Author Archives: Edward

About Edward

Edward Harman

jaq@ethelred.org
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random compiz wallpaper

January 21, 2010 – 12:06 pm

Since I have a growing number of pictures of my baby daughter, I wanted to randomly select some to use as desktop wallpaper. I put a bunch of pictures in my ‘wallpaper’ directory and wrote this script to deal with them. #!/usr/bin/env ruby   require ‘pathname’ require ‘dbus’   $wallpaper_dir = Pathname ‘/home/edward/wallpapers’ $screensize = […]

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next whenever

December 7, 2009 – 9:07 am

It appears from a couple of confusing arrangements recently that Americans1 who say e.g. ‘next Friday’ mean ‘Friday next week’. Whereas I, being literal-minded, interpret it as ‘counting from today (which is Monday), the next Friday is Friday this week’. In other time-related language, people here say ‘quarter of’, and I still can’t remember if […]

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bash twitter

November 24, 2009 – 8:57 am

There are probably lots of variants out there. In fact mine is largely copied from here Inspired by BLT #!/bin/bash # a twitter client (uses .netrc for auth)   confdir=~/.bt seenfile=$confdir/seen feedstyle=$confdir/btfeed.xsl   if [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then echo " use: $(basename $0) -h | [ tweet ]" echo " -h help" echo […]

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random dabbling roundup

November 14, 2009 – 10:50 am

I seem to be in a phase where I play with lots of new software things without creating a whole lot in any of them. Google App Engine is interesting due to the promise of getting massive distribution/scaling for ‘free’. I started trying to put together a Java application to try it out, but it […]

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javascript in the shell

November 10, 2009 – 12:13 pm

Different languages are good for different things. But unix shell style trumps all. An example: bin/urlencode #!/usr/bin/js   function urlEncode(str){ str=escape(str); str=str.replace(new RegExp(’\+’,‘g’),’%2B’); return str.replace(new RegExp(’%20’,‘g’),’‘); }     if(arguments && arguments.length > 0) { for(var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i+) { r = urlEncode(arguments[i]); print(r); } } else { importPackage(java.io); importPackage(java.lang); S […]

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Health Care Debate part 1

August 13, 2009 – 8:20 am

I’ve been meaning to write comparing British and US health care for a while, but it’s not a very easy topic to get around. However it is the main subject in the news these days so it’s about time I weigh in. The most emotive piece I’ve heard on the radio this week was from […]

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basement music player part 1

July 6, 2009 – 1:34 pm

Having got the old computer hooked up to the network I proceeded to work on its setup. My main intention for it is to play music from the network drive, while I’m down in the basement working on my other hobbies. I upgraded it with the latest Debian, since that is about the only Linux […]

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recycling

July 6, 2009 – 8:14 am

A while back, I put our old computer elizabeth on a shelf in the basement. Frustratingly, it was fairly close to our cable modem, which is connected to the home network, but there is only a single cable run up to the router which is on the first (ground) floor, and which is where it […]

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Comcast are scum

June 25, 2009 – 8:12 am

The ‘Digital Television Switchover’ took place here a couple of weeks ago. Not long after, we received this letter from Comcast[PDF 900kB]. While I suspect it doesn’t say anything that is actively illegal, I do think it could be highly misleading and is taking advantage of less well informed people1. Q: How do I get […]

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dns323 podcast and torrent downloader

June 19, 2009 – 5:39 am

I’ve expanded on my previous podcast downloader program so that it gets torrents as well. I was running Automatic but it seemed silly to have two programs doing more or less the same thing. I also didn’t like the configuration of Automatic, which has a global set of regexps it applies to all feeds to […]

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