Archive for July, 2008

Oakland to Yosemite

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Google Maps provides a route from the San Francisco Bay Area to Yosemite National Park which runs along 580 to Highway 120. I find this route to be intolerably populated, unattractive, and often ground to a stop due to accidents or sheer traffic volume. On a recent drive back, when ...

Weirdness With Echo and Parentheses Within Conditional Statements

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

The if command in Windows batch files has some strange implications. One problem is that parentheses take on special meaning. I first ran into this problem because my batch file would terminate shortly after showing, "folder unexpected at this time". A very basic if command might look like this: C:\>if exist C:\ ...

Organizing Files by Date Using Find

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

I had taken pictures using a friend's SD card. He copied all the files to my flash drive, but this left me without a nice, tidy directory structure. Normally, I organize my photos like: 2008 2008_06_27 2008_06_28 2008_06_29 First off, I needed to list ...

Extracting a Version Number From a Text File Using Batch Files and Cygwin

Friday, July 11th, 2008

We have a version.h file. It contains lines such as: #define VERSION_MAJOR 3 #define VERSION_MINOR 1 By piping this through grep, I can get the line I'm looking for: c:\>grep "VERSION_MAJOR" version.h #define VERSION_MAJOR 3 But what I really want is the version ...

Installing Graphviz Dot Without Root Access

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

I want to install Graphviz on a machine in order to get access to the dot diagram generator. However, I don't have root access on this box, so I want to install it in my home directory, under ~/bin/graphviz. To do this, call the configure script with a ...

Linking to XML Stylesheet Stored on Local Server in Firefox

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Problem I created an XML stylesheet which I wanted to place on a local Samba. In the XML file to be transformed, I placed a file:// URI in the xml-stylesheet tag, but it wouldn't work in Firefox. Internet Explorer would happily format the content as expected, but Firefox simply ...