I always do this

As many of you know, from time to time I am seized by an all but irresistible compulsion to program X, where X is usually some semi-useful doohickey for this very website. That’s how I spent most of yesterday evening, this time prescribing 100 cc’s of awesome to the writing page. The difference should be largely transparent, but take my word that it’s now much easier for me to post new articles for your perusal on this site. If you look at yesterday’s piece in the Daily, for example, you’ll notice that all articles are now indexed on the side of each page. Keen!

Oh yeah, I had an article in the Daily yesterday, which I feel like I mentioned. Hopefully you read it and liked it, but if not, there’s a link to it above or right here if you’re too lazy to move the mouse back up. Better get started forming irrational and uninformed opinions on it. Don’t forget to email them to me once they’re good and formed, capitalizing words at random and confusing “your” and “you’re”, “too” and “to”, etc. It happens more than you might think.

Last night, after I had the new scripts and everything set up and looking pretty, I did another thing I do way too often. “OK, time to get rid of all these temporary files. I’ll just enter ‘rm *.php *~’. OK, now I’ll just check on my fancy new script to make sure it’s still working… 404?… Oh that’s right, I just deleted it, along with all backups.” Unix needs some sort of “undo idiotic function” function. I tried hitting myself a bunch, which is what all the manuals I found indicated was the appropriate action, but that didn’t seem to bring my file back. The good news is that it was a much easier script to write the second time. Today’s moral: be careful with wildcards in your rm commands, kids.