reason I tried out xmonad for as long as I did.
GNU Emacs: Emacs is probably where I spend about 90% of my day. I've got it to the point where I hardly touch the configuration files anymore. People complain that emacs users spend tons of time fiddling with settings but you have to average that over the lifespan of you using the software. So the time setting it up isn't that much really. Emacs probably demands its own post about all the packages that I use come to think of it.
Google Chrome: Yep, I ditched Firefox. Chrome just seems a lot faster and the developer tools are built in and rock solid. Seeing as how Firebug was staring to cause me to stab my eyes out, I'm quite happy now.
Dropbox: This is a service that I actually pay for. At my last job, dropbox was blocked and it made my life kind hellish. Without it, all my ebooks, projects and personal wiki are inaccessible.
KeePassX: The older the get, the more I forget. And when it comes to the bazillions of passwords I need to remember for various sites, I rely on KeePassX. Open source and available on multiple platforms, it's a keeper. Har har! Get it? Keeper. KeePassX. I should move over to marketing.
Spotify: Another service that I pay for. The huge selection of songs and the integration with Facebook make it kind of hard to pass up. I mention Facebook because it's good fun to queue up weird songs so they end up on your wall and your Mom gets to see it.
Git: Yeah, I spend way too much time in git but I use it and it suits my software development needs. So much so, that I use git to interact with our Subversion repository at work.
Remeber the Milk: Another piece of software that I pay for. I know this is technically a web service but I have software installed for it on my phone and tablet so I'm lumping this into the software post.
urxvt: I'm using this less and less now that I've been using Emacs to run my shell but when I need to run complex commands, this is the termianal I turn to. My shell of choice is Zsh.
Oh My Zsh!: Speaking of Zsh, this is a great collection of very useful Zsh configurations and aliases which make working with Zsh very very nice.
homedir: I don't know how I exactly found homedir but it's very sweet. It's basically a small package manager for your home directory. I use to keep all configurations the same across machines. And where I need a machine specific configuration, homedir comes to the rescue. I don't really use this day to day but thought it was worth mentioning because it's saved my bacon a few times.

That about wraps up what I'm using day to day. I use other things on-and-off (like LibreOffice -- shudder) but didn't think they were worth putting in the post.

Moustaches For Good!

2011-11-03T00:00:00-07:00

Sooo...hey! How ya' doing? Long time no see. Hope you've been well. Aside from being broken up over the breakdown of Google Reader, I've also been busy growing a moustache for Movember.

You can donate to my cause at http://mobro.co/sethmason. Feel free to pass it around …

JSLint and git blame for fun and profit

2011-05-04T00:00:00-07:00

For some unknown reason, we have a problem with superfluous trailing commas at work in our JavaScript. It's probably because we have a bunch of Perl developers writing JavaScript. Unfortunately, this doesn't play well in a world with Internet Explorer.

JSLint makes this easy enough to track down. But I wanted something more. I wanted to know who the culprits were. Thus, I whipped up this little script that'll take a list of files and tell you who committed a file with a trailing comma in it. Besides, JSLint, You'll need Rhino and a script to execute commands (named runtime.js). I'll try and post that later.

// blame_comma.js -- loop through the files passed in and see who has
// commas in them

// find ../htdocs/js/ECM -type f -name "*.js" -print | \
// xargs java -classpath \
//   /usr/share/yuicompressor-2.4.2/lib/rhino-1.6R7.jar \
//   org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main blame_comma.js

load('fulljslint.js');
load('runtime.js');

(function(args) {
    var bad_files = {};
    for (var i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
        var file = args[i],
            js = readFile(file);
        var success = JSLINT(js, {
            browser : true,
            undef   : true,
            newcap  : false,
            indent  : 4,
            predef: ["Ext","ECM","ActiveXObject","window",
                     "TestCase","document","assertTrue","sinon","gt"]
        });
        if (!success) {
            var errors = JSLINT.errors;
            for (var j=0;j<errors.length;j++) {
                var e = errors[j];
                if (e && e.reason && e.reason.match(/Extra comma/)) {
                    var cmd = 'git blame -L' + e.line + ', ' +
                              e.line + ' -- ' + file;
                    var output = runtime.exec( cmd );
                    if (!bad_files[file]) {
                        bad_files[file] = [];
                    }
                    bad_files[file].push(output);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    for (var key in bad_files) {
        if (bad_files.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
            print("\n" + key);
            var errors = bad_files[key];
            for (var i = 0; i<errors.length;i++) {
                print(errors[i]);
            }
        }
    }
})(arguments)

Like most of the stuff I seem to do lately, this is available as a gist on GitHub. Let me know if you see anything you like.

Beautify your JavaScript in Emacs

2011-04-28T00:00:00-07:00

I know you'll find this hard to believe dear reader but I'm a big fan of using Emacs to write JavaScript. One thing that irked me in the past is that none of the libraries got the indentation and other formatting how I wanted. Luckily, I recently stumbled onto js-beautify (via the most excellent jsFiddle.

