Monthly Archives: January 2008

Maintaining My Posting Rate

I had one major New-Year’s resolution (though I had resolved it before then): post to my blog on average once per day. This sounds simple, but I don’t just want one post on each day. I’m happy to let my posting muse cycle between wordlessness and logorrhea. Therefore, if I post three things one day, I’m off scot free for the next two days. In practice, this gets pretty hard to keep track of. I’ve already started to find it difficult 23 days into the year.

However, I was able to remedy this with a little PHP and MySQL code. WordPress (this blogging software) runs on those technologies, and so it was trivial for me to tap into the database and produce this page. It does something very simple. It goes from the beginning of the year to the present day, tallying posts along the way, and dividing by the number of days in the year that have passed. This gives me a total post count and a ratio of posts to days. As you can see if you look at that page, I have been coasting for a little while, but was getting dangerously close to “1”. This post should remedy that, which is kind of cheating, but I’m willing to accept it.

Probably this could be dressed up into a widget or plugin or something, and anyone is welcome to use it to do that, but I have neither the time nor sufficient interest to learn how.
Here’s the PHP code, if you’re interested: postcountphp.gz (1 kB)

ADDENDUM: Updated 2008-01-26 to only count published posts.

Label Your Power Bricks

Once upon a time, AC/DC adapters were special — they were made for expensive devices and were clearly labeled as belonging to those devices. No more. Now, every device comes with an adapter, most of them are nothing special, and the adapters are hardly labeled at all. Furthermore, they have mysterious round plugs that (unless you have calipers handy), you probably can’t tell apart. You could go around trying to match voltages and currents, or you could just label the damn things when you get them.

If you’re part of the GTD cult, you should already have a labeler. Just print out short, simple labels and stick them on!

Password Generator

When I had my own server, I had a simple PHP generator that would pipe the output of Pwgen to the web page. I moved to a shared hosting account and couldn’t do that anymore. However, as I’m trying to encourage cluster users to use good passwords, I re-created the page on the cluster.

So! If you want a handy way to get good, memorable passwords quickly, it’s here.

I don’t claim any role in generating these passwords, that’s all done by pwgen. The flags being used for the sections are:

-B -c -C -n 8
for the pronounceable passwords and

-B -c -C -n -s 10
for the more secure but less memorable passwords.