SOTD: ipcalc

Today's Software of the Day is ipcalc. Very useful! (Thanks Greg!)

This post is brought to you by the numbers 0 and 1.

| 20 Jul 2010 | #

Stock Market: Why shorting is wrong

Here is an article about how to short the stock-market. Shorting is selling stock you don't own, hoping the price will go down, and buying the stock at the lower price to cover your previous sells, hence making money. While within the law, it's just plain wrong.

Shorting allows day traders and the like to continue to make money while the market drops, but by doing so they are encouraging the market downwards hurting 'long' investors - aka your super fund.

Shorting should be banned permanently. The ongoing greed in the market is disgusting - step up the plate governments of the world! It's time for some regulation.

| 16 Feb 2009 | #

A hard week

Last week was pretty hard. All was going well until Thursday when things turned pear-shaped - I was completely out of my depth with the unexpected news.

It's times like these when you think about life, your loved ones, and what's most important to you. Priorities become very clear at times like these, and you find out how wonderful your friends are. I have been so blessed by the love and support I've received by good friends.

Thank you for supporting me and my family, and thank you for your kind words, thoughts and prayers.

| 15 Sep 2008 | #

Random Acts of Kindness

This morning a package arrived from Germany which contained the following:

It's a firewire/USB iPod dock connector (so no custom cable is required) + a case for my ear buds. Nice. The problem is that I don't know where it came from. There's no indication on the package, and I certainly didn't order it. So thank you to the Fairy-of-Random-Acts-Of-Kindness for giving me a nice surprise this Monday morning.

I'll have to Pay It Forward.

| 08 Oct 2007 | #

Clearcase labeling with spaces in filenames

Working with spaces in filenames is a right royal pain - should be a criminal offence, if you ask me! (if it wasn't for -0 on xargs and -print0 on find, it'd be a lot more painful, but I digress :-)

Clearcase has it's own slightly different set of tools which doesn't help matters either. So one problem you commonly face is "I want to apply a label across some specific set of files, but some of them have spaces in them." The standard tricks don't work, but fortunately there is a workaround. Here 'tis.

shadowfax:> cleartool find . -type f -version "some criteria" -exec 'cleartool mklabel MY_NEW_LABEL "$CLEARCASE_XPN"'

'XPN' gives us the extended pathname (as opposed to 'PN'), and the double quotes cover the space-in-filename issue. Just one of them dang things you blog about because you never know when you'll need it again later :-)

| 17 Jul 2007 | #