Lo and behold, there is a command line interface to beautifying JavaScript! Good thing Emacs can call shell commands on text so easily. Thus, we have:

;;; js-beautify.el -- beautify some js code

(defgroup js-beautify nil
  "Use jsbeautify to beautify some js"
  :group 'editing)

(defcustom js-beautify-args "--jslint-happy --brace-style=end-expand
--keep-array-indentation"
  "Arguments to pass to jsbeautify script"
  :type '(string)
  :group 'js-beautify)

(defcustom js-beautify-path "~/projects/js-beautify/python/jsbeautifier.py"
  "Path to jsbeautifier python file"
  :type '(string)
  :group 'js-beautify)

(defun js-beautify ()
  "Beautify a region of javascript using the code from jsbeautify.org"
  (interactive)
  (let ((orig-point (point)))
    (unless (mark)
      (mark-defun))
    (shell-command-on-region (point)
                             (mark)
                             (concat "python "
                                     js-beautify-path
                                     " --stdin "
                                     js-beautify-args)
                             nil t)
    (goto-char orig-point)))

(provide 'js-beautify)
;;; js-beautify.el ends here

I like it so much I have bound to M-t (for tidy) in a mode hook:

(local-set-key "\M-t" 'js-beautify)

If you want to follow any updates, I've put this snippet up as a Gist on GitHub so feel free to clone and send me any pull requests.

Toggler in Ext JS

2011-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

Since it has been awhile since I last posted and we started using Ext JS at work, I thought I'd post a little snippet JavaScript for setting up a link that toggles something.

// create a toggler link...is there a better way?
var toggler = new Ext.BoxComponent({
    autoEl: {
        tag: 'a',
        href: '#',
        html: 'All'
    },
    listeners: {
        'render': function(comp) {
            var el = comp.getEl();
            el.on({
                'click': {
                    scope: comp,
                    fn: function(event, element) {
                        event.stopEvent();
                        var text = this.getEl().dom.innerHTML;
                        text = text.toggle('All', 'None');
                        this.update(text);
                        // do your toggling here
                    }
                }
            });
        }
    }
});

Because it's an instance of Ext.Component it can easily be added to a Ext.Container so it's a tad more reusable than a straight up select. At least I think so.

Questions and comments welcome.

Books I Read in 2010

2010-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

I was messing around with the Goodreads API and generated a list of books I read in 2010. Here they are in reverse order:

The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
How Would You Move Mount Fuji? by William Poundstone
The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money by David Owen
Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3) by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2) by Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) by Suzanne Collins
Lush Life by Richard Price
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Nights of Villjamur (Legends of the Red Sun, #1) by Mark Charan Newton
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
The Young Wan by Brendan O'Carroll
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
Circles by James Burke
Honey, I Wrecked the Kids: When Yelling, Screaming, Threats, Bribes, Time-outs, Sticker Charts and Removing Privileges All Don't Work by Alyson Schafer
The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1) by Gene Wolfe
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga
Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right by Douglas C. Merrill
The South by Colm Tóibín
Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Statistics Demystified by Stan Gibilisco
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt
Storming Las Vegas: How a Cuban-Born, Soviet-Trained Commando Took Down the Strip to the Tune of Five World-Class Hotels, Three Armored Cars, and Millions of Dollars by John Huddy
Table of Contents by John McPhee

Only 32 books in a year! That's kind of low for me, even with my Kindle by my side. Such is life I suppose. I really enjoyed How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, the Hunger Games series and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt if anyone is looking for a "Best of."

Full disclosure: These are Amazon affiliate links so if you happen to buy one through a link, I'll get some shekels.

Git script to update Bugzilla

2010-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

At my work we use git and Bugzilla for source code control and bug tracking respectively. We have a process where bugfixes are commited to a branch off of master with the name of bugfix/bz1234 where 1234 is the id of the issue in our bugzilla system.

After a fix is completed, a merge request is filed in our bugzilla system to merge this branch back into master (developers don't have write privileges to master). We are in the process of writing up a hook to parse commit messages to automate all of this but it's taking some time.

So, in the interest of making my life a bit easier until then, I took advantage of Bugzilla's excellent email_in.pl to parse incoming emails to edit tickets and wrote up a command to file fix and merge tickets for me.

I simply put git-bz on my $PATH and call it thusly:

> git bz fix
> git fix 1.2.3 hotfix | sendmail -t

Note: Our merge tickets require a milestone and a version for the merge ticket, thus the extra arguments for the merge.

Your system is probably radically different than ours but I thought it'd be interesting to post something here showing how powerful git is. Let me know what you think.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# git-bz -- given a version and target, print out a merge
#           email for sending to bz

use warnings;
use strict;

use Carp;
use Git;

#============================================================================
# map a shorthand version to the one bz expects for merges
#============================================================================
my %versions = (
    'mne'    => 'Merge (M&E/Patch)',
    'rc'     => 'Merge (RC/Major)',
    'hotfix' => 'Merge (Hotfix)'
);

#============================================================================
# get the action and config info
#============================================================================
my $action   = shift || '';
my $bz_email = Git::config('bz.email');

if (! $bz_email) {
    croak 'No bugzilla email found';
}

#============================================================================
# start doing the work
#============================================================================
if ( $action eq 'fix' ) {
    my $user_email = get_user_email();
    my $bz_info = get_bz_info();

    print <<"MAIL";
To: $bz_email
From: $user_email
Subject: Issue $bz_info->{bug} fixed

\@bug_id = $bz_info->{bug}
\@bug_status = RESOLVED
\@resolution = FIXED

Fixed in $bz_info->{branch} pending merge.

