The new balance

Uplifting Bible quote

I keep seeming to bump into these today. Here's a good one:

"For I know the plans I have for you" declares our Lord Jesus Christ, "they are plans to prosper you, to give you a hope and a future and not to destroy you."

That's from the Book of Jeremiah Chapter 29, verse 11.

According to Wikipedia, Jeremiah had a happy early life, but has come to be known by scholars as the "weeping prophet" due to his rather touching Book of Lamentations, one of the four he wrote in the present day Bible canon. His spiritual role as a prophet was to point out where people were going wrong in their relationship with God and to bring the bad news of God's anger and frustration to the communities who ignored God.

Aphorism #271 In every Occupation if you know little stick to the safest

Another good one from Balthazar Gracian. I take this approach with people's production systems...

Aphorism #271 In every Occupation if you know little stick to the safest.

If you are not respected as subtle, you will be regarded as sure. On the other hand, a man well trained can plunge in and act as he pleases. To know little and yet seek danger is nothing else than to seek ruin. In such a case take stand on the right hand, for what is done cannot be undone. Let little knowledge keep to the king's highway, and in every case, knowing or unknowing, security is shrewder than singularity.

Cryptographic Hash Functions UNO Component for OpenOffice.org

You, like me, might be wanting to create MD5 hashes in OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets. You, like me, might be wondering why the OpenOffice repository for Extensions is unusable.

If this is true then like me, you might want a link to the Cryptographic Hash Functions UNO Component for OpenOffice.org, because the extensions site is not working very well at the moment.

I did what anyone would have done and filched the link from Google's cache of the page.

Renaming files Part I: inserting before the extension

I wanted to put some text before the extension on some files. I had been doing that with a rename regex, matching the extension, then replacing it with extra-bit+the extension. Messy. This is much nicer. Thanks to movingtofreedom.



$ ls

after_1.jpg   before_const_1.jpg  before_const_3.jpg  detail_1.jpg

after_2.jpg   before_const1.jpg   before_const3.jpg   detail_2.jpg

before_1.jpg  before_const_2.jpg  before_const_4.jpg  detail_3.jpg

before_2.jpg  before_const2.jpg   before_const4.jpg



$ rename 's/(.+?)(\.[^.]*$|$)/$1_sm$2/g' *

$ ls

after_1_sm.jpg   before_2_sm.jpg        before_const_2_sm.jpg  before_const3_sm.jpg   detail_1_sm.jpg

after_2_sm.jpg   before_const_1_sm.jpg  before_const2_sm.jpg   before_const_4_sm.jpg  detail_2_sm.jpg

before_1_sm.jpg  before_const1_sm.jpg   before_const_3_sm.jpg  before_const4_sm.jpg   detail_3_sm.jpg

As you can see, that lovely little regex (With two backreferences, I must say) allowed me to add _sm before each filename extension. As you expect, I batch-resized these images to thumbnail size with the excellent mogrify.

Voiceover profile - have a listen

So much for all that "last post" nonsense. As people have been asking, here's a link to my Voice123.com profile, where you can hear me talking in my serious and silly voices.

I'm hoping to get some voiceover work using this as my showreel, so if you know anyone who wants their answerphone message doing (or a nice, long, expensive car commericial would be nice), please send them my details! I'm competing with Harlan Hogan and, naturally John Briggs, self-styled "on-air male" of Weakest Link fame.

The last post right here for a while?

I will be posting on my Travel Blog for a while. It is much easier for me to update, simply by sending it e-mail. It's address is simply blog.jdv.me.uk so you can find it and bookmark it easily.

If I think of anything which doesn't relate to travel, and if I have the time, I might still post here. But for the moment, the Travel Blog is the place to be!

Joy

Something I found on Quora (try it: you'll love it) which made me think I might be on the right track!

'Weep and you weep alone! - What a lie this is! Weep and you will find a million crocodiles to weep with you. The world is forever weeping. The world is drenched in tears... But joy, joy is a kind of ecstatic bleeding, a disgraceful sort of contentment which overflows from every pore of your being. You can't make people joyous by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn't. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood or communicated.

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.'

-Henry Miller

Redshift to reduce eyestrain at night

If your monitor, like mine, is a little bright and on the blue side, you might appreciate Redshift available on Linux and Windows (with caveats). It takes your location and the time of day and alters your monitor settings to make the colours match daylight during the day and tungsten during the night. You can tweak the settings quite a lot. I don't like the screen getting so red during the night - it's a cheap laptop screen so the colours are bad enough as it is without too much more messing around.

Here's the command I'm using on Linux, using Medmenham as my geographical location. You can easily get latitude and longitude for any place using Google maps: find the place, and the lat/lng is after &ll= in the URL when you click Link.



gtk-redshift -l 51.556459:-0.834851 -t 5700:4900 -g 0.8 -m vidmode

Setting up phpm for offline use - parsing the PHP docbook manual

If you want to create an up-to-date function list for use with phpm, you'll need to update the manualparser.php recommended in the original article to work on PHP5. I'll tell you for free that this is going to be difficult: for starters the original article is no longer properly online (there's a cached version on the Wayback Machine) and the code is broken as it relies on a deprecated method of the DirectoryIterator class.

