Author Archives: Jeff Fitzsimons
Powdered Whole Milk
Powdered milk is a great thing to have along when backpacking. It’s a lightweight source of protein and flavor. Unfortunately, all of the backpacking-oriented stores seem obsessed with fat-free products. This yields tasteless, low-calorie breakfasts which don’t seem to keep … Continue reading
Oakland to Yosemite
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Backpacking, Climbing, Travel
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Weirdness With Echo and Parentheses Within Conditional Statements
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“. … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Organizing Files by Date Using Find
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, … Continue reading
Posted in Scripting, Technology
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Extracting a Version Number From a Text File Using Batch Files and Cygwin
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scripting, Technology
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Installing Graphviz Dot Without Root Access
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Linking to XML Stylesheet Stored on Local Server in Firefox
Problem I created an XML stylesheet which I wanted to place on a local Samba share. 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 … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Mouse Scroll Wheel in Ubuntu in VMware
I’m running VMware Workstation 6.5 under Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu 8.04 installed. I found a tip on how to enable the mouse scroll wheel, but I found that it switched my mouse over to Ubuntu control. That is to … Continue reading
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CoCreateInstance Fails With “Class Not Registered”
Recently, I had a problem unique to my test machine. Attempting to call CoCreateInstance on a COM class provided by one of our DLLs resulted in HRESULT 0x80040154, which corresponds to “Class not registered”. This was a mystery since regsvr32 … Continue reading
Posted in COM, Technology, Win32, Windows
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Stripping Vertical Whitespace Using tr
The Translate command, tr, is available on all Unix-y systems, including Cygwin. tr -d will delete the specified characters from a stream. Several handy escape sequences are provided for stripping newlines, carriage returns, and form-feeds: \f – form feed \n … Continue reading
Posted in Linux, Scripting, Technology
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