MAIL

} elsif ( $action eq 'merge' ) {
    my $target_milestone = shift || '---';
    my $merge_to = shift;
    my $version  = ( $merge_to && $versions{$merge_to} ) ||
                   'unspecified';
    my $bz_info  = get_bz_info();

    my $user_email = get_user_email();

    if ( !defined $bz_info->{bug} ) {
        croak "No bug id found in branch name";
    }

    my $bug_id = $bz_info->{bug};
    my $bz_branch = $bz_info->{branch};

 #============================================================================
 # get the remote branch, url and name
 #============================================================================
    my @remote_info
        = Git::command( 'config', '--get-regexp', '^branch\.'
                        . $bz_branch );
    my ( $remote, $remote_branch );
    for my $line (@remote_info) {
        if ( $line =~ /\.remote\s+(.+)/x ) {
            $remote = $1;
        } elsif ( $line =~ /merge\s+((refs\/)?heads\/)?(.+)/x ) {
            $remote_branch = $3;
        }
    }

    my $remote_url = Git::command_oneline( 'config', '--get-regexp',
        'remote.' . $remote . '.url' );
    if ( $remote_url =~ m/url\s+(.+)/x ) {
        $remote_url = $1;
    }

 #============================================================================
 # get the commits to show
 #============================================================================
    my $commits = Git::command(
        'log',            "$remote/$remote_branch..",
        '--pretty=short', '--name-status'
    );

 #============================================================================
 # finally print out the email message
 #============================================================================
    print <<"MAIL";
To: $bz_email
From: $user_email
Subject: Please merge $bz_branch to $remote_branch

\@blocked = $bug_id
\@product = Application Defects
\@component = Merge Request
\@version = $version
\@target_milestone = $target_milestone

Please merge $bz_branch to the remote branch $remote_branch

Merge: $bz_branch
To: $remote_branch
Repository: $remote_url

$commits
MAIL

} else {
    croak <<"USAGE";
error: Unknon subcommand: $action
usage: git bz fix <target>
   or: git bz merge <merge_to> <target>

USAGE
}

#============================================================================
# get current branch and bug ID
#============================================================================
sub get_bz_info {
    my $bz_branch = Git::command_oneline( 'symbolic-ref', 'HEAD' );
    $bz_branch =~ s{^refs\/heads/}{}x;
    my ($bug_id) = $bz_branch =~ m/bz(\d+)/x;
    return { branch => $bz_branch, bug => $bug_id };
}

sub get_user_email {
    my $email = Git::command_oneline( 'config', '--get', 'user.email' );
    return $email;
}

If you want to use it, you'll need to set up a config to point to your own bz email.

> git config bz.email mybz@somedomain.com

This script is available as a gist on github.

Emacs and Remember The Milk all jumbled up

2010-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

I'm a huge fan of Remember The Milk and GNU Emacs. So much so, that I've given them both money over the years. And now I've (kind of) combined them. I just pushed slack-rtm to GitHub.

I've kind of avoided Emacs Lisp, the 1984 Subaru of Lisp. While I've done some minor hacking of my .emacs in the two years I've been using Emacs, I have not really done any serious programming in it. But with this, I'm hoping to remedy that a bit. It's been fine so far, even though the learning curve has been steep. I don't think I'll be writing a JavaScript interpreter anytime soon.

Right now, it's pretty simple. It just creates a buffer and shoves your tasks into it. I've only tested it on GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1. Ultimately, I'd like it to sync between an orgmode file and RTM, kind of like what Sacha Chua did with org-toodledo.

So, have at it. Feel free to fork it and send me pull requests. I'm hoping to release early (DONE!) and often.

Sheena Is A C++ Hacker

2010-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Not really. And my name's not Sheena. But I did make a contribution to the awesome console based newsreader Newsbeuter. If you want to see my patch, it's available on Github. I fixed a problem with the way that it authenticated against Google Reader API.

As for Newsbeuter, if you like doing everything from the commandline, this is the newsreader for you. Lots of features like keyboard shortcuts that can be reconfigured easily and query feeds so you can create your own pipe.

Check it out

Google Apps Script For Fun and Profit

2010-05-28T00:00:00-07:00

OK, so I have to admit that I have a mancrush on Google Apps Script. It's a nice little tool that allows you to do a whole variety of things on a bunch of Google Products. For instance:

With scripts, you can:
* Create your own custom spreadsheet functions
* Automate repetitive tasks (e.g. process responses to Google Docs forms)
* Link multiple Google products together (e.g. send emails or schedule
* Calendar events from a list of addresses in a Spreadsheet)
* Customize existing Google products (e.g. add custom buttons or menus to run * your own scripts)

Not only is the tool itself very nice (a slick in-browser editor with syntax highlighting and context sensitive prompts), the tutorials are as well. In a little under 15 minutes while reading the tutorial I was able to write a script that emails you the next 10 days events from any calendar. It uses JavaScript so if you are familiar with that, then you could probably even do it quicker than me and my old brain.

A pet peeve that I have is that the daily email I get from Google Calendar doesn't include my contact's birthdays. Even if it did, it'd only be for that day which would be too late for me to drop a card in the mail. And even if did that, it wouldn't send the email to my wife. Thus, the following script was born.