You'll also need to get hold of the PHP manual docbook source. All the instructions for doing so refer to old CVS users: SVN is used these days. This is what you need to know:



$ svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/phpdoc/modules/doc-en ./phpdoc-en

So, to save you time, I've suffered all the pitfalls and mended the code myself - it runs cleanly. You'll find it on my GitHub along with more explanation in the README. Fetch the lot down, put it in the same directory as you download phpdoc-en and run parseit.php.

Here are some links to the resources I used: I'm mainly putting them here in the hopes that they will trackback to the various blogs and that people might actually find this...:

- Håvard Eide's phpm post. Did he write the original version of this parser? I'm not sure, but he certainly wrote phpm
- http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11663

Have you ever read a more scary prayer than this?

Paul my vicar has been blogging again, this time about Renewing our Vow and Covenant, and he mentioned a prayer that I hadn't heard of, but it might just be the scariest, most challenging prayer I've ever heard. It's called the Methodist Covenant prayer. I got shivers when I read it.

I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. Amen

There is no clever language here, nothing I can't understand, just the most pure expression of supplication, submission and admission to God that I've ever read. Even though the first line is simply a recognition that we didn't make ourselves and that God's creating Spirit is responsible for our existence, it puts it in a new light. It recognises that God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the new: isn't it tempting to think of God only as a benign, gentle, useful, protecting watcher when it is so much more than that. God is love, and love happens in pretty explosive, cruel-to-be-kind, hands-on, forthright way sometimes, and that's just with humans. Why don't we treat God as capable of that same kind of tough love?

Great stuff.

MXToolbox SuperTool - great for domain and DNS checking

I've written my first search plugin on MyCroft, for the excellent SuperTool. I can't believe that out of 22,000 plugins, mine is the first for such a brilliant tool. Take a look and try it out - you won't regret it. Better than a lot of pay-for ones, in my view, but there's a special place in my heart for the free, oddly named and somewhat spartan dnscolos. My web hosts often use intoDNS which I rather like as well, and gets new tests and features periodically.

(How do I manage to sound like I'm advertising, even when I've nothing to gain? Must be that boundless enthusiasm...)

Checking credit on a Vodafone dongle

More a less a note to self, if you're using a Vodafone TopUp and Go dongle on Linux, you'll quickly find there's no nice way to check your remaining credit. On Windows, you can use the button so labelled in the Vodafone connect software. On Linux, that's not really an option!

The answer is to pop open your trusty copy of minicom so proceed thusly:



minicom -s

In the resulting settings menu, change the serial port configuration so that your device is set up. The most likely choice is /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 rather than /dev/ttyS8 or whatever the default on your system is. Then go to 'exit' in the menu, which should take you into minicom.

What we do now is to simulate pressing that button, so, paste in (so that it happens quickly), and follow with Enter:



AT+CUSD=1,"*&1345;",15

You may have to have a few goes. What you get back should look like this:



+CUSD: 0,"#14.66.",0

Which is your dongle's way of saying £14.66 remaining.

I don't know how up-to-date this figure is, and for the record, I think £15/GB is extortionate (I'm paying £15 for 5GB for my own 3 dongle with a rolling one-month contract by Direct Debit).

This will only work for Vodafone dongles (and TopUp and Go mobiles, I suppose if you've hooked yours up by USB). The approach might work for other setups, though.

ttytter extension for posting to Instapaper

I have forked reuteras' extension for posting twitter URLs to del.icio.us and make it post to Instapaper instead. You can find my efforts in my GitHub repo.

It isn't as clever as I would like it to be:
- only accounts without a password are working at the moment
- I'm not using HTTP basic auth as I just can't get it to work

To try it you need to do the following:
Continue reading "ttytter extension for posting to Instapaper"

If you need a fresh proxy, here's the list I use

I remember when the days of finding a fresh, fast, geographically local anonymous proxy to surf behind were fraught with difficulties. Some Russians ran a list I used, but it was often out-of-date and the proxies on it didn't work for long.

I now go here for a fresh proxy when I need one:
http://www.ip-adress.com/proxy_list/

That site also allows you to test a proxy for Reverse DNS, actual location and so on, right from the list.

These are HTTP proxies mainly, rather than SOCKS5 ones which you might want if you need a full range of ports from Windows, but they suit my needs, getting me out of corporate networks and around restrictive ISPs, etc. I expect I will use them heavily whilst travelling when I come across certain states which are somewhat restrictive about where their citizens might surf. Like Western news websites.

To avoid Adobe's Download Manager (DLM), try FTP!

Fed up with having to download a download manager in order to fetch a little piece of proprietary software, I'm recommending people use the FTP site which Adobe runs. Head over to:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/

You'll find the version you need quite quickly, and a choice of MSI or EXE installer.