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Author Archives: Steve

Command Line Dictionary Using Groovy WS

Monday, July 18, 2011

Alas, another 15 years has passed since I’ve last posted. This time it was prompted by a fairly simple need: to lookup a word via the command line. Now, I already had a very simple solution to this using WordNet. That is simple enough: sudo apt-get install wordnet Then simply type: wn hello -over You [...]

Filed in General, Groovy, Web Services | Tagged | Comments (2)

Twitter Mode for Emacs – With OAuth

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Twitter’s recent removal of basic authentication eliminated the ability to use quick and dirty methods of posting tweets and viewing timelines, such as via the command-line with cURL. There is one twitter mode, twitel.el, that I had already been using. Supposedly it can handle OAuth through the emacs-oauth package, with some minor custom tweaks to [...]

Filed in Linux | Tagged | Comments (3)

Simple Processes: Bash vs. Python – “A No-Brainer”

Saturday, March 13, 2010

I haven’t posted in about 5 billion years. Well, it seems like that anyway. As I sit here partying with my laptop on a Friday night, I’ve been wondering how to display the track length of the current track that xmms2 is playing, without having to use the “xmms2 status” command. Yes, I listen to [...]

Filed in Linux, Python | Tagged | Comments (4)

Quick command line spell check of a single word or sentence

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Here’s a short bash script, using aspell, to spell check a word or several words from the command line. It’s simple but effective. If anyone else knows a cleaner or even simpler way, please let us know. #!/bin/bash WORD=$1 TEMPFILE=temp.spell echo $WORD > $TEMPFILE aspell -c $TEMPFILE cat $TEMPFILE rm -f $TEMPFILE rm -f $TEMPFILE.bak [...]

Filed in Linux, Tools | Tagged | Comments (4)

Follow RTC on Twitter

Sunday, July 26, 2009

We only tweet from the console! http://www.twitter.com/reverttoconsole

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Revert to Console for IM – Gtalk Example using Mcabber

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

I can finally sleep at night now that I have a command-line solution for Google Talk. What’s needed (for a poor windows user): Mcabber, a jabber client from http://mcabber.com Cygwin, http://cygwin.com Ssh package for cygwin, if you need to install mcabber elsewhere and then connect to it remotely. If cygwin and ssh are new to [...]

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“Revert to Console” for Language Translation

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

So you might be sitting around asking yourself, “Do I really need a web browser or collection of clunky travel dictionaries to translate to and from different languages of the world? Isn’t there a command line tool that can do the same thing and make my life easier, while making me even more awesome at [...]

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The DO NOT’s

Friday, January 23, 2009

I haven’t posted in about 8 years or something like that. Besides being lazy and uninspired, I really haven’t learned anything new or exciting in the past 2 years. I have nothing to share that would be beneficial to all of you. However, some of you may benefit from what I have learned NOT to [...]

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Just Venting

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I hate stupid users. *RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIING* Me: “Hello” SU: “Why is the application going so incredibly slow?” Me: “Because I coded it so that if it finds your user ID it will run slower.” SU: “I’m reporting you to HR!” Me: “OK, but you’ll be wasting your time.” SU: “And why is that?!” Me: “Because I [...]

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A Machiavellian Approach to Software Development

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

If you are a software developer and haven’t realized by now that a BS in Computer Science should be at least 50% BA, then you must be living the good life and I envy you. Though users love to believe that software development is a perfect science that is as predictable as manufacturing wing nuts, [...]

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