// how many days in advance
var INTERVAL = 10;

// the calendar to grab
var CALENDAR = "Contacts' birthdays and events";

// who to send it to
var EMAIL_TO = "email1@somewhere.com,email2@somewhere.com";

//  the subject to use
var SUBJECT = "Birthdays for Seth next " + INTERVAL + " days "

function onOpen() {
  var submenu = [{ name:"Send Birthday List",
                   functionName:"sendBirthdayList"
                 }];
  SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().addMenu('Birthdays', submenu);
}

function sendBirthdayList() {
  // Get the event template string from the spreadsheet
  var emailTemplate = SpreadsheetApp
        .getActiveSheet().getRange("b2").getValue();
  var eventTemplate = SpreadsheetApp
        .getActiveSheet().getRange("b3").getValue();
  // Get the next INTERVAL days
  var start = new Date();
  var end = new Date(start.getTime() + 1000*60*60*24*10);

  var cal = CalendarApp.openByName(CALENDAR);
  var events = cal.getEvents(start, end);

  // Add each event to the email
  var eventLines = "";

  for (var e in events) {
    var event = events[e];
    eventLines += eventTemplate
      .replace("<TITLE>", event.getTitle())
      .replace("<DAY>", event.getEndTime().toLocaleDateString())
      .replace("'s birthday","");

  }
  var email = emailTemplate.replace("<EVENTS>", eventLines);
  MailApp.sendEmail(EMAIL_TO,
                    SUBJECT + now.toLocaleDateString(), email);
}

Lo! Better living through technology.

Right now, I have the template for the email stored in two cells in a spreadsheet and other configuration info at the top of the script. Those could probably go in cell data too, just so it'd be easier to share this script. But it should give you an idea of lovely it is touse Google Apps Script.

Using the triggers that are built-in (Triggers < Current script triggers...), I have it scheduled to email us every 3 days at midnight. So, hopefully, I won't be missing any birthdays.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

2010-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

I recently picked up O'Reilly's book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts as it was an eBook Deal of the Day. Overall, I thought it a great book for a programmer just starting out in the field. It had quite a few things that I wish I'd known earlier. Probably because I took an unconventional route to programming.

One thing I found interesting was that many of the essays made reference to the suggestion from The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master to learn one new langauage every year. The suggestion by itself wasn't interesting. I think many people have heard it. The thing that intrigued me about it was that "The Pragmatic Programmer" is published by Addison-Wesley. I don't think I've seen such overt references to other publishers' books in a programming book before.

Kudos to you O'Reilly.

A Better Bugzilla2

2010-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

For a variety of reasons, I'm still using version 2 of Bugzilla at work even though it's considered "dead" by Bugzilla. And the interface looks like it's been dead awhile.

But, thanks to Greasemonkey, I'm not stuck with the interface. Inspired by Jesse Ruderman's TidyBug, I made my own Greasemonkey script which I'm calling TidyBz2.

Here's the before shot:

Here's the after shot:

It hides the huge header, makes the title of the issue much more prominent and fixes some other formatting nits I disliked. Information that I think is more important is moved up to the top as well. But there are also perks you can't see. You can use the keyboard to do pretty much anything you need to: comment, resolve, browse the URL, search, navigate between comments a la gmail, etc. Once you have it installed, just press ? to see all the keyboard shortcuts.

It's up on GitHub so feel free to fork it and make any modifications you'd like to see.

PragPub

2010-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

This is probably way late but The Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishers of fine programming books, have launched a free monthly magazine called PragPub that covers a variety of topics. For instance, this month has a nice overview of how to use Sass. Past topics have included articles about Clojure, automating screencasts and managing life projects.

Granted, they are ultimately pushing their books (which I think are excellent) but they are releasing the magazine in PDF, epub and mobi. How cool is that?

PragPub

Visit your local library via Amazon.com

2010-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

I love reading. It's how I get most my knowledge (or lack thereof). And I also really like bookmarklets. They make browsing the web much easier.

And I found this great bookmarklet that let's you find a book that you are viewing on Amazon.com at your local library. It's called xISBN Bookmarklet. I just call it 'library lookup v2.' It was inspired by Jon Udell's LibraryLookup which I used to use so I just updated the version.

It's really easy to set up and use. Set up is covered on its page under "Try xISBN Bookmarkets." One thing you'll need in advance is to know the base URL of your library's catalog. Mine is http://catalog.colapl.org for example.

Using it is even eaiser. You just look at a page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and click the bookmarklet. Or if there's a ISBN on a page, you can just select it and click the bookmarklet. It'll take you to a page like this.

Depending on your library, you could place a hold on it and then pick it up. Remember, support your local library!

And I'm back

2010-01-25T00:00:00-08:00

OK, so it's been over a year since my last post (of which I completed all except two). But here I am now with a wonderful new design, thanks to Sprout Creative and a new outlook on blogging.

I've taken a bit of a different approach to blogging this time. Instead of using a content management system like Wordpress or Movable Type, I'm opting for static html. The pages are generated by Jekyll after being written in GNU Emacs. I'm hoping that this tool set makes it easier for me to get posts up. Let me know if you have any questions about the process or if you have any comments about the design.

We'll see if it sticks. If you don't hear from me for another year, then you'll know that this little experiment failed.

Resolutions

2009-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

I have been mulling these over for the past couple of days but I thought I'd post them to the internets in hopes of injecting some accountability into the whole morass.

