I was just in Vancouver at the Vancouver PHP conference, and it was really amazing.

When I got home, I noticed that my host-key authentication with SSH wasn't working. I knew that there were some files in /etc/ssh that needed to be modified when my Telus internet connection changed it's IP address. But, which files?


root.web 12 [/etc/ssh] # grep 169.253 /etc/ssh/* | cut -d ":" -f 1 | uniq -c
1 /etc/ssh/shosts.equiv
2 /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts


This command is neat and simple:

First, "grep" for a bit of the IP address.

Then, cut out the first field, delimiting on colons.

Third, find unique instances and count them.

Neato!

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."

Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

:)

From RE: What's so cool about Scheme?

In lovemygarden.net users can have a Garden Journal which is very similar to a blog, but with a few extra nice things for gardeners.

One of those is that they can enter the weather for the day, and the high and low temperatures when they add a journal entry.

Right now, they have to do it manually, and I want to have a way that they can have this information automatically looked up for them.

Ruby Quiz number 68 asked people to write a Ruby program to get the current temperature, which is pretty close to what I want.

There were two different approaches, one was to screenscrape a weather site, and the second was to use a SOAP service, and get the information from that.

Unfortunately that one that they talk about in the quiz won't work for me, it only returns the current
temperature, but it has a sweet little API.

I've looked at a few more web services, but it seems like all the good ones cost money to use and all the free ones are currently broken. Guess I'll have to leave that one for now.

Not quite as intellectually satisfying, but something that looks like it will work is to screenscrape a weather site. The example they use in the Ruby Quiz is from Yahoo, but when you look at the HTML that Yahoo provides, they explicitly say that you can't repurpose the data.

There are, however, the government websites for Canada and the US that do provide current highs and lows:

Canada - Powell River (which is where I live right now)
US - Honolulu (which is where I'm going on vacation)

When I have some time, I'm going to write up some code for lovemygarden.net and then I'll share it with you all.

I'm a monk in the Church of Emacs. Living up in the forest, in a house of Emacs. Also, my apartment.

Hello, I'm sness and I'm a codermonk. If I lived 500 years ago, I would have lived in a monastery, copying out books of ancient Greek philosophers, but here, in this life, I code. Life is sweet.