It still stands for awesome
 

This is my website.

My name is Jesse van Herk, and I make imaginary robots for a living. Sometimes they go on a rampage and destroy (imaginary) tokyo, at which point I should be called in from my secret underground headquarters using the bot-signal.

At other times, I take pictures of things, or write things down. With the help of the robots, of course.


awesome php error

I just got this error in PHP, and it's fantastic:

Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

It seems like the actual error is an undefined index into an array a few lines above, but PHP has completely lost it when trying to give me a stack dump.

Further note: this seems to be linked to the use of yield() in the middle of the specific file. Yielding/re-entrant code isn't exactly a commonly used feature in PHP, so I am not really surprised that there issues with it.

Wireframe stencils for visio

Ever since I started doing wireframe and user flow documentation, I've been looking for a decent tool to quickly create them. Nick Finck has a nice set of Visio stencils

http://www.nickfinck.com/blog/entry/visio_stencils_for_information_architects/

I've created a custom visio template with these shapes loaded as well, and added it to visio's path like so:

  1. tools => options => advanced => paths...
  2. add the path containing my custom template to the "Templates" box
  3. the template now appears at the bottom of the "Choose Drawing Type" list under "other", as well as in the File -> new menu.
Big Ball of Mud

This is a great article about the pervasity and perversity of the most commonly seen software architecture, the Big Ball of Mud . I've worked with and chipped away at such systems, and the author hits many points that resonate with my experience.

HouseMiniUpgrades

Pics of my shower curtain installation where I went through 3 drill bits for 4 holes in the tiles, as well as the newly installed programmable thermostat (which came with its own rather large hole)

Shell commands from within vim

I've had keybindings in vim to check a file out of perforce and deploy it to dev/test/production for a while, but until recently it was kind of a pain to see the output of those commands. With the help of some existing vim tips, I just tossed in the following function, and now it gives me a nice "press ENTER to continue" window to see what is going on:

function! RunShellCmd(commandLine) let l:filename=@% let l:cmd_output=system(a:commandLine.' '.l:filename) echo l:cmd_output let l:cmd_list=split(l:cmd_output, "\n" ) unlet l:cmd_list[0] cexpr l:cmd_list cwindow endfunction map :call RunShellCmd("p4 edit" ) map :call RunShellCmd("uploadto dev" ) map :call RunShellCmd("uploadto test" ) map :call RunShellCmd("uploadto live" )

The key mappings will automatically operate on the current file. The "uploadto" script is some bash magic that I worked up some time ago, which will have to wait for a different post.

Powerful command-line widget for windows

I just found and installed a fice little program called "Mike's Command Line", a simple popup text entry box that can be programmed with macros to open websites, run programs, and basically simplify everything else you might want to do in windows. It's very much like the quick-launcher in KDE, which is probably why I like it.

Linky:
MCL

NewHouse
floating point math in bash

I often have to do some quick calculations while working on some project, and I never have a calculator when I need it. Instead, I've got a bash terminal, and up until today, I've always written an obscure perl one-liner or loaded bc to crunch the numbers.

Today I wrote a very short bash function which lets me do such calculations faster, right on the command line. Stick this in your .bashrc:

# usage: bcalc 17 / 3 + 101 # arguments have to be in quotesor escaped if there are *s etc function bcalc { # cheat and send it through perl. echo "$@" | perl -ne "print eval $_;"; echo "" # force a newline. }

I'm fully aware that eval is dangerous and the above can actually do more than just math. It's a feature!

Dragonboat Festival
Epcor
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