Get knee fixed
Go on vacation somewhere besides San Francisco/Oakland or Rhode Island with wife and child
Take better photos
Bake cake for wife's birthday
Lay off the sugar and don't lay around as much (uhm, after I bake the cake)
Learn Clojure
Fix what ails desktop computer
Clean out top drawer of bureau
Rebalance 401K
Turn 40 (yeah, I'm old)

If you are reading this and want a health check, feel free to ping me.

Dojo snippets for Emacs

2008-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

I've been using Dojo for a couple of months now and I really like it as it makes writing cross-browser JavaScript a breeze.

I've also been using Emacs with YASnippet for a bit now too. YASnippet is a plugin for Emacs that allows you to define a snippet that'll get transformed into something much bigger in your file. It saves you a lot of typing as you can define areas in your snippet where you get prompted to enter text and it'll autofill with your entries. Very handy, let me tell you. There's a screencast on YouTube showing how powerful it is.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I've created a package of snippets aimed at people writing Dojo based JavaScript. It's hosted up on GitHub if you would like to use it. Currently, it only includes (what I feel to be) the major functions but feel free to contact me if you'd like to add more.

svn log made easy

2008-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

svn log is a great command to see what's going on in your subversion repository. Unfortunately, at my job we are using a really old version (1.1.4!), a version so old that it doesn't support the --limit argument. This makes the svn log painful to use as it outputs EVERYTHING.

Luckily, svn log is so awesome that it overcomes this weakness and allows you to use a date based criteria for listing log statements. Unfortunately, the syntax is hard for me to remember. Thus, I wrote this little shell script function that'll list activity for the given days in the past. You can put it in your .bashrc and run it like svnlog 14. That'll output logs from the last 14 days.

svnlog() {
    OFFSET=$1
    shift
    svn log -r HEAD:{"`date -d "$OFFSET days ago" +%Y-%m-%d`"} $*
}

Commandline Fun

2008-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

Insprired by an article on ibm.com about using twitter from the command line, I wrote up a simple little script to get your friends updates.

Here it is:

$ curl -s -u username:password \
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml |
awk '/<text/ {
  gsub(/<\/*text>/,"");
  text = $0;
}
/screen_name/ {
  gsub(/ *<\/*screen_name>/,"");
  print $0;
  print text;
}'

All it does it is use cURL to grab the timeline from twitter. Then it passes it through awk to extract the name and text from your buddies. Simple and silly, yes?

More Keyboard Fun

2008-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

Continuing along on the keyboard theme, most Google apps have keyboard shortcuts. I've started using Google calendar and found the keyboard shortcuts for it as well. Very handy.

Google Calendar keyboard shortcuts

Speaking of keyboard navigation....

2008-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

Did you know that you can navigate Google search results with your keyboard?

It's a Google Labs experiment so you'll have to enable it on any machine you want to try it.

To experience the glory of navigating search results with your keyboard, head on over to Google Experimental Search and click "Join" for the Keyboard Shortcuts experiment. Then it's simply a matter of pressing "J" to navigate down the search results and "K" to move up your search results on Google. Pressing "O" will then open up the link for you. There are a few others that you might like as well so give this experiment a whirl.

The keyboard shortcuts key will also show up on your search results page so that'll help you remember them. (Experienced vi users will of course recognize these keyboard shortcuts.)

Throw away that mouse

2008-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

I'm not a big fan of using the mouse. It pains me to reach for it to accomplish something. That's why I was really excited to find the Mouseless Browsing add-on for Firefox.

From the add-on's homepage:

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) is a Firefox-Extension which enables you to browse the internet with the keyboard. The basic principle is to add small boxes with unique ids behind every link and/or form element. You just have to type in the id and press enter (there is also an automatice mode available) to trigger the corresponding action i.e. following a link, pressing a button or selecting a textfield.

I could never get w3m working how I liked it so Mouseless Browsing really scratches an itch I have.

jQuery and Friendfeed experimentation

2008-07-24T00:00:00-07:00

So, I created a little page that'll dump out the last 30 items from my Friendfeed feed.

jQuery and the Friendfeed API make it incredibly easy. It only took me about 15 minutes to get it working. The rest of the time was making it ugly with my crazy design skills.

It's over on my vanity site if you are curious to check it out.

Google Code Search to the rescue

2008-06-18T00:00:00-07:00

UPDATE: Google Code Search was shutdown so this fun doesn't apply anymore.

Mmkay, this tip is probably a gazillion years late but Google Code Search is a great resource for a budding developer. Heck, I'm a relatively seasoned developer and I use it.

It allows you to search public source code using a variety of methods. You can search for an exact string or a regex. You can search certain files, certain packages and certain languages.

For instance, today I was curious how to use the Perl API for writing a Pidgin plugin as their documentation is a tad sparce. A quick search looking for Purple::Find::buddy and I found a whole bunch of examples. You can also use it for silly things, like looking for quotes from "Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy."

It's official, Google now owns me. sigh

Machine specific startup files in BASH

2008-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

Here's a helpful tip if you use a couple of different machines and need specific things set up on a specific machine.

Just add the following to your .bashrc

## Read Generic RC                                                                            
for rcfile in "$HOME/.shell/"*.rc;
do                        
    if [ -r "$rcfile" ]; 
done

Thus, common things are stored in your .bashrc (like aliases, functions, etc.) and things you want on a specific machine are in their own directory.

