vim 9.0 has been released. I haven’t done much with it, but I did immediately go and enable the new popup menu for autocompletions. It’s so much nicer than having the autocompletion options running horizontally across the screen.

A common topic in the #shell channel in the Chicago Tech Slack is what people have as shell aliases. Here are some handy aliases from my aliases.sh that runs at shell startup.

The new version v3.3.0 of the greplike code search tool ack has been released.

I’ve been reading more and more about functional programming over the past year, and working in Python where many things are immutable, and I’m trying to incorporate them into my Perl code.

Tab completion is a ubiqutious time-saver, and I use it everywhere I can. Here’s how I set it up to autocomplete hostnames when I use the ssh or scp commands.

I SSH in to many different computers all day, and sometimes I get confused by what machine I’m on. I was thinking about assigning a different color in my bash prompt for each machine, but I thought that would get tiresome coming up with a new color for each new box that I had to log in to. I mentioned this in the Chicago Tech Slack and Josh Symonds suggested “Some prompts do some hashing on hostnames to turn the prompt a different color based on that.”

The new version v3.1.0 of the greplike code search tool ack has been released. It now allows the user to search through ranges of lines in a file, rather than the entire file.

Back in the ’00s I worked on a codebase that was maintained by one programmer. He did everything himself, and learned from no one. I see this collection of coding horrors as a testament to the dangers of working in a monoculture.

ack 3 is a greplike tool optimized for searching large code trees. It’s available at https://beyondgrep.com.

I’ve released ack 2.28 to the CPAN. This release doesn’t add any major new features, but for those who like to customize things, there are two new help options: --help-colors and --help-rgb-colors.

It's good to keep backups of website's HTML and other assets. A common way to do backups, if you're not using some sort of version control system like Git, is to make a zip of the entire document tree. Usually it'll just get called "website.zip" or maybe "website-20180810.zip" or whatever the current date is.

It's a fine way to take a snapshot, but don't leave it on your web server in your website's document tree. The document tree is that folder where you upload the files, like /sites/mysite. If you make a zip or tarball or similar and leave it as /sites/mysite/mysite.zip, you're asking for it to be stolen by bad guys. Maybe you've got PHP files in there that have secrets in them, like connection passwords to your database. Maybe you've got original work files like the .psd files that you created your .jpg files from. If you don't want it seen, don't put it in your document tree.

"No way, nobody knows it's there", you may think. You don't link to the backup file anywhere, and there's no directory listing on the server. This idea is called "security through obscurity", and it's not security at all. It turns out that the bad guys don't have to know a file is there. They just have to make a lucky guess.

For many kinds of files, when you create a new one from scratch, it would be handy to have part of the file created from a boilerplate template every time. For example, whenever I want to create a Perl file, it should start like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

I’ve just uploaded a new version of ack, version 2.24, to the CPAN and posted it to beyondgrep.com.

If you work on an open source project, consider helping your users by pointing them to other “competing” projects that might be better choices for them.

When it’s time to leave your job, someone from Human Resources may want to sit you down and have an “exit interview”. They’ll ask you questions like “Why are you leaving your position?” and “What was it like to work with your manager.” It’s done with this premise that they’re looking to make the company better.

Someone on reddit asked “Why is talking bad about a previous job a taboo? What’s wrong with complaining? It’s showing dissatisfaction with the rules or environment. If I see a rule that’s unfair or inefficient, isn’t it in the company’s best interest to let them know in order to fix the issue?”

If you run a Linux box, and you want to see what services start up at which level, you use runlevel:

It’s common knowledge that it’s illegal for US employers to ask about your age, sex, religion, marital status, national origin, or other protected statuses. Thing is, it’s not illegal for them to ask.  It’s illegal for them to discriminate, but it’s not illegal to ask. Still, the idea of the “illegal interview questions” is a common one. Search for “illegal interview questions” on Google and you’ll get 50,000 hits. Lots of blog posts and news articles, but nothing from anyone I see as a legal authority.

You spend hours slaving over your resume, crafting every word of every bullet point, and yet you’re getting no interest from the companies you send the resume to.  Maybe your problem is that you’re ignoring the most important part of your resume: The first half-page, or the first screenful.

After spending a few hours last night switching between three different branches in the ack2 project, and typing "git br" over and over, I decided I needed to put branch status in my bash prompt. The only question was: Which one would I steal? Fortunately, Rob Hoelz was online and I mentioned it to him and he handed me his, so I stole it and also added Subversion support as well.