“I have several friends who know him to some degree. One of them said ‘he often walks the fine line between genius and lunatic.’ The problem is, genius is such a commodity these days, that it’s not acceptable to be an eccentric any more.”
— Greg Hudson

I’ve know way too many creative people who’ve hidden behind elaborately constructed facades of eccentricity. Initially it takes up too much of their energy, then after a while it just becomes an excuse.

Tangentially related and potentially contradictory:

You have to pursue greatness not success. Achieve greatness and success will follow.
— Keith Schacht

Here are two cheatsheets showing the table-structure of WordPress versions 2.3 and 2.2.2. Click the thumbnails to download the PDF.

WordPress 2.3

WordPress 2.2.2

I created these to help transition some custom category queries from WordPress 2.2.2 over to the terms tables in WordPress 2.3. Table keys are in bold.The pages were generated by a small AppleScript Studio app I never quite cleaned up enough to release, it reads MySQL dumpfiles then spits out nice looking tables in OmniGraffle.

Amazing how times change:

Originals found here, via Shawn King on Twitter

One for my dad: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Morse Code

Growing up, I have very fond memories of my dad tapping out morse code. 30-odd years later, I find these recordings to be quite soothing, triggering a childhood feeling of warmth and safety from somewhere deep in my brain.

I never learned Morse Code, I faked the post title with this Morse Code Translator

(Si dad, fixed.)

From the sed manpage:

-i extension
   Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension.
   If a zero-length extension is given, no backup will be saved.  It
   is not recommended to give a zero-length extension when in-place
   editing files, as you risk corruption or partial content in situ-
   ations where disk space is exhausted, etc.

This doesn’t work:

sed -i -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

The key thing here is that the extension after the -i flag is not optional. If you leave it off, sed assumes you’ll be entering it via stdin, which isn’t allowed and yields this error:

sed: -i may not be used with stdin

The solution is to send a zero-length extension like this:

sed -i '' -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

Careful with this, it could be really dangerous with poorly crafted commands.

Ran the Sunrise Lake loop this morning. Sunrise Lake’s elevation is 1,440 feet above sea level, which, considering that I normally run at sea level, made the hills seem that much more difficult.

Ran the 4.5 mile Hudson River route with Harris. Started out at dusk, which was amazing.