Then, just put whatever machine specific files you want/need in ~/.shell and name them with .rc. For instance, I have ~/.shell/smurf.rc that sets up some smurf information.

> export FAVORITE_SMURF="Poppa Smurf"
> export SMURF_LOVER=$HOME/bin/blue_love

That way, if I ever need something that's specific to a machine, I just drop it in my .shell directory and away we go.

Cost of try/catch in JavaScript

2008-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

I know that in Java, using a try/catch is fairly expensive vs. a if check. Since JavaScript has the same syntax for the most part, I wrote up a simple benchmarking script to test it out. On my box, it outputs:

if avg: 0.029
try avg: 1.372

Note, that you'll need the Firebug plugin for Firefox in order to run this.

var tryFunc = function () {
  try {
    document.getElementById("fake").innerHTML = "hi there";
  } catch (e) {
    // eat it!
  }
}

var ifFunc = function() {
  var el = document.getElementById("fake");
  if (el) {
    el.innerHTML = "hi there";
  }
};

function benchmark(name, func) {
  var repeats = 1000;
  var elapsed = 0;
  var startTime =0;
  var endTime = 0;
  for (var i=0; i< repeats; i++) {
    startTime = new Date().getTime();
    func.call();
    endTime = new Date().getTime();
    elapsed += (endTime - startTime);
  }
  console.log(name + " avg: " + (elapsed / repeats ) );
}

benchmark( "if", ifFunc );
benchmark( "try", tryFunc );

HOWTO: Invoke a shell script on a file on save with emacs

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

At my current job, we use a lot of Template Toolkit. Due to some design decisions (that I consider a tad strange), we have to run a shell script on the template files (e.g. files that end with “.tt”) after they are saved in order for them to be displayed on the dev site.

Since I started using emacs about two months ago, I've learned quite a bit. A new thing on the learning heap is the after-save-hook. Emacs to the rescue yet again.

Here's a emacs lisp function I wrote to automate the execution of the script when a template file is saved:

(defun ssm-cheetah-after-save-hook ()
  "After saving a tt file, run the language_update file"
  (if buffer-file-name
      (progn
        (setq is-tt-file (numberp (string-match "\.tt$" buffer-file-name)))
        (if is-tt-file
            (progn
              (setq cmd (concat (getenv "B") "/bin/YOURSCRIPTHERE --template="))
              (shell-command (concat cmd buffer-file-name))
              (message "Updated template with %s" buffer-file-name))))))
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'ssm-cheetah-after-save-hook)

What it does, is first defines a function that checks to see if we have a file name, (which should probably always be true since we are saving now that I look at it). If we do, check to see if the name ends with “.tt.” If it does, pass the name of the file to the shell script and output a message to the user saying the template was updated. Finally, the function is added to the after save hook.

Emacs Tips

2007-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

Since I've been programming more Perl than Java lately, I've started using Emacs as my primary IDE. Been checking out a few sites with tips and tricks to help me along the path of conversion from vi to Emacs. Trey Jackson's blog seems pretty promising.

Hopefully, he can keep up the tip a week format. Allegedly, he has 150 tips so he should be good for 3 or so years.

Lisp Fun

2007-10-30T00:00:00-07:00

Interested in learning Lisp? A new site has launched with screencast episodes about developing an application in Lisp. The site is LispCast and so far there are three videos up. It's about building a web application that is a clone of Reddit. The subject of the videos so far are writing it, developing tests and refactoring. They each clock in at about twenty minutes and are quite helpful.

It looks like the creator, one Eric Normand, has some pretty big plans for the site. Let's hope that he is able to do it. I know I'm rooting for him.

Intellij IDEA and Linux: Not Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate

2007-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

I love me some Intellij and I love me some Linux. Unfortunately, they don't play too well together. Lots of keyboard shortcuts do operating system commands.

For instance, CTRL+ALT+L reformats your code in Intellij but it never gets a chance to that because that keyboard sequence locks the desktop on Ubuntu. Besides changing quite a few keyboard shortcuts in the administration screen, does anyone have any tips or tricks?

Editing Huge Amounts of Files Easily

2007-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

Where I work, we have tons of static html files that are published using our custom built Content Management System. Sometimes, we have to change a single line on every single page. For example, the latest case involved a change involving the size of ads that were on the pages. Rather than use publishing and database resources just to make this relatively simple change, I use the power of the shell. Specifically, I use find, sed and a shell script that I wrote. It's based on a shell script in the Unix Power Tools book.

First off, we need to find all the files. I usually accomplish this with something simple like

$ find /www -type f -name "*.html" -print

This simply finds that end with .html in the /www directory. You can do more complex things with find like find all files modified in the last 2 days by Frank if you needed to change files like that.

The results of this will be passed off to a file named replace.sh located in my ~/bin directory. replace.sh is reproduced here:

#!/bin/sh
temp=/tmp/replace$$
echo -n "editing $1: "
if test "$1" = sedscr; then
    echo -n "Not editing sedscript!"
elif test -s $1; then
         sed -f sedscr $1 > $temp
    if test -s "$temp"; then
        if cmp -s "$1" $temp; then
            echo -n "FILE NOT CHANGED: "
        else
            # save original, just in case
            # mv $1 $1.bak
            cp $temp "$1"
        fi
        echo -n "done"
    else
        echo -n "Sed produced an empty file \
- check your sedscript".
    fi
else
    echo -n "ORIGINAL FILE IS EMPTY"
fi
rm -f $temp
echo

So, the command we would run would now look like this:

$ find /www -type f \
      -name "*.html" \
      -exec ~/bin/replace.sh {} \;

This does the same as above but passes each file found by the find command above to the ~/bin/replace.sh script.

