NuclearDonkey.net

~

Changes the case of the character currently selected. If the current character is not a letter, no effect is rendered. This can be done to multiple characters by preceding the tilde with a number. For example, entering "5~" will switch the case of the next five characters.

I don't really consider myself a sports person, at least until it comes to baseball. The new season has started and I've got the usual hope for my two teams (Red Sox and Cubs). The Sox especially are looking good thus far. With Matsuzaka being fab in his first start and Beckett looking like he may come into his own this year, they should have quite the starting rotation to contend with, until we get to the fifth starter anyway.

Any other Sox fans who refuse to pay for premium MLB channels can get their first look at Matsuzaka tomorrow night on ESPN2. They're playing Seattle, blegh, but I'll watch my beloved Sox crew any chance I get.

As promised, here's what I hope to accomplish over the next three months:

1. Learn thirteen new VI commands/shortcuts, an average of one per week.

I'm resolved to be through with being intimidated by VI. There are so many different things it can do, and I want to learn more!

2. Post thirteen email-related or work-related blog entries, an average of one per week.

I really enjoy reading the blogs of my coworkers and hope that others will similarly enjoy reading mine. Besides, I didn't set this up just to not use it.

3. Work an average of at least three hours per day on weekends.

Of late, I've been getting fairly lazy on the weekends. I love having some downtime, but I also want to make sure I have a share of productive time as well.

4. Read all of Learning Perl.

I'm simultaneously in the middle of books on Perl, PHP, shell scripting, and Postfix. I'm honestly more interested in PHP since I hope to use it in some of my future projects, but Perl is still the one I understand least and stand to benefit the most from knowing more about.

5. Finish and upload the current batch of RT interface enhancements.

This will help pave the way for some of the snazzy, new things we'll be doing with RT down the road.

Personal Goals

6. Be out of bed by 7:15 at least four days of each week.

I've always had the hardest time waking up in the morning. If I can force myself to not sleep in until 7:40, then I have the perfect amount of time to walk Dexter, work out, shower, and get ready for work.

7. Read one book for personal enjoyment -- God's Debris.

As is probably the case with most people, I bought this book because it's by Scott Adams, who also draws the Dilbert comic strips. This book is not related to Dilbert at all, and I'm interested in seeing how Adams does philosophy (very well, from the reviews I read).

8. Work out five days out of every week, barring injury or illness.

I'm tired of being so out of shape and have been Nordic Track-ing every day for the last month or so. I want to keep it up this time, and not fall back into old, bad habits.

9. Add .1 miles to daily workout at the end of each month.

This will get me to 1.4 miles each day by the end of the quarter. My body is most averse to anything requiring endurance, but I think this is doable.

10. Take Dexter to the dog park at least three times.

Another way of making more of my weekends. Dexter loves the dog park and I love watching him have fun with other dogs :)

Shooting-For-The-Moon-If-There's-Time Goals

11. Begin work on integrating our accounts database with RT.

I can think of few things that would be as super-cool-neato-awesome as being able to see all of a customer's account information automatically when they submit a support request. To do this, we'll need to find a good way to make RT (which is Perl-based) talk to our accounts database (MS SQL). Should be fun!

12. Beef up the U2-Drive and get it running Xen/VMWare with multiple OSes.

We have a fair share of customers who run Mac OS or Linux, and this would be a great way to improve our support for all operating systems. Imagine being able to connect up to one central server and boot up a copy of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux within a window on your own machine.

13. Complete at least one of three phases of the reseller provisioning project.

This will be an amazing time-saver; it's just a matter of allocating the time to code it. And, thanks to goal #3, I should have some extra time to work on my various side-projects.

I think it's safe to say I'm pretty stoked about this quarter. Now on with the rocking!

So, I was in Northern Virginia all last week -- part of the reason my new goals are going up a bit late. The order of the week was RH133, a Red Hat training course. The short of it is that I gained a bunch of new system admin knowledge and am now RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) certified., w00t w00t.

I know it doesn't mean too much in the scheme of things, but I've always had a certain fondness for certifications. The knowledge itself is obviously way more important than being able to pass a four-hour exam, but it still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that I earned that cert.

I posted some pictures from the trip on Facebook. It's almost entirely pictures of Dexter but, what can I say, I love my little guy.

* (up, down, left, right) or (k, j, h, l)

By default, the navigation keys will move you one line up/down or one character left/right, however they can be preceded with a number to move that many lines or that many characters.

For example, entering "20(right arrow)" will move the cursor twenty characters to the right.

For anybody who somehow hasn't been following the news, there were multiple shootings today on the Virginia Tech campus, with the reports now saying that 31 people were killed, including the gunman.

I don't know what's going on in Blacksburg these days, but people need to stop going psycho, seriously. This is an awesome area to live in, and it makes me sick that now what it's going to be famous for is being the site of the highest number of fatalities in a shooting spree in the U.S.

They haven't released any information yet on who was involved, but I hope all you folks out there are safe at home. This is a very sad day.

Today I upgraded the last of my three main PCs to the beta version of the new Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn (7.04). While it is a beta, they're very close to the full release at this point, so the code should be pretty close to final.

I haven't seen any major issues thus far. My xorg.conf file needed some tweaking on the desktop, but I can hardly fault Ubuntu for having issues with the three monitors that X always needs a ton of finagling to get to work. Samba had a hiccup on my server box, but that's more related to the hacked-up smb.conf file. The laptop installed flawlessly. All in all, a pretty painless upgrade.

Probably the new feature I'm most stoked about is the wireless manager. FINALLY, there's a nice and easy way to browse and connect to available wireless access points. The lack of this in past versions has bitten me a few times and I never was able to find a nice third-party app for such a purpose.

If you're using Edgy and want to give the beta a whirl, you can get the process started by running the following at a command line:

gksu “update-manager -c -d”

And that's it! The upgrade GUI will walk you through the entire process. I can't wait to see where the Ubuntu team takes things from here.

No sooner do I finish installing the beta of the new Ubuntu than they push out the final version.

This is another great step for Linux operating systems, and I hope to see more people making the switch. I know I don't regret it at all and am finding more and more tools in Linux that I'd have a difficult time living without if I had to go back to Windows. Major kudos to the Ubuntu team.

%s/oldstring/newstring/g

This must be done from the VI command line (hit : to get there) and will replace all occurrences of "oldstring" in the current document with "newstring". Supremely helpful when editing massive config files.