You'll notice that the replace.sh file calls sed using a file named sedscr. The next step is creating the sedscr file.

The sedscr files simple contains sed commands. It must exist in the same directory that you call the find command above from. Here's a sample sedscr that just does a simple replace.

s/BigHonkingAd/NiceSmallAd/

You can enter in as many complex sed commands as you want. It's sed so the power is there!

This simply replaces all instances of BigHonkingAd with NiceSmallAd in each of your files found by the find command. The nice thing about the replace.sh script is that it will not edit the file if the contents of your sedscr don't produce an altered file. Also, if you want the replace.sh to make a backup of your original file, just uncomment the mv line.

Using this methodology, I'm able to edit about 5000 files a minute. It could probably be faster if I used xargs and the output of replace.sh is a little verbose but this solution has worked for me for years and if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Vim Tip: Select Column

2007-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

How many times have you wanted to replace a column of text with something. With vim it's easy. Just use CTRL-V to select a column using a visual block.

Once it's selected, you can do a search and replace, yank, cut and other actions. For example, here's the keystrokes to change a column.

Put cursor and beginning of text to select
Press CTRL-V to begin select of the column
When you reach the end of your select, type 'c'
Type the new text. Note that this will only replace the first instance.
Now hit <ESC><ESC>. All the text has been changed!

The same thing works with plain old 'v' (select character by character) and SHIFT-V (select by line).

Happy vimming!

Just Cuz'

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

OK, I've decided that the next programming langauge I learn is Lisp. I just love all the parenthesis I guess. An excellent Lisp tutorial is Peter Siebel's book Practical Common Lisp.

Fun stuff.

Command Line Fun

2007-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

If you use the command line in bash, you should check out the CDPATH environment variable. It'll make your life tons easier.

From the bash man pages, CDPATH is defined as:

The search path for the cd command. This is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for destination directories specified by the cd command. A sample value is “.:\~:/usr”.

In my .bashrc, I've got the following defined: CDPATH='.:..:../..:~/projects'

This allows me to just type cd app when I want to go to ~/projects/app. Another great part of it is that if I am in /var/log and want to go to /var/www I only need to type cd www. The .. in the CDPATH takes care of finding it.

The important part of it is the first one. The single period allows for cd to work normally and find directories in your current directory.

Ten Keyboard Shortcuts for IntelliJ IDEA

2007-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

For my day job I use Java quite a bit. And to edit I use IntelliJ IDEA. I used to use Eclipse but work paid for an IntelliJ IDEA license and I've become hooked. The refactorings and clean interface are a boon to my productivity.

Well this post isn't an IntelliJ IDEA fanboy post so let's get back on track. Here's a list of shortcuts that I find most helpful for use with IntelliJ IDEA. Note that these aren't the obvious ones (like Alt-Space for code completion). These are some hidden ones that you might not know about it.

Ctrl-/: Comment out the selected lines with //.
Ctrl-D: Copy the current line and paste it.
Ctrl-Y: Delete the current line.
Ctrl-BACKSPACE: Delete to word end from cursor.
Ctrl-DEL: Delete to word start from cursor.
Ctrl-W: Select the current word. Press it again and it selects more of the code block.
Shift+F10: Run the configuration
Shift+F9: Debug the configuration
Alt+F7: Find usages of the current word
Ctrl-J: Bring up the Live Template context menu. If you don't know about Live Templates, you can save major keystrokes by defining them.

For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts for IntelliJ IDEA, there's a PDF issued by JetBrains floating around.

Linux Cut and Paste

2007-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

Since I'm in the process of switching to Ubuntu I've been hunting down tips and tricks. One great resource is the Ubuntu Blog. Today they had a great tip for copying and pasting in GNOME.

Basically, what you do is highlight the text in one application (for example Firefox), switch to another application and then click the middle mouse button where you want the text to show up. Your highlighted text is now exactly where you want it. If you don't feel like using the mouse, you can use Shift+Insert in the second application to paste the text.

Cygwin And SSH Tip

2007-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

Auto completion for ssh under cygwin was driving me nuts. It wasn't parsing the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file like it should have and using those values to auto-complete. Investigating, (by using ssh -v) I found out that my known_hosts didn't exist in ${HOME}/.ssh and ssh was using the one in C:/Documents and Settings/smason/.ssh. Uh, excuse me? My $HOME is /home/smason. I cd ~ and I'm in /home/smason. Bafflement ensued.

Turns out my /etc/passwd was all mucked up. It had my HOME directory set to the one in my Documents and Settings directory. I manually edited my /etc/passwd and now ssh auto completion works.

Wow, the second post in a row dealing with auto completion. I guess I really like auto-completion. Think of the keystrokes I'm saving you!

.bashrc Fun With Subversion

2007-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

Do you use Subversion a lot from the command line in bash? Then this tip is for you.

Add the following to your .bashrc

# svn completion
_svn ()
{
    local cur prev
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}
    if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ] || [ "${prev:0:1}" = "-" ]; then
        COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W 'add blame cat checkout cleanup \
        commit copy delete diff export help import info list lock \
        log merge mkdir move propdel propedit propget proplist \
        propset resolved revert status switch unlock update' $cur ))
    else
        COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -f $cur ))
    fi
    return 0
}
ccomplete -F _svn -o default -X '@(*/.svn|.svn)' svn

Save your .bashrc, source it (using source .bashrc) and now Subversion commands will complete. For example, enter svn upd press the Tab key and you'll get svn update.

Think of all the keystrokes you'll be saving.

Update: I just found Subversion's own bash completion script which has a ton more options. Mine is easier to maintain. :)

Got Ugly SQL?

2007-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

Sometimes you have a bunch of SQL statements that are very long, very verbose and very unreadable. Would you spend minutes of your time to format the SQL in strings so that it's readable? Would you paste the ugly SQL in your source code letting some future maintainer try and decipher it? Well, I'm about to save you a metric ton of time as well as your reputation with maintainers of your code. Use SQL Formatter and it'll do all the grunt work for you.

It's bloody easy to use. Just Accept the usage agreement, paste in your offending SQL statement and choose the formatting and output you want. Bingo! Nicely formatted SQL. You can even choose to format it as a string in the language of your choice so you can just copy and paste it into your source.

If you don't feel comfortable using an online tool, there's a desktop version that's postcardware.

Give it a whirl!

Keeping It Real Safe And Real Easy

2007-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

OK, I've fallen in love with putting my home directory in Subversion. The benefits are enormous. They include (but are not limited to):

ease of setting up environment on new system
backup
ability to go “back in time” using Subversion tags

Mind you I don't put everything in there, just the important stuff like my shell configuration files and my vim configuration files. Other important files (like pictures and music I spent ages ripping) are backed up in other ways.

Here's what I currently have saved in svn:

$ svn ls http://my.svn.server/svn/home-dir/trunk/
.Xdefaults
.antrc
.bash_profile
.bashrc
.dircolors
.inputrc
.irbrc
bin/
vim_local/

So now when I'm on a system, I'll have the same look and feel and same functionality as the utilities I use will be available in my ~/bin directory.

For those astute readers, you'll notice that I don't have a .vimrc file in there. That's because I'm using an excellent tip from Amir Salihefendic about taming your vim config. Basically on each system I have a specialized but simple .vimrc that sources the vim_local for what it needs.

I've found this setup works great on the many different systems I use throughout a given week (e.g. Windows, Mac and Linux). And I'm safe in the knowledge that my configuration files won't disappear should my machines suddenly implode.

Debugging Is Sexy Good Times

2007-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

I love me some JSON. The problem with it is that it's not too human readable when you need to see what it's returning. Sure you could litter your code with alerts or console.debug (if you are using Firebug and Firefox to figure out what values are you getting back.

But if you've got the Firefox/Firebug setup (and why don't you if you don't?) then you can just use the Firebug console to display the JSON data. Say for instance you have the following data returned from your service (but imagine it's a bazillion lines long):

{"SomeObject":{"Attrib1":"foo",
               "Attrib2":"bar",
               "SubObject": {"SubAttrib1":"bar"}
              }
}

Just wrap that in an eval function, plug it into the console and you get back a nice little tree of your data in the DOM view.

Now isn't that sexy?

Welcome

2007-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Hello and welcome to sethmason.com. This site is basically an experiment to set up a site that's a resume of sorts. It will feature articles about technology that reflect my depth of knowledge.

The site itself is set up using TextPattern. Normally, I would eat my own dog food and use a Java based content management system but I wanted to give PHP and Textile a test. So far, I'm impressed.

For more information about myself, check out my about page. And feel free to leave a comment.

Writing Tests For Fun And Profit

2007-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Learning a new programming language historically starts off with the classic “Hello World” example. I've probably written a variation on that a bazillion times. From there you take more steps into advanced parts of the language. If you are smart, you save your example programs to refer back to them later. But there's a better way. And that better way is to write test cases that exercise the capabilities of the language you are trying to learn. This also works for new libraries within a language you are trying to learn.

The advantages of writing test cases are plentiful. It gets you writing actual code which helps you remember, they can be usually be run easily, they serve as an extra source of documentation about what you are trying to do (e.g. “How do I use gsub again? Oh yeah, it's in that string test I wrote?”) and finally writing tests is fun.

An Example

After ignoring it for way too long, I recently started trying out the Yahoo! User Interface Library. It's a JavaScript library with scads of useful utilities for buidling web applications. So, I pulled up the documentation and started writing a tests based on what's documented. Since it's JavaScript, I used JsUnit since I'm used to JUnit on the Java side of things. And voila we have our first test:

<html>
    <head>
    <title>Test Yahoo</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" 
        src="jsUnitCore.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" 
        src="yahoo.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    <!--
        function testIsArray() {
            assertTrue(YAHOO.lang.isArray([1,2]));
        }
    //-->
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    A test document.
</body>
</html>

(I know it's very simple but I just wanted to get a feel for the first method in the global library and type it so my brain remembered it.)

So, now I drop the test file into my test runner and here we have the results:

Can't you just feel your brain expanding with the possibilities?